The United States of paranoia

When a young male friend offered to teach me chess last summer, I thought it sounded an exotic thing to learn at forty — and a feminist itch made me want to prove I could hold my own against the dorky boys. Perhaps one day — for the moment I am still pretty hopeless. Radical gender imbalance continues to characterize the chess landscape. Gender ratios are slowly shifting among children as old beliefs about cognitive preference and ability are proved wrong, but top-level chess is still heavily male-dominated. At the very top, it is all male: there is only one woman in the top 120, Hou Yifan of China, ranked 115th.

Recently, I ordered a pizza. Since the establishment was only a few blocks away, I decided to pick it up myself. Manning the cash register was a slouching paragon of the zoomer generation. “Can I help you?” he asked in some patois that mixed English and bovine. I said hi and told him I was picking up a pizza. He tossed his bangs almost imperceptibly; a tsunami raced across the Pacific. Another employee then brought my pie, upon which my man seemed to slip into a persistent vegetative state, staring at some fixed point on the horizon while I swiped my credit card through the reader. The check printed. On it was a line for a tip. Before we go any further, I want to make clear that most service employees are nothing like my catatonic cashier.

The question of what to eat has plagued Americans since the first conquistadors hit the shores and started rounding up and eliminating the only people who actually knew what was meant to grow and be eaten here. Historical accounts show the first colonists living in abject terror of the foreign foods of Native Americans, believing that if they began eating the strange corn, squash and beans around them then they would literally turn into Indians. As a result, many of them starved trying to grow their old-world crops in America. Now, hundreds of years later, the colonizers’ descendants are looking to the past in search of a solution to the countless health problems that plague consumers of American food. They’re calling it the ancestral diet.

On a windy morning thirty years ago, the FBI staged a surprise attack on the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas. The Branch Davidians were a splinter group of Seventh-day Adventists who followed the apocalyptic preaching of their self-styled prophet, David Koresh. They had been holed up in their ramshackle retreat for fifty-one days. Finally, at 6:02 a.m. on April 19, 1993, tanks broke through the compound’s flimsy walls, firing tear gas at the people inside. The gas was meant to end the standoff by flushing the Davidians out, but Koresh had handed out Army-surplus gas masks. Some of the Davidians took shelter. Others shot at the tanks and federal agents outside. Hours later, fire leveled the compound. Several Davidians burned to death.