But if Maggie was sheltered from the onslaught beyond her small town, her mother was not. Erika has also struggled with her weight her entire life and feels the experience defined her; she has done everything she can to reassure Maggie that she is beautiful as she is and to protect her from the casual cruelty of people she encounters. But she also knew from the time her daughter was young that there was something different about her. In a small, dark part of herself, Erika feared that, because of her parenting or her habits or her own history with food, she was the one at fault. Even now, after all the interventions — the doctors, the fighting with insurance companies, the overhaul of the family fridge — this worry has not left her. It has only evolved, because Erika knows her neighbors and people in the world beyond have things to say not just about Maggie’s body but about the treatments she has chosen for it, too.

The military conscription of a beluga whale might sound like a conceit plucked from less-than-convincing spy fiction, but it is actually a well-documented practice. Since the 1960s, Russia and the United States have trained dolphins, seals and other marine mammals to assist their naval forces by tagging enemy divers, detecting mines and recovering items from the seafloor. Satellite photos of Russian naval bases near Murmansk, not far from the spot where Norwegian fishermen first found Hvaldimir, reveal the type of sea pens often used to hold belugas. Audun Rikardsen, a professor of marine biology at the Arctic University of Norway, told me that international contacts have since confirmed that Hvaldimir belonged to the navy.

On the day she died, I set my phone’s wallpaper to my favorite photo of Peggy—appearing to smile on a ridgeline trail in Missoula, Montana, the bright-yellow balsamroot flowers in bloom behind her. But a month later, I told myself that it was time to stop wallowing. Instead of a memorial photo of Peggy, I opted to try a newer, “dynamic” wallpaper feature called “Photo Shuffle.” Every so often, my iPhone would change my wallpaper and home screen to an image it had grabbed from my camera roll. To help it along, I could offer parameters for the photo choice. Knowing that Apple’s Photos app uses image-recognition software to identify cats and dogs in the camera roll, I chose a “Pets” filter.

A short plane ride away from the FEMA event, the girls bobbed in the water beneath their towels. Three hours passed. Still no rescuers. Isabella knew there was a vast military force in Hawaii. Why had no one showed up yet? Had the fire wiped out the entire island? she worried. Had all of the firefighters perished too? Where were they?

From her vantage point, Isabella could peek from beneath the towel and see Lahaina’s historic banyan tree on fire. The harbor was engulfed. Boats burned. A giant piece of sheet metal from a nearby restaurant’s roof hurtled into the water, scratching Isabella. Every car that caught fire or exploded brought more black, suffocating smoke.

The aftermath of the war brought in sweeping military presence and restrictions in the north and east, even as the country opened up access to the north for war tourism in 2014. Since then, simple acts of remembrance like cooking and serving kanji have become a dangerous form of resistance, often inviting police surveillance and action.

From the beginning, Nkechi knew that she and Subomi had “no business dating.” His genotype was SS: he had two abnormal S genes for hemoglobin, the oxygen- carrying protein in his blood. Nkechi’s genotype was AS: she had one abnormal S gene and one normal A gene. Like an estimated quarter of all Nigerians, she was a silent carrier. There was a 50 percent chance that any child they had would suffer from sickle cell disease like their father. This was no light prospect. Subomi’s own childhood had been marred by secrecy and shame over his condition. Nkechi, meanwhile, had lost four cousins to the disease. Those deaths might be understood as products of an earlier, benighted time, when the average Nigerian knew far less about genetic testing and disease management. Today, however, there was a growing consensus— particularly in their college- educated, upper- middle- class milieu—when it came to passing on two sickle cell genes: don’t risk it.

Steinberg was skeptical that anyone could accurately judge the health of a relationship between, say, an 18-year-old and a 30-year-old without intimately knowing the people involved: “For all we know, the 30-year-old is immature and maybe they’re perfectly matched to each other.” One friend of mine, a 41-year-old woman I’ll call Claire, admitted she was drawn to dating a younger guy precisely because she felt less grown-up than her peers. She met her boyfriend on Hinge a year and a half ago, when he was 26. “I had this fear of being with dudes who were really adulting,” she told me. “I see myself as somebody who is completely dysfunctional in romantic relationships and in terms of my career direction.” She currently works in communications at a museum, but for years prior, she’d been drifting from profession to profession, never sure what she wanted to do with her life. She has accrued a lot of debt. “I could not imagine not feeling self-consciousness about those things in an intimate relationship with somebody my own age who seems to be on track,” she told me.

Between the surrogate and the intended parent there is a peculiar bond. “They’re doing this life-changing thing for you and receiving a life-changing amount of money in return,” Dorothy often says. The position suggests equality, but it is a fine balance, dependant in part on distance. Now the war was about to uncouple them from the organisational rules that kept them apart.

Dorothy found Anastasia on Facebook. The agency had told couples not to contact their surrogate on social media, and vice versa, for mutual protection against, say, surrogates asking for more money, and intended parents suggesting diet and exercise regimes. But some couples still snooped on their surrogates, scouring Facebook and Instagram for evidence of smoking or drinking. On the afternoon of 24 February, Dorothy sent Anastasia a supportive message: “I hope you don’t mind me contacting you. I just want you to know we’re thinking of you and hope you and your son are OK. If there is anything we can do, please let us know.”

The goal is to train the pigs for an experiment that will test whether they’ll exercise just because it makes them feel good, a window into their emotions. “The idea comes from human sports physiology,” Puppe says. “That exercise can improve mood.”

A couple of decades ago, work like this would have been laughed out of the barn. There are an estimated 78 billion farm animals on Earth—a number that dwarfs monkeys, rodents, and humans combined—and we have lived with them longer than any other creature save dogs. Yet in an era where researchers are modeling rat brains on computers and showing that our canine pals may be able to intuit our thoughts, livestock remain a black box.

We sat in a lofted seating area, looking down on the man forming kebabs with one hand, lining the patties on the edge of a plate for another cook to fry. Eating them, I felt a tingling heat I’d never experienced. The chile mellowed beneath the other spices, all of them building and building until I felt my consciousness lift three inches past my brow, like the last time I’d successfully smoked a joint. My cousin and I were giddy, sweeping up the kebab with roomali roti and washing it down with Limca, barely able to form sentences but in complete agreement this was a meal we’d remember forever. My grandfather beamed, I’m not sure whether for himself or for us.