It is an astonishing statistic: Some 87 percent of British Jews believe that Jeremy Corbyn—one of two men who could be prime minister in a few days’ time—is anti-Semitic.

How did we get here? Corbyn’s party, Labour, has strong connections with the Jewish community, dating back to its earliest days. Yet a deep distrust has developed between the two since he became Labour leader in 2015, and the issue has dogged Corbyn throughout this election campaign.

The litany of alarming incidents is well rehearsed: Corbyn’s support for an artist who drew a mural depicting hook-nosed bankers getting rich on the backs of the poor. (He said he had not looked properly at the mural.) His assertion in 2013 that British Zionists “don’t understand English irony.” (He said he would now be more careful about using the word Zionist, because it had been “hijacked by antisemites as code for Jews.”) Labour’s refusal to adopt in full an internationally recognized description of anti-Semitism. Each of these individual incidents was made more toxic by the party’s slow handling of complaints filed by Jewish members. During the campaign, Corbyn refused four times to apologize for the distress caused to the Jewish community when questioned on camera by the BBC’s Andrew Neil—a particularly odd decision, because he has done so previously. The party is currently being investigated over allegations of institutional anti-Semitism by Britain’s Equality and Human Rights Commission.

Dear Therapist,

About 10 months ago, my young adult son returned home, appearing distraught over a broken relationship. Before this, he had moved back to his university city to be with his girlfriend, who was entering her final year, and he spent four months trying to get a job and develop social networks, and being committed to the relationship.

It appears he was unsuccessful on all fronts, and my previously sunny, gregarious kid slumped into a mood matching the cold, dark winter weather in which he was living. He returned to sunny California just prior to Christmas, but struggled with sadness, anxiety, and generally feeling lost. It was clear to me that the issue was not simply a breakup and he should have come home much sooner. My other two sons returned home for the holidays, and we tried to make the best of a difficult situation. My other sons are several years older, one is married, and both live far away and are established in their careers.

Today’s impeachment hearing was supposed to be a check-the-box session for House Democrats—a formality, really: Its purpose was to televise the evidence against President Donald Trump that party lawmakers presented in a voluminous written report released last week.

What it turned into, however, was the weirdest, most chaotic hearing of the entire impeachment saga so far.

The witnesses were not exactly household names: two staff lawyers for Democratic House committees, Barry Berke and Daniel Goldman, and one serving Republicans, Stephen Castor. They were there to discuss the findings of the House Intelligence Committee, a necessary but decidedly anticlimactic step ahead of the introduction of official articles of impeachment. Democrats could unveil those charges by the end of the week, and the full House could vote on them before Christmas.

The United States is a fortress of gerontocracy besieged by a youth rebellion. America’s leaders are old—very old. The average age in Congress has never been higher, and our national leaders are all approaching 80. Nancy Pelosi was born in 1940, Mitch McConnell came along in 1942, and Donald Trump, the baby of this power trio, followed in 1946, making him several weeks older than his predecessors Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. The two leading candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, are 77 and 78 years old, respectively. Every individual in this paragraph came into the world before the International Monetary Fund and the CIA; before the invention of the transistor and the Polaroid camera; before the Roswell UFO incident and the independence of India.

When Donald Trump Jr.’s book, Triggered, leapt to the top of The New York Times’ best-seller list a few weeks ago, alert observers noticed something odd—odder even than the thought of Donald Trump Jr. writing a book. Next to the listed title was the image of a dagger. What it signified was unclear. Was it a sly commentary by the Times’ obsessively Trumpophobic editorial staff? I had read the book already and had a guess: A dagger was the first thing readers would reach for when they finished Triggered—something sharp and lethal that could be used to slit throats, our own or someone else’s, to obliterate the experience of having read the whole thing.

Weirdly, I was wrong. The Times explained that the dagger serves as a kind of asterisk. It warns readers that some portion of a book’s sales came in the form of bulk orders by institutions rather than through individual purchases by ordinary, humble book buyers such as ourselves. The implication is to question the book’s status as a boffo smash. In the case of Triggered, thousands of copies were bought by the Republican National Committee and then passed along as premiums to donors. A pro-Trump youth group called Turning Point USA and several Republican congressional candidates did the same, the Times reported in a news story.

Speaking with George Stephanopoulos on ABC this weekend, Representative Matt Gaetz—one of President Donald Trump’s most relentlessly enthusiastic congressional supporters—had an unexpected suggestion for how the president should proceed in the impeachment inquiry. Mick Mulvaney, the director of the Office of Management and Budget and acting White House chief of staff, should testify before Congress, Gaetz argued—along with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and perhaps even the president’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani. All three men have so far refused to cooperate with House requests for information. But, said Gaetz, “I think it would inure to the president’s advantage to have people testify who could exculpate him.”

Though Kanye West hovered over 2019 like a sentient burial shroud, other artists took a less self-hagiographic approach to their projects and personas. This has been a year of longing, unease, and collective reaches toward a more hopeful future. So perhaps fittingly, our three music writers’ picks on this best-albums list shift between total doom and quiet optimism.

FKA Twigs, Magdalene

FKA Twigs’s electronic operas progress at the pace of dying embers, include passages of trash-compactor noise, and are so, so sad. None of those factors would seem to suggest the sort of cultural phenomenon that creates stans and gossip and memes. Yet search “FKA Twigs” on Twitter and you find a trove of joy: guys blubbering to their girlfriends about Twigs’s live show, or folks celebrating Twigs’s cathartic pole-dancing. Twigs sings that she’s a “fallen alien,” and that she’s “never seen a hero like me in a sci-fi,” but Magdalene makes one idiosyncratic woman’s lamentation into a shared, almost uplifting spectacle. The key is that she knows how tension can be its own entertainment, and sobs a kind of relief. — Spencer Kornhaber

On the eve of Thanksgiving, the University of North Carolina Board of Governors agreed to settle a lawsuit filed by the North Carolina division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) over a Confederate monument that had stood for more than a century on the university’s flagship campus, in Chapel Hill, before demonstrators toppled it in August 2018.

The settlement might, at first glance, appear to be a workmanlike solution to a vexing issue. It ensures that the monument, commonly referred to as Silent Sam, will no longer adorn the university campus. Under the terms of the consent decree, the SCV will take custody of the monument and receive $2.5 million in “non-state funds” for a “charitable trust” to care for it. In a statement to the UNC community, which for more than a decade has been riven by the controversy over the monument, UNC Interim Chancellor Kevin M. Guskiewicz applauded the Board of Governors for “resolving this matter.”

Gabapentin was supposed to be the answer. Chronic pain afflicts about a fifth of American adults, and for years, doctors thought it could be treated with prescription painkillers like Oxycontin. But as the drugs began killing the equivalent of three planeloads of Americans every week, opioid prescriptions fell off precipitously. Many doctors embraced gabapentin, an anticonvulsant drug traditionally used to prevent seizures, as a way to treat neuropathic pain while avoiding triggering life-threatening addiction.

From 2012 to 2016, prescriptions for gabapentin increased 64 percent. It’s now the 10th-most-commonly-prescribed medication in the United States. Baclofen, a muscle relaxant, has become another popular opioid replacement. Though gabapentin and baclofen can cause a boozelike “high” for some people, they’re far less addictive and less likely to be fatal when taken in large quantities than opioids are.

For Ryan Rucker, a dad in Vacaville, California, the weekly summons comes on Wednesday mornings, usually around seven. For Rosanne Sweeting on Grand Bahama island, in the Bahamas, it’s twice a week—Mondays and Thursdays, anytime from 6 to 8:30 a.m.—and for Whitney Schlander in Scottsdale, Arizona, it’s every Tuesday morning at half-past seven.

At these times, the quiet of the morning is broken by the beep beep beeping of an approaching garbage truck—and broken further when their kids start hollering, begging to be escorted outside to wave or just watch in awe as the truck collects and majestically hauls away the household trash. Rucker’s daughter Raegan, 3, takes her stuffed animals outside with her to watch the pickup. Cassidy Sweeting, 4, enlists her mom’s help to deliver granola bars and water bottles to the three trash collectors. Finn Schlander, 3, invited the neighborhood garbage-truck driver to his birthday party. (Ultimately, he was unable to attend, but the party had garbage-truck decorations nonetheless.)