A cancer diagnosis is a shocking blow for anyone. But you might imagine that someone like Timothy Keller, a Presbyterian minister who has spent years talking with people about mortality, would be well prepared to deal with that kind of news. Keller has sat at people’s bedsides as they died, and he’s written a book called On Death. Perhaps most crucially, he believes in God and an afterlife. And yet, when Keller received a diagnosis of Stage 4 pancreatic cancer, he was terrified.

In the late 1990s, learning about something obscure took effort. You’d have to make your way to the right bookstore or know the edgy older person who might turn you on to a special record, a book, or a zine. These pre-internet objects were community builders; if you met someone who had heard of the specific thing you were into, you made a very cool friend. That was Bitch magazine.

One day, deep into production on David Lynch’s 2006 film, Inland Empire, a producer approached the actor Laura Dern in a panic, trying to parse a strange request from the director. “He took me aside and said, ‘Laura, David called me this morning, and I can’t figure out if it’s a joke,’” Dern, the movie’s lead, recalled in an interview. “‘He said, “Bring me a one-legged woman, a monkey, and a lumberjack by 3:15.

More than two years into this pandemic, we finally have an antiviral treatment that works pretty darn well. Paxlovid cuts a vulnerable adult’s chances of hospitalization or death from COVID by nearly 90 percent if taken in the first few days of an infection. For adults without risk-heightening factors, it reduces that likelihood by 70 percent. Also, it might make your mouth taste like absolute garbage the whole time you’re taking the pills.In Pfizer’s clinical trials, about 5.

The love song, the breakup song, the party song—all are excellent pop traditions, but a good doomsday song can do the work of all three. What connects David Bowie’s “Five Years” to Prince’s “1999” to Lana Del Rey’s “The Greatest” aren’t just visions of civilizational collapse.

Here is the foundational narrative on which I was raised: In March 1933, my great-uncle Arthur Kahn walked out of his apartment in Würzburg, Germany, for what was supposed to be a short Easter-break trip to see relatives. He was 21, training to be a doctor. He didn’t know it, but his name had been placed on a list of students suspected of Communist ties. He had none, but he was arrested in Nuremberg. A few weeks later, he was transferred to Dachau, which had just opened as a prison.