Half an hour down the highway from Topeka, Kansas, not far from the geographic center of the United States, sits the town of St. Marys. Like many towns in the region, it is small, quiet, and conservative. Unlike many towns in the region, it is growing. As waves of young people have abandoned the Great Plains in search of economic opportunity, St. Marys has managed to attract families from across the nation. The newcomers have made the radical choice to uproot their lives in pursuit of an ideological sanctuary, a place where they can raise their children according to values no longer common in mainstream America.

Sherwood Eddy was a prominent American missionary as well as that now rare thing, a Christian socialist. In the 1920s and ’30s, he made more than a dozen trips to the Soviet Union. He was not blind to the problems of the U.S.S.R., but he also found much to like. In place of squabbling, corrupt democratic politicians, he wrote in one of his books on the country, “Stalin rules … by his sagacity, his honesty, his rugged courage, his indomitable will and titanic energy.” Instead of the greed he found so pervasive in America, Russians seemed to him to be working for the joy of working.

Above all, though, he thought he had found in Russia something that his own individualistic society lacked: a “unified philosophy of life.” In Russia, he wrote, “all life is focused in a central purpose. It is directed to a single high end and energized by such powerful and glowing motivation that life seems to have supreme significance.”

What are Jews? Members of a religious group? A race or an ethnicity? A nation? Some mixture of them all, or something else entirely?

As a debate among the Jews, this question may be academically interesting or, depending on your point of view, incredibly tedious. But as a legal question, it matters a great deal. American antidiscrimination law covers certain protected categories. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination in programs receiving federal support on the basis of “race, color, or national origin,” but—unlike many other antidiscrimination provisions—not religion.

So if Jews are deemed “just” a religious group, then they are not covered by Title VI. Publicly funded programs, under this view, could discriminate against Jews with impunity.

This article contains spoilers about Marriage Story.

It’s a rare achievement for an intimate, quietly heartbreaking film about the dissolution of a relationship to light up social-media feeds with impassioned debate. But Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, released this past weekend on Netflix, has done just that. In the days since its release, several aspects of Noah Baumbach’s semiautobiographical film (about a marriage between a New York theater director and an actress that crumbles when the director has an affair and the actress moves to Los Angeles to star in a television show, taking their son with her) have become fodder for online discussion: whether the party at fault for the divorce is Charlie (played by Adam Driver) or Nicole (Scarlett Johansson); whether the film is more sympathetic to one spouse than the other; and what kind of message the movie sends about the very institutions of marriage and family.

My tween will never know the sound of me calling her name from another room after the phone rings. She'll never sit on our kitchen floor, refrigerator humming in the background, twisting a cord around her finger while talking to her best friend. I'll get it, He's not here right now, and It's for you are all phrases that are on their way out of the modern domestic vernacular. According to the federal government, the majority of American homes now use cellphones exclusively. “We don't even have a landline anymore,” people began to say proudly as the new millennium progressed. But this came with a quieter, secondary loss—the loss of the shared social space of the family landline.

“The shared family phone served as an anchor for home,” says Luke Fernandez, a visiting computer-science professor at Weber State University and a co-author of Bored, Lonely, Angry, Stupid: Feelings About Technology, From the Telegraph to Twitter. “Home is where you could be reached, and where you needed to go to pick up your messages.” With smartphones, Fernandez says, “we have gained mobility and privacy. But the value of the home has been diminished, as has its capacity to guide and monitor family behavior and perhaps bind families more closely together.”

A glass-walled bastion of minimalism in a retail mall in Atlanta is the first of its kind in the United States. It looks like an Apple Store, but with a bouncer. You have to be 21 or older to enter. If you want to buy what’s inside, you must be a cigarette smoker. Or at least, you must tell the salesperson that you’re a cigarette smoker.

The store’s product is an electrified cylinder to be kept in your pocket. Branded “IQOS,” for “I Quit Original Smoking,” the device is the first in what’s expected to be a new class known as “heated tobacco” or “heat not burn” products. They’re not vaping or smoking, but another way of inhaling the addictive stimulant nicotine.

The IQOS is USB-charged and about the size of a Sharpie. The far end has a port where you put a roll of tobacco that looks like a short cigarette. Overall, the aesthetic is closer to an asthma inhaler than to anything James Dean would have carried. Signifiers of smoking and vaping are absent: There is no flame, no smoke, and only a ghostly wisp to exhale.

Four people were murdered on Tuesday, and two assailants killed, in an anti-Semitic attack on a kosher market in Jersey City, New Jersey. It was one of the deadliest attacks against Jews on American soil in the history of the United States; if the perpetrators had succeeded in detonating a pipe bomb they had built, the carnage could have been even worse. And yet the shooting attracted remarkably little attention at first and even now barely seems to be penetrating the national conscience.

Perhaps that’s because, in the House of Representatives, the impeachment articles against President Donald Trump are nearing a vote. Or because William Barr, the attorney general, has launched a set of broadsides against the FBI. Or perhaps the relative silence about the Jersey City massacre is due to the fact that it does not fit a neat political narrative.

Jews have once again been murdered, and their children will have to live with the knowledge of that violence. This is the thought that has been haunting Rabbi David Niederman, a leader of the Satmar Hasidic Jewish community: How will he and others explain that two shooters apparently targeted a kosher grocery store run by members of his community in Jersey City, New Jersey, yesterday? “How long,” Niederman asked at a press conference hosted by New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio today, “are these children going to live with their scars?”

In recent months, America has faced nearly nonstop reports of anti-Semitism in all forms. A swastika scrawled on the outside of a synagogue. A string of assaults against Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn. Jewish students pushed out of progressive circles on campuses because of their presumed views on Israel. Slurs shouted at Jews out shopping during a measles outbreak. Especially in the realm of politics, fear is extremely close to the surface: Any statement or action from the Trump administration related to Jews immediately conjures intense backlash from progressives, whether or not it’s based on facts.

The House Judiciary Committee has published articles of impeachment against President Donald  Trump. Though potentially damning, the particular charges—abuse of power in connection with Ukraine and the 2020 election, and obstruction of Congress—face an unusual evidentiary problem compared with impeachments past. Because there is a plausible legitimate governmental justification for each of the allegations, the impeachers must establish not only that the alleged conduct occurred, but that the president acted for personal gain.  

For most Democrats, Trump’s corrupt intent is so obvious that the proof is everywhere. For most Republicans, however, Trump’s corrupt intent remains the proposition to be proved. (I worked at the White House as the Council on Environmental Quality’s associate director for regulatory reform from 2017 to 2019.) That doesn’t bode well for the impeachers’ hopes of removing the president, because most of the evidence we’re likely to see is already contained in the report of the House Intelligence Committee, which was given the role of fact-finder under the House impeachment resolution. The Judiciary Committee ultimately backed off the theory that Trump had committed bribery, presumably because the evidence of a quid pro quo proved so thin, and abandoned the possible obstruction-of-justice charges suggested in Robert Mueller’s Report on Russian interference. The impeachers have failed to convince anyone who wasn’t already in their camp at the outset.

It was a pair of feather earrings that helped Ann Miceli get out from underneath strangers’ cars. For years, Miceli had worked as an auto mechanic and picked up shifts in her spare time at Indianapolis restaurants. One day, she came across those earrings, and “it kind of sparked something.” Miceli bought a pair, and then some supplies to make her own. She listed some of her creations in a shop on Etsy and named it PrettyVagrant.

That was in 2011. In the intervening years, Miceli has sold nearly 30,000 of her handmade earrings and feather hair extensions, all of which she assembles by hand at home. After a couple of years, Miceli quit her job as a mechanic. Etsy “has given me the opportunity to work from home and watch my grandkids,” she told me. Everything was humming along nicely until last summer, when the site began implementing a new search algorithm that gives priority to sellers who guarantee free shipping. Those who charged even a few dollars, like Miceli, were removed from their spots on the first page of search results. In August, Miceli’s revenue was down 40 percent from the previous year—a huge dip that she blames on the free-shipping finagling.