Koji Uehara, the best relief pitcher on the Boston Red Sox, only throws strikes. He threw eleven pitches in the ninth inning of Game Six against the Tigers: all were strikes. A really good pitcher has a strike-out-to-walk ratio of about two or three to one. Since August 3rd, Uehara has struck out forty-four and walked no one. In one stretch, he retired thirty-seven batters in a row—and threw twenty-five balls during the whole time. He has allowed the fewest hits and walks per nine innings of any pitcher in history.

Wang Gongquan, who was charged in Beijing on Sunday with “assembling a crowd to disrupt order,” hardly fits the profile of a classic Chinese political activist. He doesn’t lead a threadbare life on the margins of an increasingly prosperous society. He doesn’t scrape by on a mixture of tiny grants, consulting fees, and the sale of obscure essays. On the contrary, Wang, who is fifty-two, is a plutocrat, one of China’s most famous venture capitalists. He made a fortune in real estate, technology, and other investments. People call him a billionaire, or maybe just a multimillionaire—in China, it can be difficult to know for sure. He has indulged in the decadent excesses of his moment, most memorably in 2011, when he announced that he was leaving his wife to journey abroad with his mistress—news that he broke on Weibo. “I am giving up everything and eloping with Wang Qin,” he wrote to his social-media followers, whose numbers eventually grew to more than a million. “I feel ashamed and so am leaving without saying goodbye. I kneel down and beg forgiveness!”

He came back. His fans, by and large, forgave him. (He even seemed to get credit for what some interpreted as an act of true romance.) But Wang is not a man accustomed to living within limits, and he had begun to bridle against other restraints.

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.

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.

• 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.

It is painful to watch French President François Hollande endure one self-inflicted wound after another, the latest being his inept handling of the deportation of Leonarda Dibrani, a fifteen-year-old girl sent back to Kosovo earlier this month. Leonarda’s family—father, mother, and six children—entered France four years ago and had exhausted various efforts to obtain asylum on the ground that, as members of the Roma ethnic minority, they faced discrimination. On October 9th, when French police arrived to repatriate the family, they learned that Leonarda was in school—in fact, on a school field trip with her classmates. The police tracked down her school bus, forced it to stop, and took the child away. The scene of a child being arrested in front her classmates struck a nerve and brought thousands of high-school students to the streets of French cities in protest. An official investigation found that the deportation had been carried out legally, but that the police could have shown greater “discernment.” Hollande, rather than let the matter die down, made a nationally televised address, in which he offered a kind of Solomonic compromise: Leonarda was welcome to return to finish her studies in France—but without the rest of her family.

The thirty-five-minute documentary “From One Second to the Next,” directed by Werner Herzog and released online by the four largest mobile carriers in the United States, opens with an image of an empty hand. It belongs to a young woman whose brother, Xzavier, was struck by a car driven by someone who, absorbed in a text message, ran through a four-way stop. Xzavier was paralyzed from the neck down, and now must use a ventilator to breathe. In another scene, a young man with startling blue eyes tells the camera, “This was the last text message I sent before I caused an accident that killed three people.” The words “I love you” flash on the screen. He was texting his girlfriend when he accidentally ran down an Amish buggy on the side of the road in Indiana.

The film is gentle to the people whose stories it tells, whether they are victims or perpetrators. Above all, it expresses a skepticism about the value of technological connectedness. “It’s just nuts, it’s crazy,” says a truck driver who hit a car that was pushed into his lane by another texting driver, about the popularity of sending messages from behind the wheel. And then, in the film’s final line: “I don’t know why people don’t want to talk to each other, anyway.”

“Precisely because the product is good, I want the cash registers to work,” President Obama said in the Rose Garden on Monday. “I want the checkout lines to be smooth. So I want people to be able to get this great product.” A lot of people seem ready to throw those cash registers—that is, the computers on which they are trying to enroll in health-insurance plans with the help of the Affordable Care Act—through the window. Obama said that he wasn’t going to “sugarcoat” the problems with the Web site, Healthcare.gov—“Nobody is madder than me,” he said. The “kinks” have gone well beyond a rush of traffic. But he also wanted people to know what he was selling:

Few small magazines remain so for long. A handful get larger over time; most die at a fairly young age. One exception is Dissent, the independent left-wing quarterly that was founded in the dark days of the McCarthy era by the literary critic Irving Howe and the sociologist Lewis Coser, which will celebrate its sixtieth anniversary later this week. For decades, Dissent’s subscription list has hovered around the mid-four figures, never going much higher or lower; today, it has just over ten thousand followers on Twitter, its editors never pay themselves a penny, and its writers don’t make a whole lot more. Creatures that function at a consistently low metabolic rate are prone to being picked off by predators or to just stop moving. And yet, Dissent has survived its founding editors, eleven Presidencies, the rise and fall of neo-conservatism, Ramparts, The Public Interest, Talk, and George. The reasons for this longevity are more interesting than sheer persistence.