There appears to be, among journalists, a waning enthusiasm for Apple product announcements. This has to do largely with their utter predictability. Not only is it difficult to keep their contents secret, given the vast supply chain needed to accommodate shipping tens of millions of iPhones and iPads per quarter, but their format feels increasingly leaden: on Tuesday, a handful of middle-aged white men in loafers, jeans, and shiny, untucked, collared shirts spent nearly an hour and a half walking their audience through five press releases’ worth of announcements.

Perhaps there should have been a single declaration of Apple’s progress in the war on the pixel. With the introduction of the iPad Mini with Retina display and lower prices for its highest-end MacBook Pro line, the only mainstream Apple products that lack super-high-resolution displays are the MacBook Air and iMac.

Nabeela ur-Rehman is nine years old. On October 24, 2012, one year ago this Thursday, she was playing outside her home in Ghundi Kala, a village in Pakistan’s North Waziristan tribal region, when missiles hit her family’s fields. The drone strike killed Nabeela’s sixty-eight-year-old grandmother, Mamana Bibi, the village’s only midwife. Nabeela tried to run, but her body was too badly burned. She had to be rushed to the hospital with shrapnel wounds. Her older brother, Zubair, thirteen, was taken to Islamabad and then, when the medical costs grew too steep, to Peshawar, for surgery to remove shrapnel from his leg. Her little sister Asma, seven, has had problems hearing ever since.

The tentative thirteen-billion-dollar deal that JPMorgan Chase has reportedly struck, to settle several probes of its residential-mortgage-backed securities business, has sparked heated debates over whether the bank should have to pay more or less. There is also the question of whether the settlement is large enough to punish JPMorgan and deter other companies from behaving similarly.

This season, the black story line on “Boardwalk Empire” does something so extraordinary that I didn’t think it was possible—certainly not on television, nor in film: it presents an entirely authentic nineteen-twenties Negro world, part Harlem Renaissance perversity and part “Macbeth,” all without sacrificing style.

In Peter Biskind’s recent book “My Lunches with Orson,” the late auteur despairs of time periods like the nineteen-twenties ever being depicted properly in film, saying—quite accurately—that if a fifties film attempts to portray the twenties, it looks like the twenties in the nineteen-fifties. The production values on “Boardwalk Empire” are impeccable, showing the twenties as they look in photographs and film, but none of it looks nostalgic; we’re watching a highly stylized documentary set in the past.

Every day, it seems, more damaging details emerge about the rollout of the federal online insurance exchange at the heart of the Affordable Care Act. Today’s revelation, courtesy of the Washington Post: days before the launch, officials and government contractors conducted a test of the new Web site, during which it crashed when just a few hundred people tried to log in simultaneously. But the Obama Administration went ahead with the rollout anyway, only for the site to seize up just hours into October 1st.

Until the Administration gets the site working properly, this story will dominate the news and overshadow the underlying reality about Obamacare: judged on its own terms, the new health-care system is likely to work. In the coming decade, tens of millions of Americans will end up using the new health-insurance marketplaces—both the federal one and the state ones—and the number of uninsured will drop quite dramatically. Not everybody will end up being covered, but, excluding unauthorized immigrants, who won’t be eligible to use the new system, it seems likely that, at a minimum, the proportion of people who are uninsured will be cut in half.

• “K.179” (2011). Design by Frank Stella. Photograph courtesy the artist/Artists Rights Society.
• “Untitled (5)” (2008). Design by Richard Dupont. Photograph courtesy the artist.
• “Fully Articulated 3-D-Printed Dress (as worn by Dita von Teese)” (2013). Design by Michael Schmidt and Francis Bitonti. Photograph by Albert Sanchez/Michael Schmidt Studios.
• “Intervening Phenomena” (2012). Design by Robert Gero and Michael Rees. Photograph by Jimi Billingsley.
• “Nike Vapor Laser Talon” (2013). Design by Shane Kohatsu. Photograph courtesy Nike.
• “Rapid Racer” (2011). Design by Andreas Schulz, Barbara Kotte, Johannes Zäuner, Rebecca Wilting, and Nicolas Eggert. Photograph by Johannes Roloff.
• “Cross Section 7,” from the collection “Army Green Orchids Brooches” (2005-2006). Design by Rebecca Strzelec. Photograph by Doug Yaple.

The other day, the Museum of Art and Design held a science fair of sorts to introduce a new exhibition called “Out of Hand: Materializing the Postdigital.” All of the art on display was created with the help of computers; artists stood beside their projects, happy to split the credit for their work with machines. The show’s curator, Ronald Labaco, addressed the crowd gathered around a tall nude sculpture by Richard Dupont, who collected data about his body using a 3-D scanner in order to render a pixelated-looking figure made of pigmented cast-polyurethane resin. “I’m here to tell you the digital revolution is over, and it has now become commonplace,” Labaco declared. Whispered gasps could be heard. The gallery walls were painted black, and most in the room wore the same color, giving the space a futuristic mood: H&M meets Starship Enterprise.

• The Boston Red Sox manager Joe Cronin and the St. Louis Cardinals manager Eddie Dyer shake hands in Boston before Game 3 of the 1946 World Series. AP Photo.
• The start of Game 7, October 15, 1946. AP Photo.
• Enos Slaughter of the Cardinals slides home with the winning run in Game 7. Photograph by Mark Rucker/Transcendental Graphics/Getty.
• Joe Cronin takes a photo of photographers who covered the 1946 World Series. From left to right: Pete Carroll, Boston; John Lindsay, AP New York; Abe Fox, Boston; John Rooney, AP New York; and Frank Curtin, AP Boston. AP Photo.
• The Red Sox manager Dick Williams poses with the Cardinals’ Roger Maris before Game 2 of the 1967 World Series in Boston. AP Photo.
• Lou Brock, Julián Javier, and Bob Gibson following the Cardinals’ 7-2 victory over Boston to win the 1967 World Series. Brock set a series record of seven stolen bases, Gibson pitched a three-hitter and hit a home run, and Javier hit a three-run homer. AP Photo.
• Brock leads off of first base at Fenway Park. Photograph: Focus On Sport/Getty.
• The Red Sox outfielder Carl Yastrzemski stares at Fenway’s Green Monster during the 1967 World Series. Photograph: Focus On Sport/Getty.
• The Boston Red Sox hall of famers Dom DiMaggio, Bobby Doerr, and Johnny Pesky prepare to throw the first pitch during Game 2 of the 2004 World Series between the Cardinals and the Red Sox. Photograph: Elsa/Getty.

It’s hard to remember now, but the Red Sox of the twentieth century was a team of tragedy and symmetry. They won several times during the Taft and Wilson Presidencies, but then they traded Babe Ruth to the Yankees and never won again. They had two brilliant sluggers who mainly played left field, and who led the team from Roosevelt’s second term to Reagan’s first: Ted Williams, who played from 1939 to 1960, and Carl Yastrzemski, who played from 1961 to 1983. Both played only for Boston and neither won a World Series. They each made it there at the age of twenty-seven—Williams in 1946 and Yaz in 1967—only to lose traumatic, seven-game series. The winner each time? The St. Louis Cardinals. And in both of those series, one outstanding pitcher did in the Red Sox. In 1946, Harry Brecheen went 3-0, with a 0.45 E.R.A. In 1967, Bob Gibson went 3-0 with a 1.00 E.R.A.

In 2004, the Red Sox returned to the World Series. They hadn’t won since 1918, but they got in after a stirring comeback against the Yankees, following a game in which they lost 19-8. Fittingly, their opponent was the Cardinals, and savvy Boston knew that the outcome would either be 4-0 or 4-3. (Before this year, and after 1918, the Red Sox played twenty-four post-season series, twenty-one of which either went the distance or were sweeps.) This one was a sweep, with the Red Sox victorious. Manny Ramirez, another left-fielder, was the M.V.P.

Now, the two teams return to the championship for the fourth time. Johnny Gomes (and his beard) will probably start in left. Above is a slideshow of photographs from the two teams’ prior meetings in the World Series.

The director Michael Roemer’s film “Nothing But a Man” was made in 1963; it premièred at the New York Film Festival in September, 1964, just two months after the Civil Rights Act was passed in Congress and signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson. The movie, set mainly in a small town near Birmingham, Alabama (but, as Roemer says in a recent interview, filmed in New Jersey), is a drama about the lives of black people in the South; its protagonist is a railroad-track worker who meets and marries a schoolteacher and settles down in her town but is unaccustomed to the overt hatred and constant threat of violence that blacks experience there. One scene, involving a meeting between the white school-board director and the minister who is the unofficial leader of the black community, results in the decision that a new school will be built for black children—in exchange for the minister’s agreement not to push for integration. There, as in scenes depicting the threat of violence both against blacks and against whites who protect them, I found myself wondering to what extent the involvement of government, by means of law and its enforcement, has been responsible for changing not just practices but also attitudes—and to what extent changing attitudes are due to what I’d call, with all praise, the liberal media. On the other hand, Roemer admits that his movie—like many independent films—had almost no impact at the time of its release. It’s easy to imagine the Internet helping to speed the movie toward its audience and its just acclaim.

A lot of people who live in the city like to visit the country to get close to nature. Then, once they are in the country, they find that they needn’t go outdoors to get close to nature. Nature comes right inside, as if to prove some kind of point.

Often, it arrives in the form of gray, nickel-size spiders that have woven their webs in the upper corners of several rooms, and then crawl up and down the walls to start a new web in another corner. Some people get a paper towel and clear away the webs and spiders, but many worry that the spiders will crawl onto their bodies, and so leave the webs and spiders alone, avoiding corners of rooms altogether.

Last year was the hundredth anniversary of Woody Guthrie’s birth, and the occasion was marked by a number of new releases and reissues, including “Woody At 100,” a three-disc box from Smithsonian Folkways that contained a wealth of previously unreleased selections, and “My Dusty Road,” a four-disc box from Rounder that focused on Guthrie’s mid-forties recordings. Now Rounder returns to celebrate Guthrie’s somewhat less momentous hundred and first birthday, with “American Radical Patriot.” Featuring six CDs and a DVD housed in a hardbound package, the set is as large as the other two combined.

It also has a specific charter: to collect the various songs that Guthrie made for the American government. The best place to start is where “American Radical Patriot” does: the Library of Congress recordings. Alan Lomax, then a young musicologist and oral historian, began an annual ritual of collecting songs and stories from the country’s most important and colorful musicians: he kicked off, in 1938, with Jelly Roll Morton, moved on to Leadbelly in 1939, ran tape on Guthrie in March of 1940, and wrapped up with Muddy Waters, down on Stovall’s Plantation, in 1941. All are major works of both musicology and oral history, especially the Morton recordings, a staggering act of informal jazz scholarship as told by a man who was present for the creation. (They were released in full in 2005, in a massive eight-disc Rounder box.)