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.”

To hear more feature stories, see our full list or get the Audm iPhone app.

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.

Updated at 12:07 p.m. on June 19, 2019

Like most other colleges across the country, Newbury College, a small, private liberal-arts school in Brookline, Massachusetts, held classes through the end of this past spring semester and then bid farewell to cap-and-gown-wearing seniors. But unlike almost every other college, those classes, and that farewell, were the school’s last: Newbury officially ceased operations at the end of May.

One of the first sources to publicly confirm the long-rumored closure was the president’s blog, where the news was shared last December. “It is with a heavy heart,” the school’s president, Joseph Chillo, wrote, “that I announce our intention to commence the closing of Newbury College, this institution we love so dearly.”

Clyde Ross was born in 1923, the seventh of 13 children, near Clarksdale, Mississippi, the home of the blues. Ross’s parents owned and farmed a 40-acre tract of land, flush with cows, hogs, and mules. Ross’s mother would drive to Clarksdale to do her shopping in a horse and buggy, in which she invested all the pride one might place in a Cadillac. The family owned another horse, with a red coat, which they gave to Clyde. The Ross family wanted for little, save that which all black families in the Deep South then desperately desired—the protection of the law.

In the 1920s, Jim Crow Mississippi was, in all facets of society, a kleptocracy. The majority of the people in the state were perpetually robbed of the vote—a hijacking engineered through the trickery of the poll tax and the muscle of the lynch mob. Between 1882 and 1968, more black people were lynched in Mississippi than in any other state.

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?

Five years ago, the journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates published “The Case for Reparations” in The Atlantic, a cover story that would reinvigorate national discussion over debts owed for slavery and discrimination against black Americans. Today, on Juneteenth, he is testifying at a House hearing on H.R. 40, a bill that would establish a commission to study reparations. It’s the first such hearing in more than a decade.

Below, the full text of his opening statement as delivered:

Yesterday, when asked about reparations, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell offered a familiar reply: America should not be held liable for something that happened 150 years ago, since none of us currently alive are responsible. This rebuttal proffers a strange theory of governance, that American accounts are somehow bound by the lifetime of its generations. But well into this century, the United States was still paying out pensions to the heirs of Civil War soldiers. We honor treaties that date back some 200 years, despite no one being alive who signed those treaties. Many of us would love to be taxed for the things we are solely and individually responsible for. But we are American citizens, and thus bound to a collective enterprise that extends beyond our individual and personal reach. It would seem ridiculous to dispute invocations of the Founders, or the Greatest Generation, on the basis of a lack of membership in either group. We recognize our lineage as a generational trust, as inheritance, and the real dilemma posed by reparations is just that: a dilemma of inheritance. It is impossible to imagine America without the inheritance of slavery.

The conventions of mainstream journalism make it difficult to challenge America’s self-conception as a peace-loving nation. But the unlovely truth is this: Throughout its history, America has attacked countries that did not threaten it. To carry out such wars, American leaders have contrived pretexts to justify American aggression. That’s what the Trump administration—and especially its national security adviser, John Bolton—is doing now with Iran.

The historical examples abound. William McKinley’s administration sought a pretext for war in 1898, when—driven by the desire to evict Spain from its colonies in the Caribbean—it ignored evidence that an internal explosion, not a Spanish attack, had blown up the U.S.S. Maine in Havana’s harbor. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson exaggerated a North Vietnamese attack on U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin to win congressional approval to escalate the Vietnam War. In 1986, the Reagan administration sent warplanes toward Libya’s coast to provoke the missile fire that would justify an American bombing campaign. In 1997, according to the memoir of General Hugh Shelton, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a top Clinton administration official suggested that he lure Saddam Hussein into shooting down a U-2 spy plane over Iraq so the U.S. would have the “precipitous event” it needed “to go in and take out Saddam.” (Shelton refused). In their book, Hubris, David Corn and Michael Isikoff recount a 2002 CIA plan to help Iraqi exiles take over an Iraqi air base and thus, in the words of one of plan’s authors, “create an incident in which Saddam lashes out” so “you’d have a premise for war.”

The first time someone commented on what I was eating at work, I was a teenager at my first job, manning the front desk at the local courthouse’s law library. On the way out one day, a regular visitor interrupted my fistful of cashews to tell me he loved watching me eat—I did it with such relish. Before I could think of a response, he left.

At 18, I was already well aware of the frequency with which grown men say bizarre things to teenage girls, but what stuck with me was the fact that someone who wasn’t a parent or close friend noticed when and what I ate. It was like realizing I had been looking into a two-way mirror all along, and the food police were on the other side. What had people seen me do before I knew I was being watched?

Imagine a life in which all your basic needs were met, the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs forever lopped off. No concerns about college debt ruining your ability to buy a home. No worries about where meals would come from, or whether you would have enough cash to keep gas in the car. No problems paying medical bills.

Then, imagine a life in which virtually all of your needs were met. In this world, society would guarantee its members not just middle-income status, but the prospect of travel, the option of a fulfilling but nonremunerative career, time with family and friends, time with cats and gardens and on volunteering and road trips. Imagine that all your peers exercised regularly and watched as much Peak Television as they wanted. Imagine never retiring, because there would be no need to retire. And imagine this happening on a far greener planet.

The Sultan’s hand felt soft and gentle, more suited for a moisturizer commercial than for participating in a public stoning. By the official count, the Sultan of Brunei had shaken tens of thousands of hands in the previous two days, and I worried that by the time his hand shook mine, it would be blistered or leathery. But absolute monarchs are different from you and me, the sultan of this oil-rich Southeast Asian city-state was different dermatologically as well. When I arrived at the front of the receiving line and squeezed the royal hand, lightly, I thought of Curley in Of Mice and Men, who wore a “glove fulla vaseline” to keep his hand “soft for his wife.” (Wives, I thought, in his case. The Sultan has had as many as two at a time.)