James Fallows

This album is okay. I understand that Taylor Swift is not someone you’re supposed to feel okay about—she is either the great redeemer of English-language arts and letters in the 21st century, as her fans have it, or a total cornball foisted upon the public by the evil record industry, as the haters say. The truth is that she is a talented artist who has reinvigorated popular music as a storytelling medium—but who has, all along, suffered from some quality-control issues.

The Tortured Poets Department, her 11th studio album, could recalibrate the way we talk about her. Much of the album is a dreary muddle, but with strange and surprising charms, and a couple of flashes of magic. This record is not a work of unimpeachable genius, nor does it feel engineered into existence by a committee of monied interests—it’s way too long and uneven to be, from any point of view, savvy. (And this opinion is based on the 16 songs of the main album; earlier today, she surprise-released 15 more tracks on top of those.) She’s just processing a weird chapter of her life.

In the criminal case now unfolding in a Manhattan courtroom, Donald Trump is accused of having a sexual encounter with Stormy Daniels, finding a way to pay her to keep quiet about it, and then disguising those payments as a business expense. The facts are all very tabloid-y. They also took place before the 2016 election, long before January 6 or the “Stop the Steal” movement, or any of the more serious threats to democracy we associate with Trump.

But the Stormy Daniels case has distinct and simple advantages: In the other, more sprawling cases that deal directly with election interference, Trump’s lawyers have been remarkably successful at piling on delay tactics and are unlikely to go to court any time soon. But in the Stormy Daniels trial, the defendant has been summoned, the jury is being selected, witnesses have been called. And the D.A., Alvin Bragg, has honed his argument that the hush-money payments were in fact an attempt to interfere with the election.

Mass shootings didn’t start at Columbine High, but the mass-shooter era did. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold’s audacious plan and misread motives multiplied the stakes and inspired wave after wave of emulation. How could we know we were witnessing an origin story?

The legend of Columbine is fiction. There are two versions of the attack: what actually happened on April 20, 1999, and the story we all accepted back then. The mythical version explained it all so cleanly. A pair of outcast loners dubbed the “Trench Coat Mafia” targeted the jocks to avenge years of bullying. Dwayne Fuselier, the supervisory special agent who led the FBI’s Columbine investigation, is fond of quoting H. L. Mencken in response to the mythmaking: “There is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.”

A certain type of person will tell you that they read cookbooks like they do novels. This usually means they flip through them at night, in bed, perhaps with the help of some gentle, warm light and a hot cup of tea. They pore over the notes and instructions that precede each recipe; they dream up menus the way a fiction reader might picture the furniture inside a character’s home. They might flag dishes they want to cook, or they might not. The point of this practice is pleasure, not pragmatism.

Of course, there are some cookbooks that lend themselves particularly well to this exercise, and with the right title, any of us can fall into late-night reveries over bouillabaisse or dumplings. These are not quick-and-dirty weeknight cookbooks, nor are they written to bend to a trend, as with the keto and air-fryer manuals that seem to proliferate like weeds these days. For a cookbook to be a great read, it should be written with a living, breathing (and often busy) home cook in mind, and also elevate and expand the genre. The eight books below are titles you should, and will want to, read front to back. Each is written with care and enthusiasm, not just for the practice of cooking but for the experience of eating.

In October 2003, Mark Zuckerberg created his first viral site: not Facebook, but FaceMash. Then a college freshman, he hacked into Harvard’s online dorm directories, gathered a massive collection of students’ headshots, and used them to create a website on which Harvard students could rate classmates by their attractiveness, literally and figuratively head-to-head. The site, a mean-spirited prank recounted in the opening scene of The Social Network, got so much traction so quickly that Harvard shut down his internet access within hours. The math that powered FaceMash—and, by extension, set Zuckerberg on the path to building the world’s dominant social-media empire—was reportedly, of all things, a formula for ranking chess players: the Elo system.

This month, Professor Randall L. Kennedy, an eminent scholar of race and civil rights, published an op-ed in The Harvard Crimson denouncing the use of diversity, equity, and inclusion statements in academic hiring. “I am a scholar on the left committed to struggles for social justice,” he wrote. “The realities surrounding mandatory DEI statements, however, make me wince.”

More and more colleges started requiring faculty to submit these statements in recent years, until legislatures in red states began to outlaw them. They remain common at private institutions and in blue states. Kennedy lamented that at Harvard and elsewhere, aspiring professors are required to “profess and flaunt” their faith in DEI in a process that “leans heavily and tendentiously towards varieties of academic leftism.” He concluded that DEI statements “ought to be abandoned.”

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Are you feeling a little guilty about reading this article? Not because of the content, of course—nothing scandalous here!—but rather because of the time it takes away from something else you feel you should be doing. Perhaps you are taking a break from work but feel that you shouldn’t because deadlines and obligations are nipping at your ankles this very minute.

If so, that’s because you’re probably too busy. Not that this is some amazing diagnosis: Most people are too busy. According to surveys conducted in recent years by the Pew Research Center, 52 percent of Americans are usually trying to do more than one thing at a time, and 60 percent sometimes feel too busy to enjoy life. When it comes to parents with children under the age of 18, a full 74 percent said that they sometimes feel too busy to enjoy life.

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Americans spend a fair amount of time describing things as “dad.” “Dad rock” is guitar-driven music, typically from the time of the Nixon or Ford administration, with bonus points for extended drum solos or albums that feature double-gatefold illustrations of imaginary planets. “Dadcore” is the art of clothing yourself without wasting any energy thinking about fashion. “Dad friends” are kindly and endearing, but not necessarily the most fun at parties. A “dad bod” is desirable but poised on the brink of middle-age sprawl. “Dad energy” involves being goofy and acting like a 40-something guy, whether or not you actually are a 40-something guy. “Dad jokes” are mostly terrible puns.

From now on, any state with genuine fears for its own security is bound to consider building nuclear weapons. Over nearly eight decades after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, careful diplomacy and multinational collaboration have limited the number of nuclear-armed countries to nine. But that count is likely to rise—ironically because of American policies designed to prevent nuclear escalation with Russia. Recent events have shown how much deference even superpowers give to countries with nuclear weapons, and how grievously Ukraine has suffered for lacking them.

Last Saturday, Iranian forces launched a large air assault on Israel. They used a range of systems, including relatively simple drones as well as cruise missiles and ballistic missiles. The apparent goal was to overwhelm Israeli air defenses so that at least some of the missiles and drones could get through and hit their target. Iran’s move seems to have been inspired by devastating Russian aerial attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure in recent months—and indeed was larger than any that Russia had launched on a single night.

On Indivisible’s website, the first words you’ll find—in large font and all caps—are “Defeat MAGA. Save democracy.” The progressive organizing group, formed shortly after Donald Trump’s 2016 win, sees the stakes of this fall’s presidential election as enormous, even existential. Yet when it deploys more than 2,000 volunteers to canvass neighborhoods in Arizona over the next seven months, the presidential race is the last topic it plans to bring up.

“We’re not going to be knocking on doors trying to convince people to vote for Joe Biden,” Indivisible’s co-founder Ezra Levin told me. Instead, its volunteers will be trying to turn out voters for just about every other Democrat on the ballot—including the party’s nominees for U.S. Senate and House seats and its candidates for the Republican-controlled state legislature—as well as a referendum that could restore abortion rights in Arizona.