Excerpt: There are also tensions within the group about how to govern. Some attendees at the conference told me they were disappointed by Mr. Mamdani’s decision to apologize to New York City’s police officers after calling them racist and anti-queer in 2020. Last year the D.S.A.’s National Political Committee declined to endorse Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, among the highest-profile Democratic Socialists, over her refusal to oppose funding for Israel’s Iron Dome and actions the D.S.A. described as a “betrayal” of the cause of Palestinian freedom.

The Democratic Socialists often address these divisions openly. At the Hilton in December, Mr. Tobias moderated a debate about socialists and the establishment.

He asked people arguing for a friendlier relationship with the establishment to sit on one side of the room and those arguing for a more antagonistic relationship with the establishment on the other. Then he placed four chairs in the center of the room, where members debated the issue. Though only four people debated at a time, anyone who wanted could join in by tapping a comrade on the shoulder to take the person’s seat.

During the debate, John Lewis — a member of the D.S.A.’s leadership, wearing a red shirt that read, “Y’allidarity” — said the D.S.A. should organize Democratic voters, not antagonize them. “Nobody in this room popped out a socialist,” Mr. Lewis, who once worked in the Democratic Party establishment, including for the mayor of Baton Rouge, La., told the room.

But he said conflict with the Democratic Party was unavoidable. “The momentum of the Democratic Party is captured by mass finance capital, people that we call the oligarchs,” he said. “Whether we’re going to realign the Democratic Party, whether we’re making a socialist party, whatever your path is, if you’re going against that momentum, it still is antagonistic.”

Excerpt: According to Ward and Voas, the New Agers and the conspiracists share three common beliefs: nothing happens by accident, nothing is as it seems, and everything is connected. For New Agers the stars control our destiny, there is an occult or hidden world populated by hard-to-sense entities like spirits or aliens—and of course, we’re all one, if only we would realize it. For the conspiracists the hidden hand of the Illuminati is everywhere, the truth is being kept from us by sinister forces, and every image on the pinboard is linked by red thread. Interconnectivity may be a holistic nostrum, but it’s also constitutive of what Richard Hofstadter famously called the “paranoid style” of American politics. Whether you believe the agents of the hidden power whose presence you sense are angels or men wearing black suits and earpieces may largely be a question of disposition.

Excerpt: “There’s this sense that you’re supposed to be muscly and fit, but also small and contained,” Ogden said. “The uniforms seem stuck in an age where women still have to look traditionally sexy while doing their sport — like they were designed for a beauty pageant, not performance.”

For example, Zara, a gymnast, described to Ogden’s research team how she felt wearing her leotard: “Those leotards show every detail like curves and bumps … so it’s difficult to wear such tight pieces, in general, let alone when you’re in awkward positions that you do in gymnastics.”

It’s pressure like this that has caused some girls to drop out of sports altogether.

Excerpt: Junk science is also increasingly used to defend police officers accused of excessive use of force. Although suicide by cop has not received much critical attention in the context of police accountability, the theory was developed alongside excited delirium as another exculpatory defense for police misconduct. There are important differences between suicide by cop and excited delirium, including the increasing rejection of excited delirium by the medical and scientific communities. However, suicide by cop has similar junk science attributes. Analogous to excited delirium, suicide by cop draws on real-world examples — in this context, of people who want to die at the hands of police — and manipulates the definition to encompass a much larger category of cases.

Excerpt: The more I got into the story, the more I wondered: How could this have happened? How could a private company, with the city’s assent, break federal law for so long?

So at one point, about 30 years ago, I flew to Washington DC and spent two weeks in the National Archives, reading and copying documents that relate to the PG&E Raker Act scandal. I carried home two big boxes full of records, and over the next few months, put together a detailed chronology of the Raker Act, the construction of the city’s water and power dam at Hetch Hetchy, and the politics of how this all happened.