1. The Disappearance

At 12:42 a.m. on the quiet, moonlit night of March 8, 2014, a Boeing 777-200ER operated by Malaysia Airlines took off from Kuala Lumpur and turned toward Beijing, climbing to its assigned cruising altitude of 35,000 feet. The designator for Malaysia Airlines is MH. The flight number was 370. Fariq Hamid, the first officer, was flying the airplane. He was 27 years old. This was a training flight for him, the last one; he would soon be fully certified. His trainer was the pilot in command, a man named Zaharie Ahmad Shah, who at 53 was one of the most senior captains at Malaysia Airlines. In Malaysian style, he was known by his first name, Zaharie. He was married and had three adult children. He lived in a gated development. He owned two houses. In his first house he had installed an elaborate Microsoft flight simulator.

"It’s not true that no one needs you anymore.”

These words came from an elderly woman sitting behind me on a late-night flight from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. The plane was dark and quiet. A man I assumed to be her husband murmured almost inaudibly in response, something to the effect of “I wish I was dead.”

Again, the woman: “Oh, stop saying that.”

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I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but couldn’t help it. I listened with morbid fascination, forming an image of the man in my head as they talked. I imagined someone who had worked hard all his life in relative obscurity, someone with unfulfilled dreams—perhaps of the degree he never attained, the career he never pursued, the company he never started.

The Baby Boomers ruined America. That sounds like a hyperbolic claim, but it’s one way to state what I found as I tried to solve a riddle. American society is going through a strange set of shifts: Even as cultural values are in rapid flux, political institutions seem frozen in time. The average U.S. state constitution is more than 100 years old. We are in the third-longest period without a constitutional amendment in American history: The longest such period ended in the Civil War. So what’s to blame for this institutional aging?

One possibility is simply that Americans got older. The average American was 32 years old in 2000, and 37 in 2018. The retiree share of the population is booming, while birth rates are plummeting. When a society gets older, its politics change. Older voters have different interests than younger voters: Cuts to retiree-focused benefits are scarier, while long-term problems such as excessive student debt, climate change, and low birth rates are more easily ignored.

TALLINN, Estonia—Deniss Metsavas was visiting his relatives in Russia in the summer of 2007 when the incident occurred.

While out with his cousin at a nightclub in Smolensk, Metsavas struck up a conversation with an attractive woman he hadn’t met before. They hit it off and spent the night flirting and dancing before retiring to a sauna in the early hours of the morning. Though saunas in much of Russia are bathhouses where men drink vodka and are flagellated with oak leaves, this one was a sex motel. He and the woman slept together there, but feeling awkward about what was inevitably going to be a one-night stand, Metsavas went out to buy her flowers. “I cannot leave her money,” he recounted to me. “She’s not a prostitute.” Metsavas laid the bouquet by the bed, then returned to his relatives’ home to steal a few hours of sleep.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”

Bill de Blasio was one of the last Democrats to enter the presidential-primary race, and as evidenced by his placement on the far edge of the stage last night, one of the last to squeeze into the first primary debate.

But he was the first to rock the party boat, the first to interrupt a rival, and the first to pick a policy fight.

For good or ill, the New York City mayor stood taller than his fellow contenders on the stage and spoke louder than most of them too. In the first night of a two-part Democratic debate in Miami, the goal of each of the nine contenders not named Elizabeth Warren was to have a moment that could make an impression with a national television audience, and de Blasio had several. If the debate began as a more staid, buttoned-up affair than the Republican free-for-alls that President Donald Trump dominated four years ago, de Blasio brought at least a hint of a New York brawler to Miami.

That Alex Azar, the secretary of health and human services, was generally opposed to major new restrictions on fetal-tissue research wasn’t necessarily relevant. What mattered was that Joe Grogan—the faceless director of a little-known White House office called the Domestic Policy Council (DPC)—felt differently.

It was the end of May, and the two camps had been sparring for several weeks over the policy. Azar, according to Politico, sought a less restrictive measure, echoing scientists’ concerns about how a total ban on federally funded fetal-tissue research could inhibit the potential for medical breakthroughs. (The tissue, which is obtained mainly from abortions, has been used to help develop vaccines for diseases such as polio, chicken pox, and hepatitis A.)

I am a stumbling, doubting, failing, fearful Christian, so I fit right in with the rest of them. I was raised by atheists who, for complicated reasons, sent me to a Catholic school when I was 11, assuming I was too smart to believe any of the abracadabra and would just focus on the classes.

But they had some other tricks up their sleeves, those Catholics. The first was prayer, which just about knocked me flat the first time I saw its practical application. One of the nuns came to talk to us about some dire issue from the real world; maybe it was Vietnam, maybe it was someone from the parish who was very ill—I don’t remember. She summed up the situation, and I sat there wondering what the action plan was, because that was the world I inhabited. And then she said that what we were going to do was to pray about it. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Something terrible was happening and it would somehow improve if a classroom full of sixth graders closed their eyes and mumbled?

Last week, as Americans reacted to news reports that children being held at the border were being denied food, water, and hygiene supplies, employees at a normally under-the-radar, Boston-based e-commerce company were having their own reckoning. According to someone familiar with the situation, during a “cursory review” of transactions on Wednesday, a worker at the home-goods retailer Wayfair noticed that the company had made a $200,000 sale of bedroom furniture to the government contractor BCFS. As it turned out, the furniture was to be used in a new detention center in Texas, where at least 1,600 migrant teenagers and children will reportedly be detained.

Workers began discussing the sale in person and on the company Slack, and by Friday had drafted a petition to management asking that Wayfair “cease all current and future business with BCFS” and “establish a code of ethics” for sales. Some 500 employees signed it that afternoon.

I have an old Jeep that’s on its last leg. We’ve rebuilt the transmission and replaced most of the suspension, at a cost that far outstrips the hypothetical value of the car. It runs, but just. It burns oil like a refinery and gets terrible gas mileage to boot.

It seems like a no-brainer to replace it with an electric car. Used lease returns for the less expensive models, like the Nissan Leaf and Fiat 500e, can be cheap—under $10,000 in some cases, and with less than 30,000 miles. But they pose other problems, largely related to the fact that EVs don’t operate like traditional cars. Many of the early models you can now buy used have ranges under 90 miles per charge, for one. Some can’t use the fastest public chargers. The standard 110-volt outlet in my garage would take about 24 hours to fully charge one of these cars. I could add a 240-volt outlet, but my circuit box is full, so I’d need to spend a lot more money to add a subpanel. Used EVs tend to appear in the markets where they were first introduced, California especially. But with such a small range, you can’t drive one cross-country; it has to be shipped. That’s more money. The range is plenty for city driving, but what if my older daughter wants to take it to school? That would be impossible.