Olga Khazan

“So, should we Lebowski, or should we not Lebowski?” I asked my friend Alex as we finished our pizza and wine on a recent evening.
I felt like I was asking her if she wanted to make out. The Big Lebowski—the 1998 Coen-brothers movie about bowling, pot, and mistaken identity—is one of my favorites, and I was nervous about introducing it to her. I like to use Lebowski quotes as a way to assert myself while, like Jeff Bridges’s character, “the Dude,” not taking things too seriously.

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My husband often hears me say that all I need to be happy is a sunny day and a pool. (He would argue that I don’t say this so much as I whine it.) No matter how bad a day I’m having, if I can squeeze in just 10 minutes coursing through the water, watching the dappled sun reflect off my arms, life feels bearable again.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the bear-fondling, gravel-voiced Camelot scion, is President-Elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, where presumably he will “go wild on health,” to quote Trump. His nomination has raised concerns among public-health experts because many of Kennedy’s views on health are, well, wild.

At the familiar, treacherous hour of 3 a.m., I wake up in a cold sweat, my heart galloping in my chest. I drink some water and take half an Ambien. Then I turn to a sacred document that comforts me in uncertain times. I’ve read it so often, I can practically recite it from memory: “No more than 28 percent of the borrower’s gross monthly income should be spent on housing costs,” says the article from Rocket Mortgage.

The life of a hotel front-desk clerk in a red state can tell you a lot about America’s COVID-19 failures. He doesn’t want to be identified, because he is worried about being fired, but I can tell you this: He doesn’t have paid sick days or health insurance. About a month ago, he got COVID and took four days off, using three of his seven vacation days and going a day without pay. Last week, one of his kids tested positive for COVID, and he thinks he has it again.

Just as soon as they press Save on their out-of-office responses this week, many Americans will catch what, statistically speaking, Americans usually catch during the cold winter months. No, hopefully not COVID-19. I’m talking about baby fever!The holidays are the high season for baby-making, which is why so many people are born between August and October, or about nine months from the week when everyone stops working and starts drinking hot alcohols.

In the public-health world, the rise of Omicron prompted a great, big “I told you so.” Since the new variant was detected in South Africa, advocacy groups, the WHO, and global-health experts have said the new variant was a predictable consequence of vaccine inequity. Rich countries are hoarding vaccine doses, they said, leaving much of the developing world under-vaccinated. But in reality, countries with low vaccination rates are suffering from more than just inequity.

Democrats are still licking their wounds from defeats in last week’s elections in Virginia, New Jersey, and elsewhere. Some are calling for the party to refocus on popular moderate policies. Perhaps that’s the most realistic path forward; it’s the formula that top Republicans settled on following their own stinging electoral defeat in 2012.

So many states have restricted access to abortion so severely that people in large swaths of the country feel they have no options if they want to terminate a pregnancy. But technically, those who want an abortion still have options. It’s just that few have heard of them.Pregnant people in Texas, or in any other U.S.

The number of kids contracting the coronavirus is rising. In the week that ended with July 29, more than 70,000 children got COVID-19, representing nearly a fifth of all cases. Though a vanishingly small number of kids have died of the disease—358 since the start of the pandemic, as of July 29—some states, like Florida, now have dozens of children hospitalized. Few parents want to hear that their little ones may get COVID-19, no matter how low their odds of death.

We are a nation of under-doers and over-doers. Every time the government has issued COVID-19 guidance throughout the pandemic, one slice of America has ignored it, while another slice has followed it to the letter, and then some. The government says stay six feet apart? Some Americans scoffed, while others didn’t set foot inside a restaurant for a year. The CDC’s decision to let vaccinated people go unmasked is shaping up to be another such cleavage.

Sara met her future husband when she was 18. He struggled with drug and alcohol addiction, but Sara thought marriage would change him for the better. It didn’t. Sara gave birth to two kids before the age of 25, and she says her husband grew controlling and abusive. A few weeks ago, he got drunk and punched her in the face repeatedly, she says, and she realized they had to divorce.

If you ask some people, America is in the middle of a public-health crisis. No, not that one.Legislators in 16 states have passed resolutions declaring that pornography, in its ubiquity, constitutes a public-health crisis. The wave of bills started five years ago, with Utah, which went a step further this spring by passing a law mandating that all cellphones and tablets sold in the state block access to pornography by default.

America’s CEOs have a message for people who love working from home: Your happy days are numbered. Remote work is “suboptimal,” Jonathan Wasserstrum, the CEO of the New York commercial-real-estate company SquareFoot, told me. “I believe that work is better when most of the people are in the office most of the time together,” he said.

To be a working mother during a global pandemic is to be constantly torn between your kids and your clients. At times in the past year, Amy Conway-Hatcher, a lawyer at a big firm in Washington, D.C., would overhear her two children having dinner with her husband and not be able to join them, because she was working 80-to-100-hour weeks on a big case.

In response to the high rate at which American police kill civilians, many on the left have taken up the call for defunding the police, or abolishing the police entirely. But some policing experts are instead emphasizing a different approach that they say could reduce police killings: training officers better, longer, and on different subjects.

In 2015, in the Dallas suburb of Irving, the fates of two very different Texans collided.One was 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed, a precocious kid in a NASA T-shirt who had built a clock out of spare parts and brought it to school in a pencil case. His English teacher decided it might be a bomb, and the school called the police, who arrested Mohamed for bringing in a “hoax bomb.

In the early 1970s, a psychoanalyst named Herbert J. Freudenberger opened a free clinic to treat poor patients in New York City. It was a bit of a passion project: Freudenberger would work 10 to 12 hours during the day in his private practice, then head over to the free clinic to work until midnight or later. He seemed to realize that he was overcommitting. “You start your second job when most people go home,” Freudenberger wrote at one point.

Updated at 9:15 a.m. E.T. on January 25, 2021Judging by the actions of those who stormed the Capitol, far-right extremists don’t fear arrest. But they do fear one thing: glowies.During the Trump administration, many far-right groups’ main concern was figuring out how to recruit more people to the cause.

At 10 o’clock one morning this November, Rob Beal’s bosses summoned him and his co-workers onto a mysterious Zoom call. Beal had spent more than two years working as a coach for AbleTo, which provides mental-health services to people through apps, videochats, and calls, like Uber for anxiety.Beal, a 50-year-old former attorney, had devoted himself to his job coaching people through AbleTo’s anxiety and depression programs.

If you flew into Honolulu International Airport anytime after the start of the pandemic, you would have had a different experience from most Americans who have traveled elsewhere this year. In the days following your arrival, you would not be wading into the azure waters of Waikiki Beach. You would not be climbing the soaring crest of Diamond Head to gaze upon the Pacific Ocean. A noble sea turtle might be floating in the bay, ready to swim alongside you, but you would not be able to join him.

Coronavirus infections in the United States are growing exponentially, and lawmakers may soon face an awful choice between another round of shutdowns and the deaths of tens of thousands more Americans.A small band of scientists insist there is another way. They say that if every American took multiple coronavirus tests a week at home, we’d be able to figure out who is contagious.

If you ask her, President Donald Trump didn’t deserve any votes, let alone millions. And still, Mona Charen made it all the way to 11:09 on Election Night without swearing.The conservative columnist was perched on a dining-room chair, Zooming into an Election Night panel for /YouGov poll. However, some anti-Trump Republicans might no longer consider themselves Republican, which would mean the true number of Never Trumpers like Charen is actually higher.

It was a tense and angry October. The United States had never felt more divided. Young people were marching in the streets and being met with heavily armed troops. People were seeking meaning in their lives, and finding it in ideology.It wasn’t 2020. It was 1967.Within a couple years, a group called the Weather Underground had decided to try to overthrow the U.S. government. According to Bryan Burrough, the author of Days of Rage, the group believed the racism and imperialism of the U.S.

Shortly after returning to the White House last night, Donald Trump tweeted out a triumphant video in which he urges Americans not to let the coronavirus “dominate your life,” because “we have the best medicines in the world.”That was true of Trump’s stay at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, during which doctors threw the kitchen sink of COVID-19 medicines at him while he relaxed, knowing his bills would be covered.

At 8 a.m. Pacific time last Wednesday, I joined David Anderson’s 12th-grade government class at Live Oak High by clicking on a Zoom link.Because California suffered a surge in coronavirus cases this summer, students in Live Oak, a town about 50 miles north of Sacramento, will be learning virtually for the foreseeable future. Both Anderson and his students seemed nervous about how it would go.