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.

In the faint predawn light, the ship doesn’t look unusual. It is one more silhouette looming pier-side at Naval Base San Diego, a home port of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. And the scene playing out in its forward compartment, as the crew members ready themselves for departure, is as old as the Navy itself. Three sailors in blue coveralls heave on a massive rope. “Avast!” a fourth shouts. A percussive thwack announces the pull of a tugboat—and 3,000 tons of warship are under way.

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But now the sun is up, and the differences start to show.

Most obvious is the ship’s lower contour. Built in 2014 from 30 million cans’ worth of Alcoa aluminum, Littoral Combat Ship 10, the USS Gabrielle Giffords, rides high in the water on three separate hulls and is powered like a jet ski—that is, by water-breathing jets instead of propellers. This lets it move swiftly in the coastal shallows (or “littorals,” in seagoing parlance), where it’s meant to dominate. Unlike the older ships now gliding past—guided-missile cruisers, destroyers, amphibious transports—the littoral combat ship was built on the concept of “modularity.” There’s a voluminous hollow in the ship’s belly, and its insides can be swapped out in port, allowing it to set sail as a submarine hunter, minesweeper, or surface combatant, depending on the mission.

Arguments before the United States Court of Appeals are usually dry, esoteric, and nerdy. What would it take to make one go viral? This week, in a clip that launched a million angry Facebook posts, we found out. It took a lawyer for the United States telling a panel of incredulous Ninth Circuit judges that it is “safe and sanitary” to confine immigrant children in facilities without soap or toothbrushes and to make them sleep on concrete floors under bright lights.

This assertion generated widespread outrage. Sarah Fabian, the senior attorney in the Department of Justice’s Office of Immigration Litigation who uttered it, was instantly excoriated online. As fate would have it, the clip of her argument went viral at the same time as a new wave of reports of brutal and inhumane conditions at immigrant confinement centers. It also immediately followed the raucous debate over Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez referring to the confinement centers as concentration camps. The juxtaposition suggested, misleadingly, that the Trump administration was explicitly justifying the worst sorts of child mistreatment we were seeing on the news.

Americans often lament the rise of “extreme partisanship,” but this is a poor description of political reality: Far from increasing, Americans’ attachment to their political parties has considerably weakened over the past years. Liberals no longer strongly identify with the Democratic Party and conservatives no longer strongly identify with the Republican Party.

What is corroding American politics is, specifically, negative partisanship: Although most liberals feel conflicted about the Democratic Party, they really hate the Republican Party. And even though most conservatives feel conflicted about the Republican Party, they really hate the Democratic Party.

America’s political divisions are driven by hatred of an out-group rather than love of the in-group. The question is: Why?

About 65 million years ago, shortly after the time of the dinosaurs, a new critter popped up on the evolutionary scene. This “scampering animal,” as researchers described it, was likely small, ate bugs, and had a furry tail. It looked, according to artistic renderings, like an especially aggressive New York City rat. And it had a placenta, an organ that grows deep into the maternal body in order to nourish the fetus during pregnancy.

The rodentlike thing would become the common ancestor of the world’s placental mammals, with descendants that include whales, bats, dogs, and humans, among many other species. And today, the placenta might hold the key to one of the most enduring mysteries in human medicine: Why do women suffer much higher rates of autoimmune disease than men do?

In the mid-19th century, people in the developed world entered into a Faustian bargain with the aging process. In exchange for life expectancies gaining an additional 30 years in the space of only a few generations, billions of people had to find out what it was like to be elderly.

In 2019, more people than ever before get to see their grandkids grow up. They get to enjoy a lengthy retirement, if they have the resources. The price they have to pay, however, is “the rise of heart disease, cancer, stroke, Alzheimer’s, osteoporosis, osteoarthritis, and everything we associate with aging and growing old,” according to Jay Olshansky, an epidemiologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health. If the life in your years is supposed to matter more than the years in your life, it might feel like modern humanity has backed itself into a corner.

I do not normally watch Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, but when the fate of the Earth is at stake, I make an exception. On Friday night, after an extraordinary week of brinkmanship in the Persian Gulf, Carlson delivered a seven-minute philippic against John Bolton, President Trump’s national security adviser. Bolton is the most bellicose in the West Wing of the White House, and according to reports, he has advocated military action against Iran in retaliation for the attacks on oil tankers and the downing of a $130 million U.S. drone in the Strait of Hormuz. Trump says he called off a military strike with an hour to go—reportedly on the private advice of Carlson.

On his show, Carlson described Bolton as “a bureaucratic tapeworm. Try as you might, you can’t expel him.” (Bolton served in three Republican administrations before Trump but was out of government from 2006 until his appointment to head the National Security Council last year.) He and other neoconservatives had beguiled previous presidents of both parties into invading and destabilizing stable countries such as Syria, Libya, and Iraq. They are parasites, Carlson said, and Bolton would “live forever in the bowels of the federal agencies, periodically reemerging to cause pain and suffering but never suffering himself.”

Updated at 2:48 p.m. ET on June 20, 2019.

On Tuesday, Marissa Casey Fuchs, a fashion influencer known on Instagram as @fashionambitionist, shared a video to her 160,000-plus followers. In it, her boyfriend, Gabriel Grossman, professes his love and tells her that she’s about to embark on “an extraordinary adventure.”

“I have the most important question of my life to ask you,” he says. “The problem is, we’re not really into traditional weddings. It’s not really our style.” But, he adds, he figured out how to provide “something to experience, enjoy, and, you know, capture for the ’gram so we know it happened.” The video had originally come from Grossman’s feed, and when Fuchs reposted it to her own, she added a caption: “WHAT IS HAPPENING?!”

Sometime during the past few years, the country started talking differently about white Americans of modest means. Early in the Obama era, the ennobling language of campaign pundits prevailed. There was much discussion of “white working-class voters,” with whom the Democrats, and especially Barack Obama, were having such trouble connecting. Never mind that this overbroad category of Americans—the exit pollsters’ definition was anyone without a four-year college degree, or more than a third of the electorate—obliterated major differences in geography, ethnicity, and culture. The label served to conjure a vast swath of salt-of-the-earth citizens living and working in the wide-open spaces between the coasts—Sarah Palin’s “real America”—who were dubious of the effete, hifalutin types increasingly dominating the party that had once purported to represent the common man. The “white working class” connoted virtue and integrity. A party losing touch with it was a party unmoored.