When you consider how much physical property North America’s colonizers took from the indigenous peoples (i.e., all of it), you might think we’d be less brazen with their intellectual property . . . namely, the names for every full moon as the Earth makes its way around the sun every year. But as any nineteenth-century almanac printer would have told you: Nah, we took it all. We call January’s lunation the Wolf Moon because many tribes noticed the animals being particularly active this time of year, howling on cold nights. The Sioux language calls it the “wolves run together” moon. Although the wolves in New York City don’t need an excuse to run together or apart, the full moon on January 6 was gloriously visible, a fitting crescendo to four days of discord and animus among House Republicans a few states away.

As is the nature of their species, the Republican pack spread itself across one side of the House Chamber. They looked uncharacteristically preoccupied under the pretense of picking a Speaker. While some came dolled up in suits, George Santos, the fabulist Pinocchio elected to represent New York’s 3rd congressional district, opted for Horace Mann–style prep. As the team pariah, he seemed more occupied with picking his nose than picking a leader. But his colleagues didn’t need his input to put on a show. Look how well they pretend to be doing something real! Watch them attempt a huddle! The frown-lined concern on the face of Marjorie Taylor Greene—a woman who wants to deny Democrats the right to vote in red states until they’ve lived there for five years—was one for the ages, like the TV surgeon asking the team, “Should we go in?”

The diminishment of males—every age, race, and ethnicity—is now another thing for American society to worry about. Of Boys and Men, a new book by Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution, looks at how boys and men are struggling in the United States. He argues that males are much more likely than females to feel socially excluded, and if they don’t remarry after divorce, they are much less likely to thrive. We’ve known for a while that girls in the United States are outperforming boys in most academic disciplines, earning 57% of bachelor degrees in 2020. Reeves covers the whole of America’s “male malaise” problem, which he says that nothing short of structural and societal change will be able to rectify.

It’s good to have constructive, nonpartisan thinking on this issue and not just the Tucker Carlson/Josh Hawley/Jordan Peterson “crisis of masculinity” blame game against the American left. And we especially need these ideas when the life expectancy of American men has dropped to its lowest in nearly three decades. That is indeed tragic. But then so is the fact that men’s problems continue to cause much needless suffering for women and children. In “Wayward Sons: The Emerging Gender Gap in Labor Markets and Education” (2o13), economists David Autor and Melanie Wasserman argue that “the absence of stable fathers from children’s lives has particularly significant adverse consequences for boys’ psychosocial development and educational achievement.” Thus we have a vicious cycle: fathers don’t participate (either pay or play) in the raising of their sons, sons within cash-strapped female-headed households have emotional and social adaptation problems, and the conservative right blames mothers and the mothering left for these “male fragility” problems that begin with economic and societal conditions.

As America slouches toward November 8 and the next ring of hell for our democracy, the appetite for new ways to save government by the people is pretty low. But people still have ideas—people like David Jolly, Christine Todd Whitman, and Andrew Yang, who at the end of July announced their new Forward Party.

There is certainly logic in a moderate party emerging to make the Republicans go the way of the Whigs, like a recalibration of your oven or car idler when something skews the reading high or low. A once “normal” party shifts to radicalism and violence, and a moderate party pops up to sideline the extremists.

The shooter who took ten lives at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket on May 14 cited “the great replacement theory” as his rationale for randomly gunning down Black people. This paranoid fantasy shared by millions of Americans says that Democrats have hatched a diabolical plot to replace white Americans with people of color (imported or domestic).

Where did this concept come from? A recent New York Times analysis of more than 400 episodes of Tucker Carlson’s nightly ranting on Fox News showed that the onetime news host at CNN, PBS, and MSNBC was openly promoting this racist propaganda. On one show, he directly warned a category of viewers he respectfully called “legacy Americans” that they were in danger of being replaced by voters from “the Third World.” Given that Carlson has also alleged that those protesting the murder of George Floyd were not objecting to police brutality but looking to inflict “ideological domination” on the country, his racist antagonism is not surprising. But the amplification of a lie into a “theory” is both absurd and very dangerous.

For the super-rich, 2021 has been casting lots of shade—from the Sackler family’s weaseling out of any accountability for opioid deaths to the Pandora Papers’ exposure of billionaires’ offshore and domestic tax havens. We had reminders of how America’s richest families keep that “super” before the “rich”—like with tax loopholes allowing them to pass vast sums of wealth down to their heirs by avoiding capital gains taxes. We also learned from the New York Times that in the homes of the wealthy, many basic kitchen appliances are now being hidden within bespoke cabinets, and only the initiated know where. (For instance, a regular person could not find the fridge chez Cher.)

And yet after Democrats failed to get the votes for a corporate income tax hike to pay for President Biden’s infrastructure and social spending bill, they are also unlikely to pass a proposed billionaires’ tax that would make the super-rich pay annual capital gains taxes on the value appreciation of their humungous assets. That’s a shame since there are more billionaires than ever in the United States: 719 in 2021, an increase of almost 17% over 2020.

Perhaps the ultimate irony of the Trump era arrived during the voted-out President’s most recent impeachment trial, with a video montage of prominent Democrats using the word fight. After four years of the defendant’s “I know you are but what am I?” playground logic, Americans heard his lawyers do the exact same thing in attempting to show that there was no difference between someone trying to steal an election and those trying to stop him from doing that. Somehow, telling a mob to go down to the Capitol and “fight like hell” on the day Congress was certifying electoral votes is the equivalent of using the word fight on MSNBC.

I doubt it mattered what kind of argument Trump’s legal team made. On February 13, 43 know-nothings in the Senate Chamber affirmed their knowing nothing of Constitutional law (Brandenburg v. Ohio, for instance, which holds that protected First Amendment rights do not include “inciting or producing imminent lawless action”) by acquitting the election’s loser of incitement of insurrection, the article of impeachment against him.

The two weeks between the Capitol assault on our democracy and the inauguration of our 46th President roughly coincided with Sotheby’s “Americana Week.” Leaving aside the strange fact that Americana Week went on for 14 days, what drew me to the Sotheby’s ad for furniture and folk art up for virtual bid was View of Hallowell, Maine, an American School painting described in the catalog as “a mother and her son gazing upon the bustling waterfront and business district . . . from Butternut Park on the Chelsea side of the Kennebec River.”

The anonymous painting strikes all the right notes of historical nostalgia—one that, for me at least, was implanted by the historical-society reproductions in my grade school textbooks. These kinds of documents of our national past are among the few you could today deem kid-safe—the primitive full-body portraits of children as miniature adults, usually holding a flower, a butterfly, a piece of fruit, or an unfortunate kitten by the neck; landscapes with giant rectangular cows and sheep anchoring patchwork farmsteads, with rolling hills and towns across rivers like the Kennebec, enlivened by the occasional sailboat or tugboat.

“A mob set on violence” has attracted more scrutiny in two weeks than most phrases do over generations. It is a cliché (though sometimes true) to say that violence is what a mob does, as an end in itself. But is that because a mob does not (or cannot) know what it wants? A lynch mob certainly knows what it wants. Supporters of Donald Trump came to the Capitol on January 6th wanting something, and the things many of them brought suggested it was violence. At a minimum, most wanted a line to be crossed, but it’s hard to know how many knew that once whatever line had been crossed, they became insurrectionists.

The rage itself wasn’t haphazard; it was only the rioters’ scattered attention (many seemed more concerned with livestreaming themselves in the Rotunda than stringing up Mike Pence) and lack of any deployment plan or tactical training that prevented more of the intended targets and their protectors from getting hurt or killed. Their impromptu defense was that it was all adult fun, some kind of Dad’s-Day-Off cosplay adventure where both sides ought to know the rules (or at least the safe word). I suppose they expected the public to envision a stadium of drunk football fans with painted torsos, men already engaged in playing out Braveheart fantasies of battling competing clans with hammers and axes.

Sad is a condition few people want to be in. Sadness on a massive scale is tragedy, according to the Greeks, who also gave us pathos. When our pity is accompanied by empathy or a desire to aid the sufferer, this is compassion. Sometimes, however, we pity the situation caused by a reprehensible action. What makes us sad is the lack of shame or contrition on the part of the perpetrator. This more or less is contempt—what Donald Trump elicits without breaking a sweat.

During his first presidential campaign, Trump obsessively used the Twitter refrain “Sad!” for anyone he wanted you to believe had gone down (Jeb!) and was therefore highly kickable. It’s interesting that Trump applied the exclamatory Sad! so frequently when he never seems to feel sad about any person or situation. When his 71-year-old brother died after an undisclosed illness on August 15, Trump released a statement: “It is with heavy heart I share that my wonderful brother, Robert, peacefully passed away tonight. He was not just my brother, he was my best friend. He will be greatly missed, but we will meet again. His memory will live on in my heart forever. Robert, I love you. Rest in peace.”

Most of us have a long history of seeing seatback videos or printed illustrations of what to do if the plane you are traveling in experiences a sudden drop in cabin pressure. Usually it’s a mother logically securing her own breathing device before affixing a dangling oxygen mask onto the child beside her. Before March, I doubt anyone watched those videos with anger, thinking “No airline is gonna make me put on a mask!”

As the life-giving conduit of oxygen, masks have long represented protection amid catastrophe. Infantrymen in World War I lived in mortal dread of the shout for “Gas!” Gas masks became the symbolic escape hatch of battlefield carnage well beyond the next world war. Scuba divers and snorkelers, astronauts in Ad Astra—they all seem to “get” the importance of masks. And of course the masks that protect people from contamination on both sides of a medical procedure. From the perspective of science, it’s complete logic, this effort to prevent possible death. It’s hard to imagine politicization.