Each month, the average TikTok user watches about 24 hours of video. Considering that videos now top out at 10 minutes, that’s a bewildering amount of content and reach. TikTok hit 3 billion downloads in July 2021, becoming the first non-Facebook app to do so. As a global vehicle for a wellspring of DIY creators, it has saturated the cultural moment. Saturday Night Live knows this, and it keeps wanting to say something about the platform. But it doesn’t quite know what.

This is what I wanted, isn’t it? This house, quiet
as sunlight, grass on the other side of these windowsfading from gold to green like a woman taking
off her makeup. I have waited and waited to hold  my grief. Tied her up in garbage bags under clothes
I intend to donate, slipped her in the side pockets  of suitcases and empty slots between cigarettes
in packs I carry always in multiples. I trained her  to stand behind doors, to exit as laughter from my
throat.

On March 13, a Russian soldier broke into a school in Malaya Rohan, a village near the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, which had been relentlessly attacked by Vladimir Putin’s forces for weeks. Locals had congregated in the school’s basement for shelter from the violence. What followed, according to an account from a survivor published by Human Rights Watch, is horrifying but bears detailing.

Sign up for Derek’s newsletter here.In September 1992, the band Blind Melon released their self-titled debut album. The record was mostly ignored until a music video for the song “No Rain,” featuring a girl in glasses dressed as a bumblebee, went berserk on MTV. The song rocketed up the Billboard Hot 100 charts. But that was the last time the band ever struck gold. Two decades later, Rolling Stone named “No Rain” one of the biggest one-hit wonders of all time.

Look, it’s right there in the name: Senate, borrowed from the Romans and meaning a “council of elders.” More than ever, the label fits. This is the oldest Senate, by average age, in American history, at 64 years. Jim Inhofe and Richard Shelby, both 87, have announced plans to retire. Chuck Grassley, 88, is running for reelection this fall. But even he is a shade younger than Dianne Feinstein, also 88.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, the writer and photographer Yevgenia Belorusets began to journal about her experience living in Kyiv. The resulting account, which she published online in real time, provides insight into the conflict that more straightforward news coverage has failed to capture. It is, as she put it in an interview with my colleague Gal Beckerman, “a very complex picture of reality at a moment when war has turned everything incredibly awful.