Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has shown himself uniquely skilled at attracting attention beyond the borders of his home state.  Just this month, DeSantis blocked state funds for the Tampa Bay Rays stadium after players voiced support for gun control in the wake of the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas.  He’s also continuing a fight to punish the Disney Corporation for criticizing Florida’s so-called Don’t Say Gay law.  An Ivy League-educated anti-élitist firebrand, he is willing to pick a fight with anyone—reporters, health officials, teachers, Mickey Mouse—to grab a headline. DeSantis “practically radiates ambition,” the staff writer Dexter Filkins tells David Remnick. “He sounds like Trump, except that he speaks in complete sentences. … He’s very good at staking out a position and pounding the table and saying, I’m not giving in to the liberals in the Northeast.” Yet despite having been anointed by Donald Trump in his primary election, DeSantis has refused to “kiss the ring,” and many see DeSantis as a possible opponent to Trump in a 2024 Republican primary.

Michael R. Jackson’s Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning musical “A Strange Loop” features a Black queer writer named Usher, who works as an usher, struggling to write a musical about a Black queer writer. Jackson’s work tackles the terror of the blank page alongside the terrors of the dating scene, and it speaks in frank and heartbreaking terms about Usher’s attempt to navigate gay life among Black and white partners. Hilton Als talked with Jackson about how he found inspiration in his own experience seeking identity and community. “I started writing the original monologue—building a sort of life raft for myself—to understand myself,” Jackson said. “It wasn’t until I got to a place of understanding that in my life I was caught up in a loop of self-hatred, that I could see what Usher’s problem was, and therefore what the structure of the piece was that would lead him out of that and into a better place.”

“A Strange Loop” is playing now at the Lyceum Theatre, on Broadway.

Ian Frazier, who has chronicled American life for The New Yorker for more than forty years, travelled to a house in Fort Collins, Colorado, where three roommates build, fly, and race drones. Jordan Temkin, Zachry Thayer, and Travis McIntyre were among the early professional drone racers in the sport, piloting the tiny devices through complex courses at upward of eighty miles an hour. Drones have had an enormous impact on military strategy, and the commercial applications seem limitless, but to these pilots drones exist in the strange overlap between pure adrenaline and big money that defines pro sports.

This piece originally aired on February 9, 2018.

Jerry Seinfeld used to have a comedy bit about the invention of the Pop-Tart, but when his friend Spike Feresten—who wrote the famous “Soup Nazi” episode of “Seinfeld”—suggested it as a topic for a movie, even Seinfeld said “There’s no movie here.” But they workshopped the story, turning the invention of the Pop-Tart into a nutty postwar epic. Seinfeld has written films before, including “Bee Movie,” but this time he’s making his début as a director with “Unfrosted.” (The production did not, he says, have permission from Kellogg’s.) The comic talks with David Remnick about making a life in comedy, and why he continued to work so hard on his craft after retiring his massively successful sitcom. “This is a writer’s game. If you can write, you succeed. If you can't, you will not make it. . . . Any comedian can be funny onstage, but the bullets are the writing.” And he offers thoughts on old age, as he turns seventy. “God is like, ‘I'm with you up to about thirty-eight,’ ” Seinfeld posits. After that, God says, “ ‘if you want to stay, you can stay. But I’m moving on.’ ”

Probably far more people have now seen Judi Dench as M—the intelligence chief who’s the boss of James Bond—than anything she’s done in Shakespeare. With that unmistakably rich voice, she played royalty in “Mrs. Brown” and in “Shakespeare in Love.” But it is in Shakespeare’s plays, onstage, that Dench made her home as an actor, performing nearly all the major female roles in a stage career of some 60 years. It’s not just that the language is beautiful, she thinks; Shakespeare “understood about every single emotion that any of us might feel at any time.” Dench has distilled that body of knowledge into a book called “Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent,” a collaboration with the actor Brendan O’Hea that delves into each role in each production she performed in. Having trained as a stage designer, Dench decided to “have a go” at acting, and made her début at a young age as Ophelia at one of the most prestigious theatres in Britain. She talks with David Remnick about what’s hard—and not hard—in performing Shakespeare, and why she considers M in James Bond just as challenging.

Both anecdotally and in research, anxiety and depression among young people—often associated with self-harm—have risen sharply over the last decade. There seems little doubt that Gen Z is suffering in real ways. But there is not a consensus on the cause or causes, nor how to address them. The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt believes that enough evidence has accumulated to convict a suspect. Smartphones and social media, Haidt says, have caused a “great rewiring” in those born after 1995. The argument has hit a nerve: his new book, “The Anxious Generation,” was No. 1 on the New York Times hardcover nonfiction best-seller list. Speaking with David Remnick, Haidt is quick to differentiate social-media apps—with their constant stream of notifications, and their emphasis on performance—from technology writ large; mental health was not affected, he says, for millennials, who grew up earlier in the evolution of the Internet. Haidt, who earlier wrote about an excessive emphasis on safety in the book “The Coddling of the American Mind,” feels that our priorities when it comes to child safety are exactly wrong. “We’re overprotecting in [the real world], and I’m saying, lighten up, let your kids out! And we’re underprotecting in another, and I’m saying, don’t let your kids spend nine hours a day on the Internet talking with strange men. It’s just not a good idea.” To social scientists who have asserted that the evidence Haidt marshals does not prove a causative link between social media and depression, “I keep asking for alternative theories,” he says. “You don’t think it’s the smartphones and social media—what is it? … You can give me whatever theory you want about trends in American society, but nobody can explain why it happened so suddenly in 2012 and 2013—not just here but in Canada, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, Northern Europe. I’m waiting,” he adds sarcastically, “for someone to find a chemical.” The good news, Haidt says, is there are achievable ways to limit the harm.

Note: In his conversation with David Remnick, Jonathan Haidt misstated some information about a working paper that studies unhappiness across nations. The authors are David G. Blanchflower, Alex Bryson, and Xiaowei Xu, and it includes data on thirty-four countries.

At a band rehearsal in Brooklyn, Rachel Syme talks to Maya Hawke about switching gears between acting and music. In “Stranger Things,” Hawke plays Robin Buckley, a band geek who cracks a Russian code in her spare time; she also recently appeared in films including “Asteroid City” and “Maestro.” “When I’m acting, I inhabit the character that I’m playing,” Hawke says, whereas when fronting a band, “I feel like I’m me… But sometimes I have to screw my courage to the sticking place, and that’s a bit of a character. It’s me, [but] willing to stand up onstage.” Hawke discusses the inspiration for her single “Missing Out”: a visit to her brother at college, where she came to terms with some of her own choices. Plus, the playwright and novelist Jen Silverman, whose new book “There’s Going to Be Trouble” deals with the excitement and uncertainty of getting caught up in a protest.

Texas has multiple abortion laws, with both criminal and civil penalties for providers. They contain language that may allow for exceptions to save the life or “major bodily function” of a pregnant patient, but many doctors have been reluctant to even try interpreting these laws; at least one pregnant woman has been denied cancer treatment. The reporter Stephania Taladrid tells David Remnick about how two lawmakers worked together in a rare bipartisan effort to clarify the limited medical circumstances in which abortion is allowed. “If lawmakers created specific exemptions,” Taladrid explains, “then doctors who got sued could show that the treatment that they had offered their patients was compliant with the language of the law.” Taladrid spoke with the state representatives Ann Johnson, a Democrat, and Bryan Hughes, a conservative Republican, about their unlikely collaboration. Johnson told her that she put together a list of thirteen conditions that might qualify for a special exemption, but only two of them—premature ruptures and ectopic pregnancy—were cited in the final bill. Still, the unusual bipartisan action is cause for hope among reproductive-rights advocates that some of the extreme climate around abortion bans may be lessening.