Why Parents Struggle So Much in the World’s Richest Country - The Atlantic (Full Access)   

One morning a couple of years ago, during the awkward hour between my eldest daughter’s school drop-off and her sister’s swim lesson, I stopped at a coffee shop. There, I ran into the father of a boy in my daughter’s class. He was also schlepping a younger child around, and as we got to talking, I learned that we had a lot in common.

Like me, he had followed his spouse to the United Kingdom for work; she was a physician, learning some new procedure to take back to Australia. He couldn’t wait to move home to his big house down the road from the beach. “Do you think you’ll ever move back to the U.S.?” he asked. Sure, eventually, I said. Or at least that was the plan.

What he said next threw me: His wife had recently been offered a job in America. “It would have been great for her career,” he said, “but we figured it would be too dangerous for the kids.”

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Lots of People Will Vote This Year. That Doesn’t Mean Democracy Will Survive. - The Atlantic (Full Access)   

The greatest paradox of modern politics is that there are more elections than ever before in human history, and yet the world is becoming less democratic.

Voting will take place in more than 60 countries this year—an unprecedented number—containing roughly half of the global population. But even with all this voting, democracy is under severe threat, endangered by predatory politicians who rig elections and disgruntled voters willing to hand over power to autocratic leaders. The most pivotal election will take place in November, when the world’s most powerful democracy decides whether to turn itself over to an avowedly authoritarian demagogue.

To make sense of this paradox requires understanding why democracy is on the decline. Recent shifts in geopolitics, technology, and economics, alongside the rise of authoritarian populism and innovative election-rigging techniques, have created a tsunami that threatens to sink democracies across the globe.

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How Animals Perceive the World - The Atlantic (Full Access)   

Every creature lives within its own sensory bubble, but only humans have the capacity to appreciate the experiences of other species. What we’ve learned is astounding.

Within the 310,000 acres of Wyoming’s Grand Teton National Park, one of the largest parking lots is in the village of Colter Bay. Beyond the lot’s far edge, nestled among some trees, is a foul-smelling sewage-pumping station that Jesse Barber, a sensory ecologist at Boise State University, calls the Shiterator. On this particular night, sitting quietly within a crevice beneath the building’s metal awning and illuminated by Barber’s flashlight, is a little brown bat. A white device the size of a rice grain is attached to the bat’s back. “That’s the radio tag,” Barber tells me. He’d previously affixed it to the bat so that he could track its movements, and tonight he has returned to tag a few more.

From inside the Shiterator, I can hear the chirps of other roosting bats. As the sun sets, they start to emerge. A few become entangled in the large net Barber has strung between two trees. He frees a bat, and Hunter Cole, one of his students, carefully examines it to check that it’s healthy and heavy enough to carry a tag. Once satisfied, Cole daubs a spot of surgical cement between its shoulder blades and attaches the tiny device. “It’s a little bit of an art project, the tagging of a bat,” Barber tells me. After a few minutes, Cole places the bat on the trunk of the nearest tree. It crawls upward and takes off, carrying $175 worth of radio equipment into the woods.

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When Punk Rockers Become Parents - The Atlantic (Full Access)   

Cullen admires the willowy presence of Bill Nighy, the engineering genius of binder clips, a poem by Richard Wilbur about aging, a song that puts an infant at ease, and a novel from postwar Britain that no longer seems quite like satire.

The television show I’m most enjoying right now: Slow Horses, which just wrapped up its third season. Based on the riotously seedy Slough House novels by Mick Herron, the show perfectly captures the character of the books—vulgar, funny, knowing, clever, and offensive, with an unexpectedly warm heart. Gary Oldman plays a loyal but loathsome MI5 operative, brilliant and gone to rot—in manner, the opposite of John le Carré’s George Smiley, whom Oldman has also played. He heads a shabby office of rejects. Kristin Scott Thomas is his devious, brittle, equally brilliant spymaster-nemesis at the gleaming headquarters of MI5. [Related: The subversive worldview of Slow Horses]

A good recommendation I recently received: I sent Tom Nichols’s wonderful recent article on geriatric rock to a friend, and she in turn told me about a 2011 documentary, The Other F Word, about punk rockers who have become fathers and are now raising their children and gamely teaching them about moderation, obedience, and other virtues. (Imagine what Take-Your-Child-to-Work Day is like.) The documentary has the feel of This Is Spinal Tap, but it’s all real.

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