The proliferation of retail boutiques in California did not really bother him, Evan told me, but the billboards did. Advertisements for delivery, advertisements promoting the substance for relaxation, for fun, for health. “Shop. It’s legal.” “Hello marijuana, goodbye hangover.” “It’s not a trigger,” he told me. “But it is in your face.”

When we spoke, he had been sober for a hard-fought seven weeks: seven weeks of sleepless nights, intermittent nausea, irritability, trouble focusing, and psychological turmoil. There were upsides, he said, in terms of reduced mental fog, a fatter wallet, and a growing sense of confidence that he could quit. “I don’t think it’s a ‘can’ as much as a ‘must,’” he said.

It’s easier than ever to buy things online. It’s so easy that Ryan Cassata sometimes does it in his sleep. Cassata, a 24-year-old singer/songwriter and actor from Los Angeles, recently got a notification from Amazon that a package had been shipped to his apartment, but he didn’t remember buying anything. When he logged onto his account and saw that a fanny pack and some socks were on the way, he remembered: A few nights back, he had woken up in the middle of the night to browse—and apparently shop on—Amazon.

He shops when he’s awake, too, buying little gadgets like an onion chopper, discounted staples like a 240-pack of gum, and decorations like a Himalayan salt lamp. The other day, he almost bought a pizza pool float, until he remembered that he doesn’t have a pool. “I don’t really need most of the stuff,” he tells me.

DURHAM, N.C.—On June 2, 1913, Julian Shakespeare Carr spoke at the dedication of a statue at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, his alma mater. Carr had served in the Confederate army as a lowly private, but upon returning from the war he had made several fortunes in tobacco, textiles, and banking, and affected the title “General” for his leadership of the United Confederate Veterans.

In addition to being an accomplished businessman, Carr was a virulent racist. In his speech that day, he recalled, “One hundred yards from where we stand, less than 90 days perhaps after my return from Appomattox, I horse-whipped a negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds, because upon the streets of this quiet village she had publicly insulted and maligned a Southern lady, and then rushed for protection to these University buildings where was stationed a garrison of 100 Federal soldiers.”

One of the most compelling characters in the recent Showtime documentary miniseries The Fourth Estate is the New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman. Haberman joined the newspaper in 2015 to help cover Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, and since then, she explains, her workload has been all-encompassing. Haberman is rarely seen on camera without a phone in her hand or attached to her ear. “The biggest mistake I made was promising my children that they would get their mother back at the end of the campaign,” she says. In one memorable scene, she takes a break in the middle of recording a podcast to reassure her son that he can’t die in a nightmare.

The Fourth Estate makes for fascinating television despite the fact that the majority of the series simply captures people in meetings or people making calls or people commuting back and forth to work. As Stephen Marche wrote in 2014 for Esquire, the reality of journalists is that they’re “one of the less glamorous species of humanity,” and the most reliable trait of the truly gifted ones is that they’re perpetually on the phone—which is presumably why the entertainment industry has long preferred an alternate depiction of journalists, particularly when it comes to women. On television and in film, the fictional lady reporter tends to look less like Haberman and more like Camille Preaker, portrayed in the HBO miniseries Sharp Objects by Amy Adams.

Parenting a child with conduct disorder is the loneliest thing I know.  Conduct disorder (CD) is a diagnosis given to children who have an ongoing pattern of troubling antisocial behavior. The definitions are all very wordy—but the simple version is that a child who gets this diagnosis might grow up to be a psychopath.

When my son got his diagnosis, I wasn’t surprised. He started physically hurting me when his age was measured in months, rather than years. Consequences did not deter him.  For years I told friends, doctors, teachers, my own parents that I thought there was something wrong with him. No one listened. Parents at the park started avoiding us.  My son was never invited to parties or included in fun activities. Not that I blame them—he was constantly harming other children. But American culture rarely blames the child who is acting out; it blames their parents.  Too often, I heard, “If it was my child I would never let them get away with this.” Eventually I stopped trying to connect with other parents.  They say it takes a village to raise a child, but what do you do when the village shuns you?

“Some skinny-ass white girl is going to come up here and belt out a song by one of the greatest soul singers that ever lived?”

This is what some talent scouts thought when a pre-fame Madonna, Louise Ciccone, asked to sing Aretha Franklin’s “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” at an audition. Or at least this is what Madonna assumes they were thinking. In a speech allegedly paying tribute to the Queen of Soul at Monday night’s MTV Video Music Awards, Madonna delivered the “skinny-ass white girl” line with a smirk, rendering it a double entendre that also referenced what the VMAs audience was thinking in that moment. Madonna didn’t end up singing any Franklin on MTV, but she did something else that was strange and unadvisable.

In 2007, 13 years after the brutal murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, 12 years after a jury found O. J. Simpson innocent of those murders, and 10 years after a civil jury found him liable for them, Simpson published a book called If I Did It. Outrage ensued. To the many who needed no further evidence of Simpson’s guilt, the book was the horrific culmination of his long slide into desperation and depravity. Can a person not only get away with murder, they wondered, but profit from it in open daylight? Aren’t there any rules?

Last week’s Omarosa-driven frenzy of speculation over whether a tape exists of President Donald Trump using the N word brought the book back to mind. (Tellingly, this frenzy is also tinged with the question of what people with little credibility will do in the name of book profits, but that’s another story.) The conversation seemed to focus less on whether such a tape exists than whether it would “matter” if it did.

On Thursday night, The New York Times published an interview with Elon Musk that offers a view into the billionaire entrepreneur’s life in the last year. Musk choked up “multiple times,” the Times reported in the story, and “alternated between laughter and tears.” He explained that he was overworked at Tesla, his electric-car company—which has spent the past several months scrambling to meet ambitious production goals—and that the situation has taken a toll on his physical health, family time, and social life.

“I thought the worst of it was over—I thought it was,” Musk said. “The worst is over from a Tesla operational standpoint. But from a personal pain standpoint, the worst is yet to come.”

Settling into a sense of safety is hard when your life’s catalog of memories teaches you the opposite lesson. Imagine: You fled from a government militia intent on murdering you; swam across a river with the uncertain hope of sanctuary on the far bank; had the dawning realization that you could never return to your village, because it had been torched; and heard pervasive rumors of former neighbors being raped and enslaved. Imagine that, following all this, you then found yourself in New York City, with travel documents that were unreliable at best.

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This is the shared narrative of thousands of emigrants from the West African nation of Mauritania. The country is ruled by Arabs, but these refugees were members of a black subpopulation that speaks its own languages. In 1989, in a fit of nationalism, the Mauritanian government came to consider these differences capital offenses. It arrested, tortured, and violently expelled many black citizens. The country forcibly displaced more than 70,000 of them and rescinded their citizenship. Those who remained behind fared no better. Approximately 43,000 black Mauritanians are now enslaved—by percentage, one of the largest enslaved populations in the world.

When Warner Bros. announced in 2016 that it’d be making Crazy Rich Asians for the big screen, a few things were clear from the start: The movie would be an adaptation of Kevin Kwan’s bestselling novel about a Chinese American economics professor who accompanies her Singaporean boyfriend back home for a wedding, only to discover that he’s from one of the island’s wealthiest families. It would be a rare, major U.S. production with an all-Asian cast. It would also be a romantic comedy, a genre Hollywood has fallen out of love with. And, crucially, it was clear that the stakes for the film would be incredibly—even impossibly—high. If it failed, the thinking went, would big studios want to make more Asian-driven stories in the future?