For the first time since the time of the American and French revolutions, Pluto is in the astrological sign of Aquarius. Astrologers consider this a very big deal—presumably because everything you heard about the Age of Aquarius in that the song from Hair is true. Astrologers seem to love Pluto, which astronomers only discovered in 1930 and then reclassified as a “dwarf” in 2006. Astrologers wasted little time in obsessively following the planet’s 248-year orbit around the sun, and they call this March 23 crossing “Pluto’s return.”

Since I learned what astrologers think about Pluto’s movements a few years ago, this small, cold planet has been my mascot for earthly behaviors that I don’t understand. For instance, it seems to me that American voters who call themselves independents are secretly longing for some extra-worldly force to knock them heedlessly in love with authoritarian rule. Even those who don’t yet feel it—the MAGA craziness—want to feel it. It seems like they intentionally put themselves in places (i.e., watching Fox News) where such a conversion might silently occur. In the face of so many Americans metaphorically holding up theirs arms and yelling “Take me!,” the magical thinking of astrology doesn’t seem all that weird.

Humans lie about everything from sorting recycling to murdering spouses. We do it for love and hate, money and power, convenience and kicks. Lying to the IRS without penalty has become part of the American dream, like having a newly leased Suburban in the driveway. There was already a lot of lying going on in America before Donald Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 presidential election. But the consequences of that lie—conjoined as it was with the January 6th insurrection—have changed the country and Americans as people.

In the pantheon of presidential lying, most of it was done for misguided ideology, plausible deniability, or self-preservation: Lyndon Johnson’s insistence that Vietnam was winnable, Ronald Reagan’s insistence that the Soviet Union was going to attack, George W. Bush’s insistence that Iraq had WMD, Richard Nixon saying he was not a crook, Bill Clinton saying he did not have sexual relations with that woman.

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.