Slaying Dragons for 20 Years

You might not have played World of Warcraft, but you probably know of it. The game, which turns 20 this year, inspired an Emmy-winning "South Park" episode and a (not-so-great) movie. Its fans include celebrities like Henry Cavill and Mila Kunis.

WoW, as the game is known, was social media before social media. As a teenager, I would log on as my undead mage character mostly to hang out with my friends. What we did together was certainly different than how people use today's social media; I do not typically hunt giant dragons on Facebook or Instagram. But it was a chance to socialize with the people I had met in the game. It was also, as a 16-year-old, the only space I felt safe being openly gay.

The game was truly huge. When it was released 20 years ago, so many people tried to play that the servers struggled for weeks to handle the demand. At its peak, WoW had more than 12 million monthly subscribers worldwide, making it one of the biggest games of its time. More than 100 million people have played it at one point or another.

Perhaps most impressively, the game is still going. It got a new expansion, called The War Within, this year. Imagine everything that has changed in the world since 2004, when phones were still dumb and the biggest movie of the year was "Shrek 2." WoW has endured all of that.

Women have embraced World of Warcraft since its early days. In 2009, a Nielsen survey found that it was the most popular core title among female gamers between the ages of 25 and 54.

Many games structured around player-versus-player conflicts stoke negativity in the form of trash talk. World of Warcraft is not immune to bad behavior, but rather than fighting one another, players generally work together to defeat computer-controlled enemies. Groups of like-minded players form guilds to collaborate on dungeons or role-playing.

"People opt into that," said Holly Longdale, the executive producer for World of Warcraft. "You don't have to partake. That's what creates these opportunities for safety and comfort."

Luzerne County in Pennsylvania is one of many that shifted right this year. The Times spent two weeks there before and after the election to understand the change .

California reported the first known U.S. case of a form of mpox that's causing an epidemic in Africa.

THE SUNDAY DEBATE Can Trump carry out his goals without an experienced cabinet?

No. Trump's cabinet picks show that this term will be as chaotic as his first. "One of the greatest concerns about Trump's second term was that he would be more competent this time around. But we can already see that there is no learning curve," The Washington Post's Dana Milbank writes .

Yes. You don't need experience to lead government agencies if you don't want those agencies to work. "Neither chaos nor dysfunction nor incompetence is an obstacle to Trump's lawless intentions. If anything, they're assets," Times Opinion's Jamelle Bouie writes .

FROM OPINION Democrats win when they're economically populist and culturally conservative , Adam Jentleson writes.

At the high school where Naomi Beinart is a junior, the girls were in despair after Election Day, while the boys were indifferent. The disconnection between genders had never felt starker, she writes.

Here are columns by Ross Douthat on the end of the post-Cold War era and Maureen Dowd on Elon Musk's presence in Trump World .

"Orbital," by Samantha Harvey: On Tuesday, Harvey's fifth novel won the Booker Prize, the prestigious award for fiction written in English. Clocking in at a fleet 207 pages in paperback, this gorgeous book follows a day in the life of six astronauts circling Earth on a space station at 17,500 miles per hour. Only, in this weightless world — where humans have no use for legs and forks are secured to tables with magnets — each day consists of 16 sunrises and sunsets, 16 days and 16 nights. The astronauts observe, experiment, eat, mourn, celebrate and wrestle with their own places in the universe, and Harvey takes readers along for the ride. Her plot is as scarce as oxygen in space but, as our reviewer wrote , "Sometimes, wonder and beauty suffice."

More on books What happens when a son doesn't love his father's book recommendations? One dad went to great lengths to find common ground .

The first volume of Cher's two-part memoir comes out this week. Read about her chaotic childhood and tumultuous first marriage .

THE INTERVIEW This week's subject for The Interview is Dr. Ellen Wiebe, one of Canada's leading advocates for medical assistance in dying (MAID). This summer, my mother, who had A.L.S. and was living in Toronto, died via MAID. In the time since, I realized I had lingering questions about the practice. I was hoping Wiebe could answer them.

In Ontario, one of the steps in the [MAID] process is that you have two independent assessments from a doctor or a nurse practitioner who helps determine whether a patient is eligible. I was at one of those assessments. I'm sitting in a room listening to a conversation between my mom and a doctor who has never met my mom before and is trying to assess her material, physical and psychological situation. Why would this doctor think she can understand the fullness of this situation based on a one-hour call?

First of all, the clinician who assessed your mother reviewed her medical history, and it was extensive, I'm sure. Secondly, our job during those assessments is to make sure that the person understands their condition. Remember, some of the A.L.S. patients we assess can't talk. But your mother was still verbal, right?

Yeah.

So being able to understand that she understood her condition, that she understood her options — that probably wasn't very difficult. That is the main thing that we are assessing: Do they understand this decision?