New York Magazine January 7-20, 2019

1 For New York, Lisa Miller explored the peril and promise of estrogen’s role in women’s mental health (“Listening to Estrogen,” December 24, 2018–January 6, 2019). The novelist Ayelet Waldman called it “a must read if you know any woman in her 40s or 50s.” Rutgers sociologist Norah MacKendrick wrote, “This article is mind-blowing. It tells of new science but is ultimately an old story—how science and medicine can fail to take women’s health seriously.” But Louise Newman of Australia’s Royal Women’s Hospital cautioned, “Be careful of reducing women’s mental distress and mental illness to hormones alone. This continues the myth of estrogen-driven instability of women.” James Woods, a gynecology professor at the University of Rochester School of Medicine, responded, “Your important cover article brings attention to the rise of…

THIS MONTH, we are all tentatively dipping our toes into the New Year, wondering what horrors and highlights might await us in 2019—the year that served as a setting, you may remember, for Blade Runner, Akira, and Running Man, three of the most iconic future-casting movies ever made and now divergent choose-your-own-dystopia visions of the years ahead (perhaps some more plausible than others). They are also reminders that, though Americans today may have a hard time imagining a future all that different from the present—we dream less about flying cars and space travel than about somewhat improved health care and slightly more immersive video games—it was not all that long ago that we believed (sort of) that very wild futures were possible just a decade or two down the road.…

IN 2039... DAHLIA LITHWICK: The Supreme Court Will Die Off IN 2039, the Supreme Court will consist of two people: Elena Kagan and Neil Gorsuch, because no one else will ever be confirmable again, and gradually the other justices will retire or die off. ¶ Democrats are all saying that they want the filibuster reestablished really soon. I think everybody has come to realize that confirming people by 50-48 margins is not good for anyone. But we’re also moving quickly away from anything that looks like a consensus nominee. And the paradox is, we will put up people who are 40. Clarence Thomas famously responded to the idea that he might move left over time, the way Souter and Stevens did, by telling his clerks, “I ain’t evolving.” Now nobody’s…

On the outskirts of McAllen, Texas, a few miles north of the Rio Grande, a dun-colored warehouse squats on the corner of West Ursula Avenue and South Ware Road . Formally known as the Central Processing Center, it is surrounded by a chain-link fence and numerous signs prohibiting photography. A few years ago, it was occupied by an injection-molding company. Since then, it has been retrofitted by the federal government to lock up as many as 1,000 individuals at one time. The Central Processing Center is a monument to “deterrence,” the idea that undocumented immigrants will stop showing up at the border if the punishments inflicted upon them there are severe enough. Deterrence dates back to Bill Clinton’s presidency, but it reached an unprecedented level of harshness in 2018 inside the…

It was the same for my father, and for his father, and for his father, and for the men in my family going back as far as we have records. We’ve all carried the same hereditary genetic mutation. On chromosome 2 in the DNA of all human beings, there’s a gene called the luteinizing hormone/choriogonadotropin receptor (LHCGR). In women of reproductive age, the LHCGR triggers ovulation; in men, it triggers testosterone production. But somewhere back in the lost recesses of my family’s genetic history, an unfortunate ancestor of mine was born with a mutant LHCGR gene. Having a mutant LHCGR gene leads to what doctors now call familial male-limited precocious puberty, an extremely rare disease that affects only men because you have to have testicles, which is why it’s also…

ONE OF THE MOST popular episodes in the history of “On Being,” the 15-year-old public-radio program hosted by the honey-voiced Krista Tippett, is a conversation Tippett had more than ten years ago with the late Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue on the subject of the inner landscape of beauty. ¶ “Beauty isn’t all about just nice loveliness, like,” O’Donohue tells Tippett. “Beauty is about more rounded, substantial becoming. I think beauty, in that sense, is about an emerging fullness, a greater sense of grace and elegance, a deeper sense of depth, and also a kind of homecoming for the enriched memory of your unfolding life.” Tippett responds by asking what O’Donohue pictures when he hears the word beauty. He answers, “The faces of those that I love come into…