Mr. President! Let me start this Cabinet meeting by thanking you for hanging the moon and organizing the nation, and the universe, in such a perfect way. The moon looks great where you put it. Everything you touch turns to gold, unless you would prefer it to turn to brass.
Now that we have dispensed with the pleasantries, I do have a tiny question: Do you know that you are also allowed to fire men? Really, you are! Men are allowed to leave the Cabinet too.

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Donald Trump’s reputation and political career were built on his dealmaking prowess, yet the president keeps demonstrating that he is a terrible negotiator.
Repeatedly over the past nine years, Trump has gotten rolled by counterparts during high-stakes exchanges.

If you’re reading this, there’s a chance that you have survived, witnessed, or somehow experienced a school shooting, which is a common enough occurrence in the United States that I felt compelled to write this essay. I myself have been through two school shootings: first in Parkland, Florida, when I was 12, and then at Brown University at the age of 20.

My generation—which is to say, the pillbox generation—came of age during the 1990s. The number of adults who were taking five or more prescription drugs doubled in that decade; the use of medications for depression and cholesterol more than tripled. If pills had once been used from time to time to curb a headache or stifle an infection, now they were a daily ritual for tens of millions of Americans. Popping meds, whether by catapult or tweezers, became the norm.

Too loud.
Too loud.
Too loud.
If you were to scroll through my archive of texts with my children—from the start of the coronavirus pandemic, in 2020, to the end of last year—you would find that I sent 133 of these messages.
I discovered this a few weeks ago, sitting alone on the couch in my living room, when, on a whim, I searched for the phrase on my phone. My youngest daughter, age 19, has been the most frequent recipient of the text, though each of my three children appears in the archive.

Photographs by Maggie Shannon
In person, they did not seem quite real. Gathered on a blue carpet under bright lights, inside a $50 million Las Vegas venue that had been built just for them, the athletes of the Enhanced Games—colloquially known as the “doping Olympics”—looked like action figures. When they stood next to other people, the effect was different but no less uncanny; it was as if they’d been Photoshopped, blown up 25 percent compared with the rest of their species.

The Vatican, as one aphorism puts it, tends to “think in centuries.” But Pope Leo XIV seems intent on changing that, moving with remarkable speed to publish his first encyclical today, Magnifica Humanitas, “on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence.” Leo has managed to produce a major teaching document on AI while college students are still booing commencement speeches about how the technology will change the world.