This is the image from Vanity Fair’s October-issue article that explains “Why Late-Night Comedy Is Better Than Ever.” I really love it. And the more I look, the more I love it. It’s just so rare that a single photograph so perfectly captures a cultural phenomenon. There’s a simple poetry to the whole thing, don’t you think?
So many fellas
With suits and whiskey and smiles.
“Better than ever.”
I first met him 21 years ago, and now our relationship is the subject of a new movie. He’s never been more revered—or more misunderstood.
A long time ago, a man of resourceful and relentless kindness saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself. He trusted me when I thought I was untrustworthy, and took an interest in me that went beyond my initial interest in him. He was the first person I ever wrote about who became my friend, and our friendship endured until he died. Now a movie has been made from the story I wrote about him, which is to say “inspired by” the story I wrote about him, which is to say that in the movie my name is Lloyd Vogel and I get into a fistfight with my father at my sister’s wedding.
I did not get into a fistfight with my father at my sister’s wedding. My sister didn’t have a wedding. And yet the movie, called A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, seems like a culmination of the gifts that Fred Rogers gave me and all of us, gifts that fit the definition of grace because they feel, at least in my case, undeserved.
Thirteen years ago, a young woman was found dead in small-town Texas. She was nicknamed “Lavender Doe” for the purple shirt she was wearing. Her real identity would remain a mystery until amateur genealogists took up her case.
The dead girl had perfect teeth.
That’s what so many of the strangers who obsessed over her case online noticed, and one of the few things that could even be noticed. Her body was burned so badly as to be unrecognizable when she was found in the early hours of October 29, 2006, near Longview, Texas.
The two men who saw her thought, at first, that they had stumbled across a mannequin set on fire, perhaps as an early Halloween prank. It was the smell that alerted them to something more sinister in the woods—a smell like charred hot dogs. When they stepped closer, they realized the awful and obvious truth. A human being had been killed, then doused in gasoline and set on fire, and probably only minutes before: Her body was still ablaze.
My parents recently divorced, and I’m not ready to spend the holiday with new people.
Dear Therapist,
I’m in my late 20s, and my parents recently divorced after several decades of marriage. The divorce process was initiated about a year ago, and finalized about six months ago. I genuinely feel relieved that my mom and dad got divorced, and I think it is the best thing for both of them. My dad quickly got a new girlfriend, which I expected, and she moved in with him. I’ve met her once, at a large gathering, and she seems fine. My sibling has been living abroad temporarily, so has not yet met her.
For the upcoming holidays, my sibling and I will likely spend half of Thanksgiving Day at my dad’s house and the other half at my mom's house. When discussing Thanksgiving, my dad indicated that he is expecting us to spend time with his girlfriend (who will be doing the cooking) and her family (her adult children, their spouses, and her grandchildren, none of whom I’ve met).
Describing neutrino oscillations is notoriously tricky. The search for a shortcut led to unexpected places.
After breakfast one morning in August, the mathematician Terence Tao opened an email from three physicists he didn’t know. The trio explained that they’d stumbled across a simple formula that, if true, established an unexpected relationship between some of the most basic and important objects in linear algebra.
The formula “looked too good to be true,” says Tao, who is a professor at UCLA, a Fields medalist, and one of the world’s leading mathematicians. “Something this short and simple—it should have been in textbooks already,” he said. “So my first thought was, no, this can’t be true.”
Then he thought about it some more.
The physicists—Stephen Parke of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Xining Zhang of the University of Chicago, and Peter Denton of Brookhaven National Laboratory—had arrived at the mathematical identity about two months earlier while grappling with the strange behavior of particles called neutrinos.
The Democratic Party’s establishment is in denial about the ways in which concentrated riches are warping society and contributing to the disunity it seeks to heal.
Deval Patrick is in. The former Massachusetts governor, responding to the fears of the Democratic establishment that the party’s aspirants are too left-wing and that its moderate standard-bearer, Joe Biden, is not up to the task of defeating Donald Trump, announced his candidacy for president in a video Thursday.
After filing for the primary in New Hampshire, Patrick told reporters, “I think we have to be about how we bring people in, how we bring people along, and how we yield to the possibility that somebody else or even some of the party may have a good idea, as good or better than our own … That’s the kind of leadership I have brought to settings in the private sector and the public sector, the kind of leadership I want to bring right now.”
More than two centuries after it was designed to empower southern white voters, the system continues to do just that.
Is a color-blind political system possible under our Constitution? If it is, the Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act in 2013 did little to help matters. While black people in America today are not experiencing 1950s levels of voter suppression, efforts to keep them and other citizens from participating in elections began within 24 hours of the Shelby County v. Holder ruling and have only increased since then.
In Shelby County’s oral argument, Justice Antonin Scalia cautioned, “Whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get them out through the normal political processes.” Ironically enough, there is some truth to an otherwise frighteningly numb claim. American elections have an acute history of racial entitlements—only they don’t privilege black Americans.
Thirty-one-year-old Andrew Giuliani finds himself in a surprisingly comfortable corner of the White House—for now.
It’s hard to turn on cable news or scroll through Twitter these days without catching the name “Giuliani.” Rudy Giuliani, President Donald Trump’s personal attorney, is a central character in the House’s impeachment inquiry. Meanwhile, Rudy’s third wife, Judith Giuliani, has commanded her own headlines as she’s aired details of the couple’s contentious, ongoing divorce proceedings. Scarcely mentioned, however, is Andrew Giuliani—the former New York mayor’s 31-year-old son—who works in the White House.
Rudy Giuliani told me his son’s hire “wasn’t the usual ‘hire my kid’ situation.” “He’s known the president since he was a baby,” Rudy said. “Now, did he know him in the first place because he was the mayor’s son? Sure, but they also had a relationship independent of me.”
People in different regions of the U.S. have measurably different psychological profiles.
A few years ago, Jason Rentfrow, a psychologist at the University of Cambridge, dug into a question that has captivated him for decades: Do different places have different personalities? Do people in Los Angeles, for instance, have measurably different temperaments than the residents of Augusta, Georgia? If so, what does that mean for both places? Rentfrow decided to test these questions on a phenomenon that has captivated all of America lately: The rise of Donald Trump.
Together with his co-authors, Rentfrow analyzed a set of surveys that had been conducted between 2003 and 2015 in 2,082 U.S. counties—about two-thirds of all the counties in the country. The surveys asked three million people 44 questions about their habits and dispositions. Rentfrow and his co-authors focused on neuroticism, one of the “big five” traits that psychologists often use to measure personality, which is a tendency to feel depressed or anxious, and to respond more severely to stress. The study authors compared each county’s level of neuroticism to whether those counties later voted for President Trump in the 2016 election, and whether they had historically voted for Republicans.
A tectonic demographic shift is under way. Can the country hold together?
Democracy depends on the consent of the losers. For most of the 20th century, parties and candidates in the United States have competed in elections with the understanding that electoral defeats are neither permanent nor intolerable. The losers could accept the result, adjust their ideas and coalitions, and move on to fight in the next election. Ideas and policies would be contested, sometimes viciously, but however heated the rhetoric got, defeat was not generally equated with political annihilation. The stakes could feel high, but rarely existential. In recent years, however, beginning before the election of Donald Trump and accelerating since, that has changed.
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The Trump administration wants to use eminent domain to build the border wall.
A candidate in the 2020 presidential race wants the federal government to seize the private property of dozens of Texans under the dubious pretext of a national emergency. I refer not to Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, but to President Donald Trump, whose lack of respect for private-property rights goes back decades.
Read: The many scandals of Donald Trump: a cheat sheet
In the early 1990s, while running casinos, Trump tried to get an elderly widow’s house seized so that he could tear it down and use her land to park limousines. In 1994, he urged a Connecticut municipality to take land owned by five small businesses. In 2005, Trump agreed “100 percent” with the Supreme Court’s decision in Kelo vs. New London, in which the majority ruled that governments can seize a person’s land and give it to a private corporation if they believe doing so will increase tax revenue. And in 2015, while running for president, Trump called eminent domain “a wonderful thing.”
