Longreads

That new Brazilian fertility rate is below the level at which a population replaces itself. It is lower than the two-children-per-woman fertility rate in the United States. In the largest nation in Latin America—a 191-million-person country where the Roman Catholic Church dominates, abortion is illegal (except in rare cases), and no official government policy has ever promoted birth control—family size has dropped so sharply and so insistently over the past five decades that the fertility rate graph looks like a playground slide. And it's not simply wealthy and professional women who have stopped bearing multiple children in Brazil. There's a common perception that the countryside and favelas, as Brazilians call urban slums, are still crowded with women having one baby after another—but it isn't true.

It starts at a very young age. The summer after third grade, my parents sent me to Jewish sleepaway camp. I was deeply homesick at first and cried a lot in my bunk bed, but by the end of the month…

The 58-year-old Tressel benefited from the fertile recruiting grounds of Ohio, but supporters always believed he got the most out of players because he was—as the title of a 2009 book about him declares—More Than a Coach. Under Tressel, the Buckeyes often sat together before meetings or at the start of practice for 10 minutes of "quiet time" to read about virtues such as humility, faith and gratitude. Tressel liked to say that his teams "play as hard as we can play" but also "respect as hard as we can respect." Yet while Tressel's admirable qualities have been trumpeted, something else essential to his success has gone largely undiscussed: his ignorance.

Brock’s decision to abandon conservatism was a gradual one—and, unlike other famous apostates’, more personal than ideological. “I didn’t wake up one day and say, you know, ‘Supply-side economics doesn’t make sense,’ ” he says. In fact, his move from the right began after he failed to deliver the goods in a book about Hillary Clinton and some of his conservative friends expressed their displeasure with his efforts. Brock, in turn, began to suspect that these friends valued him only for his ability to destroy liberals—and possibly loathed him because he is gay.

Alex Haley sat at a desk typing notes while Malcolm—tall, austere, dressed always in a dark suit, a white shirt, and a narrow dark tie—drank cup after cup of coffee, paced the room, and talked. What emerged was the hegira of Malcolm’s life as a black man in mid-century America: his transformation from Malcolm Little, born in Omaha to troubled parents whose salve against racist harassment and violence was the black-nationalist creed of Marcus Garvey; to Detroit Red, a numbers-running hustler on the streets of Boston and New York; to a convicted felon known among fellow-prisoners as Satan; to Malcolm X, a charismatic deputy to the Nation of Islam’s leader, Elijah Muhammad, and the most electrifying proponent of black nationalism alive.

I’ve always thought that Forever 21 was a brilliant name for a fast-fashion retailer. These two words succinctly encapsulate consumerism’s mission statement: to evoke the dream of perpetual youth through constant shopping. Yet it also conjures the suffocating shabbiness of that fantasy, the permanent desperation involved in trying to achieve fashion’s impossible ideals. The 21 posits that age as a fulcrum, tenuously balancing the teenage idea of maturity grounded in the uninhibited freedom of self-presentation against the presumptive regrets of everyone older, who must continually be reminded of when it all began to go wrong for them, the day they turned 22.