President Donald Trump is worried that Attorney General Pam Bondi is moving too slowly to prosecute his political adversaries on fake charges. Trump has good reason to be concerned. He is carrying out his project to consolidate authoritarian power against the trend of declining public support for his administration and himself. He is like a man trying to race upward on a downward-moving escalator.

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During the post-Soviet 1990s, a popular political-satire show called Kukly ran on the Russian independent network NTV. Then-President Boris Yeltsin, for example, was regularly depicted as a feeble drunk. For about a decade, the show featured puppets that lampooned prominent political and cultural figures—until one episode, in which Vladimir Putin showed up as a grotesque, wicked dwarf.

When Anna De Souza was in her early 30s, she asked her ob-gyn when she should start thinking about having kids. “When you were 26,” she remembers the doctor saying.
She was surprised. She’d had some sense that fertility decreases with age but didn’t know how significant the drop-off was. No doctor had ever told her, and she certainly didn’t learn about it in school.

Ole Miss, as is perhaps well known, is in the heartland of beautiful girls. We know this to be true if we are followers—however casually—of something called RushTok, and we know it to be enduringly true because the above sentence was written by Terry Southern in 1963, in “Twirling at Ole Miss,” which was published in Esquire and then included in Tom Wolfe’s essential 1973 anthology, The New Journalism.

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