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Why Is Joe Rogan So Popular?

Devin Gordon

He understands men in America better than most people do. The rest of the country should start paying attention.

Every morning of my Joe Rogan experience began the same way Joe Rogan begins his: with the mushroom coffee.

It’s a pour-and-stir powder made from lion’s mane and chaga—“two rock-star mushrooms,” according to Joe—and it’s made by a company called Four Sigmatic, a regular advertiser on Joe Rogan’s wildly popular podcast. As a coffee lover, the mere existence of mushroom coffee offends me. (“I’ll have your most delicious thing, made from your least delicious things, please,” a friend said, scornfully.) But it tastes fine, and even better after another cup of actual coffee.

Next, I took several vitamin supplements from a company called Onnit, whose core philosophy is “total human optimization” and whose website sells all kinds of wicked-cool fitness gear—a Darth Vader kettlebell ($199.95); a 50-foot roll of two-and-a-half-inch-thick battle rope ($249.95); a 25-pound quad mace ($147.95), which according to one fitness-equipment site is a weapon dating back to 11th-century Persia. I stuck to the health products, though, because you know how it goes—you buy one quad mace and soon your apartment is filled with them. I stirred a packet of Onnit Gut Health powder into my mushroom coffee, then downed an enormous pair of Alpha Brain pills, filled with nootropics to help with “memory and focus.”

How Life Became an Endless, Terrible Competition

Daniel Markovits

Meritocracy prizes achievement above all else, making everyone—even the rich—miserable. Maybe there’s a way out.

In the summer of 1987, I graduated from a public high school in Austin, Texas, and headed northeast to attend Yale. I then spent nearly 15 years studying at various universities—the London School of Economics, the University of Oxford, Harvard, and finally Yale Law School—picking up a string of degrees along the way. Today, I teach at Yale Law, where my students unnervingly resemble my younger self: They are, overwhelmingly, products of professional parents and high-class universities. I pass on to them the advantages that my own teachers bestowed on me. They, and I, owe our prosperity and our caste to meritocracy.

Two decades ago, when I started writing about economic inequality, meritocracy seemed more likely a cure than a cause. Meritocracy’s early advocates championed social mobility. In the 1960s, for instance, Yale President Kingman Brewster brought meritocratic admissions to the university with the express aim of breaking a hereditary elite. Alumni had long believed that their sons had a birthright to follow them to Yale; now prospective students would gain admission based on achievement rather than breeding. Meritocracy—for a time—replaced complacent insiders with talented and hardworking outsiders.

A stack of bones at Roopkund lake — Awanish Tirkey / Shutterstock

The Mystery of ‘Skeleton Lake’ Gets Deeper

Rachel Gutman

Hundreds of skeletons are scattered around a site high in the Himalayas, and a new study overturns a leading theory about how they got there.

In a kinder world, archaeologists would study only formal cemeteries, carefully planned and undisturbed. No landslides would have scattered the remains. No passersby would have taken them home as souvenirs, or stacked them into cairns, or made off with the best of the artifacts. And all this certainly wouldn’t be happening far from any evidence of human habitation, under the surface of a frozen glacial lake.

But such an ideal burial ground wouldn’t have the eerie appeal of Skeleton Lake in Uttarakhand, India, where researchers suspect the bones of as many as 500 people lie. The lake, which is formally known as Roopkund, is miles above sea level in the Himalayas and sits along the route of the Nanda Devi Raj Jat, a famous festival and pilgrimage. Bones are scattered throughout the site: Not a single skeleton found so far is intact.

Why Conservatives Are Turning Against Higher Education

Reihan Salam

College isn’t providing an effective engine of upward mobility for most Americans.

A native of small-town Missouri who excelled at Stanford and Yale Law School, Josh Hawley, the junior senator from Missouri, is keenly aware of how higher education can serve as a springboard into the elite and the challenges facing those it leaves behind. But that’s not to say he’s a cheerleader for the higher-education industry. Like many on the right, the senator often speaks of the higher-education sector as a kind of cartel, one that has left America’s non-college-educated majority out in the cold.

At a recent gathering of conservatives, for example, Hawley drew a straight line from the declining economic prospects of non-college-educated workers to a number of social maladies. “Just about any American worker without a four-year college degree will have a hard time in the cosmopolitan economy. Maybe that’s one reason why marriage rates among working-class Americans are falling, why birth rates are falling, why life expectancy is falling. All the while, an epidemic of suicide and drug addiction ravages every sector, every age group, every geography of the working class.”

Donald Trump’s Economic Anxiety

David A. Graham

The president can scarcely afford to continue the trade war, but he can scarcely afford to end it either.

As the political world struggled to understand the 2016 election, one common (and commonly derided) explanation was that “economic anxiety” among some voters, especially white working-class ones, had helped propel Donald Trump to victory. It finds an ironic echo this week, as the president displays his own economic anxiety—a fear that a recession might turn him out of office.

Trump’s anxiety has manifested itself in a string of fevered tweets and policy trial balloons over the past few days. The president has bashed the Federal Reserve, blamed the press, floated tax cuts, and delayed a tariff, even as he insists, paradoxically, that the American economy is strong. It’s not clear how likely a recession is or how it would affect his political prospects, but Trump has made clear that he is worried about both.

The Quickening

Leslie Jamison

A story of two births

When you were the size of a poppy seed, I sat in the bathroom of a Boston hotel room and peed on a stick I’d bought from an elderly man at a drugstore near Fenway Park. I laid the plastic on the cold tiles and waited for it to tell me if you existed. I wanted you to exist so badly. It had been a year of chipper emails from my fertility app, asking if I’d had sex on the right nights, and a year of sunken hearts whenever I spotted blood: at work, at home, in a sandy bathroom on a chilly beach just north of Morro Bay. Each rusty stain took away the narrative I’d spent the past few weeks imagining—that this would be the month I found out I was having a baby. My body kept reminding me that it controlled the story. But then, there you were.

Avocados stuffed with chili sit on a grill. — Matthew Mead / AP

There Are Too Many Damn National ‘Something’ Days

James Hamblin

Millions of people are extremely eager to celebrate fake holidays sponsored by corporations.

On July 31, North Korea tested a ballistic missile. Prisoners in Egypt refused food in protest of inhumane treatment. Residents of Baltimore rebuked the president of the United States for calling their district “a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess.” Yet for much of the day, the No. 1 trending topic on Twitter was avocados.

People shared recipes and photos, trivia and tales about the fruit. Not because avocados were in the news—not at the center of some controversy or scandal or massacre. It was, simply, National Avocado Day (#NationalAvocadoDay).

This might have struck people in the U.S. as odd, since 80 percent of America’s avocados come from Mexico. But scrutiny for such days tends to be low, evidenced by the now almost daily phenomenon of a trending “national day” blanketing Facebook and Twitter, and even Instagram. As I write this, it’s National Relaxation Day. August also now includes National Dog Day, National Matchmaker Day, and National Sisters Day.

Donald Trump stands in front of supporters at a campaign rally. — Bryan Woolston / Reuters

Trump Could Win Again

Yascha Mounk

He’s unpopular, scandalous, and a bigot, and we may be sliding into a recession. But that might not matter.

There are many reasons President Donald Trump might lose reelection in 2020. He is deeply unpopular. Most Americans abhor his bigotry. His administration has been plagued by all manner of scandals. He has failed to live up to his many grandiloquent promises. The country may be sliding into a recession.

Put all of this together, and it’s easy to imagine Democrats riding a big blue wave to the White House next year. But I fear that it is somewhat more likely that Trump will be able to declare victory on November 3, 2020.

Trump’s approval ratings are the most commonly used metric for how likely he is to win reelection. At first sight, they hold a lot of comfort for the president’s opponents. According to FiveThirtyEight’s tracker, for example, more Americans believe he is doing a poor job as president than believe he is doing a good one: About 54 percent disapprove of his performance. Only 42 percent approve of it.

Planned Parenthood Makes a Huge Bet

Emma Green

The women’s-health organization will stop taking money from Title X, a government family-planning program, in light of a new rule that bars doctors from making referrals for abortion procedures.

This week, Planned Parenthood decided to walk away from an estimated $60 million in annual federal funds for low-income women’s reproductive-health care. The organization claims that it was forced into this decision by Donald Trump’s administration, which recently finalized a new rule barring recipients of money from Title X, a federal family-planning program, from making referrals for abortions.

For the Trump administration, Planned Parenthood’s decision to pull out of Title X is a double victory: It serves as another barrier between federal funds and abortion services, and the president’s supporters believe it also shows that Planned Parenthood cares more about providing abortion services than serving the health needs of the greatest possible number of women.

A young girl looks at the produce aisle in a grocery store. — Nathan Mead / Getty

Putting Kids on Diets Won’t Solve Anything

Amanda Mull

Weight Watchers has a new app for children as young as 8. It might be better for the company than it is for pediatric health.

Getting smaller is big business in America. Last year, the country’s market for weight-loss products and services reached an all-time high of $72 billion. Analysts predict it will only grow in the years ahead, in large part because of the potential for apps and tech products like FitBit and MyFitnessPal to capture the attention of young consumers, who tend to like data and hate the in-person meetings that many diet companies have required of past generations.

In this context, “young consumers” almost always refers to people over the age of 18. America’s childhood-obesity numbers have been climbing for decades, but children and adolescents also need to gain weight in their formative years to become healthy, strong adults. That can make creating healthy relationships between kids and food a delicate process, which is why it has historically been the province of doctors and nutritionists. Marketing weight-loss services directly to kids has been a public-relations third rail.