One Saturday in October 1965, John Coltrane did something unusual: He picked up his tenor saxophone and led his band into a performance of his masterpiece, A Love Supreme, a work he rarely played live. That evening in Seattle, the ensemble unfurled a revelatory rendition—looser and more raucous than the recorded version, losing none of its devotion but trading solemnity for ecstasy.

When many states and cities implemented shutdown orders to combat the spread of the coronavirus last year, an array of metrics told the public when, or if, the closures would end. Restrictions on shopping, dining indoors, playing sports, and going to school were created based on specific data such as the COVID-19 positivity rate and the number of cases.

One Sunday morning in July of last year, a message from an anonymous account appeared on “Bernie or Vest,” a Discord chat server for fans of Senator Bernie Sanders. It contained an image of Shahid Buttar, the San Francisco activist challenging House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the 2020 congressional runoff, and offered explicit instructions for how to elevate the hashtag #PelosiMustGo to the nationwide Trending list on Twitter.

Fifty years ago, Bangladesh won independence from Pakistan amid devastating climate disaster. The year before, in 1970, the Bhola cyclone had killed up to half a million people. The human toll of the disaster—one of the deadliest cyclones in recorded history—was amplified by a woefully insufficient response by Pakistan’s government. Faced with renewed demands for independence in what was then East Pakistan, the military waged a brutal crackdown and genocide.

One of the best and toughest parts of being a science writer is acting as a kind of jargon liaison. Weird, obscure, aggressively multisyllabic words appear in scientific discourse; I, wielding nothing but a Google Doc, a cellphone, and the Powers of the Internet™, wrest these terms from their academic hidey-holes and try to pin them down with some endearing yet accurate analogy.

Eighteen-hour workdays with no lunch breaks. Car accidents caused by sleep deprivation. A crew member who returned to set the day after a miscarriage.For months, members of a union representing more than 150,000 behind-the-scenes workers in the entertainment industry have shared hundreds of these stories on social media—anonymous testimonies about the grueling conditions on TV and film sets.

This article contains spoilers through the Season 2 finale of Ted Lasso.In an episode halfway through the new season of Ted Lasso, Apple’s sweet and strange series about an optimistic American coach thrown into the cesspool of British soccer, the three AFC Richmond fans who compose the show’s dim-witted Greek chorus get ready to watch the FA Cup quarterfinal in a pub. “I swear, if we actually win this match, I will burn this pub to the ground,” one boasts.

It’s not just toilet paper anymore. Pandemic pressure on the global supply chain is causing disruptions and shortages of a diverse assortment of items, such as books, furniture, wood, and COVID tests.“Americans are settling into a new phase of the pandemic economy,” my colleague Derek Thompson writes. “This is the Everything Shortage.”
The global supply chain is a disaster. And not just one part of it, either.