Jeffrey Goldberg

Updated at 4:53 p.m. ET on November 14, 2021.

When Taylor Swift was only 22, she laid awake at night and worried about her age. That’s the confession the now-31-year-old singer makes on “Nothing New,” a track she wrote for her 2012 album, Red, but only released on Red (Taylor’s Version), the new, rerecorded version that came out on Friday. In the song, she describes how society tells young women to have fun and then shames them for experiencing life. She wonders why she seems to lose confidence with each passing year. “Lord, what will become of me,” she sings, “once I’ve lost my novelty?”

Sad as it may seem, this was a fair question for a prodigy to have been asking. In pop, success is fleeting: Conventional wisdom says that an act’s “imperial phase”—a career-defining hot streak—rarely lasts for more than a few years. Many women in the entertainment business can attest to the public’s limited appetite for ingenues who continue to evolve. When she was writing the original Red, Swift was already three hit albums into an astonishing career that began when she was just 16 years old. Even though she’d barely matured into drinking age, continued relevance wasn’t assured.

I turn 60 today, and I feel vaguely embarrassed about it, like I’ve somehow let myself go, like I’ve been bingeing on decades and wound up in this unappealing condition.

Chances are, most of you haven’t crossed this border station yet, so you’d better listen up. Because if you play your cards right, it’s going to happen to you too.  

Here’s what it feels like to turn 60: weird. On the one hand, you’re still going to the gym and to dinner parties. Sixty-year-olds still perform surgery on people who could choose other doctors. There’s no dithering yet—the senescence is almost undetectable.

But on the other hand, you have been on this Earth for a really, really long time. I have a photograph of myself at age 3, standing on the docks of Cork Harbor, about to sail to New York. When I look at the picture of that small child on her sturdy legs in the foggy past, I don’t feel any connection to her. The photograph looks like something I would discover after many days on Ancestry.com. It looks like a snapshot of my own great-aunt.

This story contains spoilers through the fifth episode of Succession Season 3.

Logan was ill. He was the victim of an ailment so common that most people would consider it trivial. But when it gets to Logan it can plunge him into a state of anguish, deep depression, panic, even rage. Logan Roy had a UTI.

I’ll stop there with the rewrite of Gay Talese’s legendary 1966 magazine article, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” though it is tempting to keep going in light of the latest episode of Succession. When Logan, the patriarch of the family-run Waystar Royco media empire, contracts a urinary tract infection, it causes a dementia flare-up so severe that he confuses his daughter for his wife and his son-in-law, Tom Wambsgans, for someone he likes. Just as Sinatra’s sniffles created ripples across the entertainment industry, Logan’s temporary illness throws everyone around him into disarray and threatens to upend the global-media landscape by spoiling a gargantuan deal.

Does anyone still remember the Chicago Seven?

They were a disparate group of radicals—some who knew each other, some who didn’t—who went to the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968 to spark trouble. Trouble did indeed erupt, although maybe not the exact trouble they had wanted. They were indicted and prosecuted. And then things went terribly wrong for the government.

The prosecution thought it was running a trial, a legal proceeding governed by rules. The defendants decided that they would instead mount a new kind of media spectacle intended to show total contempt for the rules, and to propagandize the viewing public into sharing their contempt. The prosecution was doing law; the defense countered with politics.

If you assembled a focus group of frequent moviegoers and asked them to describe the elements of a good action film, they’d probably come up with something along the lines of Red Notice. The star-laden blockbuster, which is dropping on Netflix this week, features three A-list names, all in familiar roles: Dwayne Johnson as a tough FBI agent, Ryan Reynolds as a motormouthed art thief, and Gal Gadot as a mysterious criminal who forces the two men to team up against her. The work is complete with globe-trotting set pieces, self-aware jokes delivered straight to the camera, and constantly shifting loyalties as each character tries to stay ahead of the others on the quest for some glittery MacGuffin.

Every time I leave my apartment, I grab a mask from the stack by the door. After all these months of pandemic life, I’ve amassed a pretty big collection: Some are embroidered, while others bear the faded logos of the New York Public Library or the TV show Nailed It. What all of them have in common is that they’re made of cloth.

At this point, cloth masks are so ubiquitous in the United States that it can be easy to forget that they were originally supposed to be a stopgap measure. In April 2020, when surgical masks and highly coveted N95s were first in short supply, the CDC released its initial mask guidance and said cloth masks were the way to go for most people—noting that they could be sewn at home from old T-shirts. Even at that point, when the pandemic was full of unknowns, we knew that cloth masks, although far better than going maskless, weren’t as protective as other types. A growing amount of research supports the idea that our masking norms don’t make much sense: A recent study in Bangladesh, which has yet to be peer-reviewed but is considered one of the most rigorous to date to tackle masking, linked wearing surgical masks with an 11.2 percent decrease in COVID-19 symptoms and antibodies, while cloth masks were associated with only a 5 percent decrease. It’s no wonder that many other countries, including France, Austria, and Germany, shifted their mask guidance away from cloth masks toward those offering higher protection a long time ago.

“How to Build a Life” is a biweekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness.

Several years ago, I was sitting on a flight to San Francisco, when my seatmate, a man a little older than me, struck up a conversation. Perhaps you hate it when that happens; I love it. In addition to being an extrovert, I’m a social scientist, so I’m always fascinated by what I can learn about people through conversations. Have you ever wanted to know how I come up with column topics? Now you know.

The man told me he was on his way home from seeing his family in Minnesota, where he had grown up. As an adult, he had pulled up stakes, left the bone-chilling winters behind, and moved to Northern California, where he had no connections at all. He raved about the professional opportunities and great weather where he now lived, comparing them favorably to the landlocked, snowy place in which he was raised.

Since the start of the pandemic, Americans have been talking seriously with friends, family, and themselves about the shortcomings of their modern-day work lives. Millions of people have joined the “Great Resignation,” and many, especially the college-educated, have vowed to follow their passion and embark on a different career.

But this yearning for more meaningful work isn’t new: Over the past three decades, college students and college-educated workers have turned to what I call the “passion principle”—the prioritization of fulfilling work even at the expense of job security or a decent salary—as a road map for how to make decisions about their career. According to my research, which draws on surveys and interviews with college students, graduates, and career coaches, more than 75 percent of college-educated workers believe that passion is an important factor in career decision making. And 67 percent of them say they would prioritize meaningful work over job stability, high wages, and work-life balance. Believers in this idea trust that passion will inoculate them against the drudgery of working long hours on tasks that they have little personal connection to. For many, following their passion is not only a path to a good job; it is the key to a good life.

An underrated joy of modern life is that you don’t have to watch live TV to see all of the uncomfortable situations people find themselves in on live TV. I don’t even own a television, nor would I ever watch NBC Sports coverage of a NASCAR race, yet I still got the chance to see the October 2 clip of the reporter Kelli Stavast attempting to interview the race-car driver Brandon Brown after an unexpected victory while the crowd behind them chanted “Fuck Joe Biden.” “And you can hear the chants from the crowd,” Stavast narrated for the camera, before repeating what she seemed to think she was hearing: “Let’s go, Brandon.” As I would say after texting this link to someone in the middle of the workday: “LOL!”

When I first suspected that I was losing my hair, I felt like maybe I was also losing my grip on reality. This was the summer of 2020, and although the previous three months had been difficult for virtually everyone, I had managed to escape relatively unscathed. I hadn’t gotten sick in New York City’s terrifying first wave of the pandemic. My loved ones were safe. I still had a job. I wasn’t okay, necessarily, but I was fine. Now my hair was falling out for no appreciable reason. Or at least I thought it was—how much hair in the shower drain is enough to be sure that you’re not imagining things?

The second time it happened, a little more than a year later, I was sure—not because of what was in the shower drain, but because of what was obviously no longer on my head. One day, after washing and drying my hair, I looked at my hairline in the mirror and it was thin enough that I could make out the curvature of my scalp beneath it. I still had enough hair, but notably less than I’d had before the pandemic. Feeling a sense of dull panic at the no-longer-refutable idea that something might be wrong, I tipped my head forward to take a picture of my scalp with my phone’s front-facing camera. When I looked at it, the panic became sharp.