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Stained-glass windows — Lucas Jackson / Reuters

They Tried to Start a Church Without God. For a While, It Worked.

Faith Hill

Secular organizers started their own congregations. But to succeed, they need to do a better job of imitating religion.

When Justina Walford moved to New York City nine years ago, she’d never felt more alone. She’d left behind her Church, her God, and her old city, Los Angeles. Then a secular congregation called Sunday Assembly filled the spiritual void—at least for a time.

Walford had just turned 40. As a child, she had been deeply religious. Her parents had no interest in religion, and didn’t understand why she would; they’d sent her to a Christian school in hopes of good discipline and education. But Justina fell headlong into faith, delighting in her Church community and dreaming of one day becoming a pastor herself.

By the time she turned up in New York, her faith had long since unraveled, a casualty of overseas travel that made her question how any one religious community could have a monopoly on truth. But still she grieved the loss of God. “It was like breaking up with someone that you thought was your soulmate,” Walford told me. “It’s for the better. It’s for your own good,” she remembered thinking. Even though it no longer made sense to her to believe, she felt a gaping hole where her Church—her people, her psalms, her stained-glass windows—used to be.

The Economist Who Would Fix the American Dream

Gareth Cook

No one has done more to dispel the myth of social mobility than Raj Chetty. But he has a plan to make equality of opportunity a reality.

Raj Chetty got his biggest break before his life began. His mother, Anbu, grew up in Tamil Nadu, a tropical state at the southern tip of the Indian subcontinent. Anbu showed the greatest academic potential of her five siblings, but her future was constrained by custom. Although Anbu’s father encouraged her scholarly inclinations, there were no colleges in the area, and sending his daughter away for an education would have been unseemly.

But as Anbu approached the end of high school, a minor miracle redirected her life. A local tycoon, himself the father of a bright daughter, decided to open a women’s college, housed in his elegant residence. Anbu was admitted to the inaugural class of 30 young women, learning English in the spacious courtyard under a thatched roof and traveling in the early mornings by bus to a nearby college to run chemistry experiments or dissect frogs’ hearts before the men arrived.

Why Online Dating Can Feel Like Such an Existential Nightmare

Derek Thompson

Matchmaking sites have officially surpassed friends and family in the world of dating, injecting modern romance with a dose of radical individualism. Maybe that’s the problem.

My maternal grandparents met through mutual friends at a summer pool party in the suburbs of Detroit shortly after World War II. Thirty years later, their oldest daughter met my dad in Washington, D.C., at the suggestion of a mutual friend from Texas. Forty years after that, when I met my girlfriend in the summer of 2015, one sophisticated algorithm and two rightward swipes did all the work.

My family story also serves as a brief history of romance. Robots are not yet replacing our jobs. But they’re supplanting the role of matchmaker once held by friends and family.

For the past 10 years, the Stanford sociologist Michael Rosenfeld has been compiling data on how couples meet. In almost any other period, this project would have been an excruciating bore. That’s because for centuries, most couples met the same way: They relied on their families and friends to set them up. In sociology-speak, our relationships were “mediated.” In human-speak, your wingman was your dad.

An Epidemic of Disbelief

Barbara Bradley Hagerty

What new research reveals about sexual predators, and why police fail to catch them

Robert Spada walked into the decrepit warehouse in Detroit and surveyed the chaos: Thousands of cardboard boxes and large plastic bags were piled haphazardly throughout the cavernous space. The air inside was hot and musty. Spada, an assistant prosecutor, saw that some of the windows were open, others broken, exposing the room to the summer heat. Above the boxes, birds glided in slow, swooping circles.

It was August 17, 2009, and this brick fortress of a building housed evidence that had been collected by the Detroit Police Department. Spada’s visit had been prompted by a question: Why were police sometimes unable to locate crucial evidence? The answer lay in the disarray before him.

Elizabeth Warren Has Momentum. Can She Build a Movement?

Edward-Isaac Dovere

The senator from Massachusetts is on the verge of turning her campaign into something much larger.

Elizabeth Warren was walking around Milwaukee a week and a half ago, listening to a community activist and a 22-year-old whose parents are undocumented immigrants. They told her the history of bilingual education in the neighborhood around Walker Square Park, and how the blocks have changed over the years. “Talk to me about housing,” Warren said. “Where are the teachers drawn from?” The group walked past a sign for the oldest Latino-advocacy agency in the city, and a gentrification signpost: a store called Antiques Addict.

Warren was in Wisconsin to speak at a Latino political conference. She used the day to release her immigration plan, the latest in a stream of plans proposing how to revamp the system, in ways that go far beyond what Washington wisdom deems possible. The neighborhood walk felt as if Warren’s campaign was merely banking B-roll footage for future ads, while a bunch of reporters tripped over curbs and fire hydrants watching the candidate interact with locals. We ended in a parking lot, beneath a mural of a bald eagle facing a dove under a rainbow, with an olive branch in their beaks, a lightning bolt striking the section closest to the dove.

The Unexplained Noise 2 Percent of People Can Hear

Emily Buder

A man is tormented by a low-frequency humming sound emanating from his house, which he believes is caused by a nearby gas pipeline.

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Hong Kong riot police use pepper spray to disperse protesters in a suburban shopping mall. — Tyrone Siu / Reuters

The Normalization of Radicalism in Hong Kong

Timothy McLaughlin

What was once extreme here, both in action and in discourse, is becoming the norm.

HONG KONG—During a recent meeting in her party’s headquarters, the Hong Kong cabinet member Regina Ip admitted that weeks of demonstrations here have put the government on the back foot.

“I never expected mass protests to continue for such a long time,” the pro-Beijing stalwart and legislator told me. “Sophisticated” protesters, she added, had “outmaneuvered the government” and were now seizing on a growing list of grievances, wielding them as “a rod to beat the government.”

In the days since, the figurative rod has become literal: Police have swung wildly at groups of peaceful demonstrators, and some protesters have struck back. Hong Kong has a high degree of autonomy, with residents enjoying a number of freedoms, as well as separate financial, legal, and political systems from mainland China. As huge numbers of people have called for their city’s autonomy to be maintained and expanded in the face of steady encroachment by the mainland-Chinese government, lines are being crossed: Protesters have grown bolder and more extreme, even breaking into the city’s most prominent government building, and the authorities more draconian in their response. What was once radical here, both in action and in discourse, is becoming the norm.

Who Actually Feels Satisfied About Money?

Joe Pinsker

“It’s not just how much you have—it’s what you do with it,” says one researcher who studies money and happiness.

These days, not even the rich feel rich. According to a recent survey by the financial-advisory firm Ameriprise Financial, only 13 percent of American millionaires classify themselves as wealthy. Even some of those surveyed who had more than $5 million across their bank accounts, investments, and retirement accounts said they didn’t feel rich. If multimillionaires don’t feel wealthy, who does?

I decided to go to Elizabeth Dunn, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia and a co-author of Happy Money: The Science of Happier Spending, with my question: Once people have enough money to cover their basic needs and then some, what would make them feel satisfied—happy, even—with what they have? Dunn said she didn’t know of any academic studies that addressed this question head-on, but she did point to some related research that provides possible answers.

How the Idea of a ‘Normal’ Person Got Invented

Todd Rose

The notion that there is a “normal” height or a “normal” salary is a relatively new one, and it's had a profound effect on how people think about each other and themselves.

Adolphe Quetelet was born in Belgium in 1796. At age 23 he received the first doctorate in mathematics ever awarded by the University of Ghent. Smart and hungry for recognition, he wanted to make a name for himself like one of his heroes, Sir Isaac Newton. Quetelet marveled at the way Newton uncovered hidden laws governing the operation of the universe, extracting orderly principles out of the chaos of matter and time. Quetelet felt that his best chance for a similar achievement was in astronomy, the leading scientific discipline of his time.

In the early 19th century, the most prominent scientific minds turned their attention to the heavens, and the greatest symbol of a nation’s scientific status was the possession of a telescopic observatory. Belgium, however, did not have one. In 1823, Quetelet somehow managed to convince the Dutch government that ruled Belgium to shell out the exorbitant sum needed to build an observatory in Brussels, and very soon Quetelet was appointed to its top position, the director of the observatory. As the lengthy construction proceeded, Quetelet embarked on a series of visits to observatories throughout Europe to learn the latest observational methods. It seemed he had perfectly positioned himself to make an enviable run at scientific acclaim—but then, in 1830, just as he was wrapping up his tour of Europe, Quetelet received bad news: Belgium had plunged into revolution. The Brussels observatory was occupied by rebel troops.

The Future of the City Is Childless

Derek Thompson

America’s urban rebirth is missing something key—actual births.

A few years ago, I lived in a walkup apartment in the East Village of New York. Every so often descending the stairway, I would catch a glimpse of a particular family with young children in its Sisyphean attempts to reach the fourth floor. The mom would fold the stroller to the size of a boogie board, then drag it behind her with her right hand, while cradling the younger and typically crying child in the crook of her left arm. Meanwhile, she would shout hygiene instructions in the direction of the older child, who would slap both hands against every other grimy step to use her little arms as leverage, like an adult negotiating the boulder steps of Machu Picchu. It looked like hell—or, as I once suggested to a roommate, a carefully staged public service announcement against family formation.