In The Batman, Matt Reeves’s long and grim superhero epic, Robert Pattinson plays a brooding sophomore of a dark knight. He wears mascara. He journals. He is vengeance. He is the shadows. But despite all the memes and fanboy hand-wringing generated from the Twilight actor’s casting, Pattinson’s is a back-to-basics Batman. He isn’t the tired, aging crimefighter played by Ben Affleck, nor is The Batman the umpteenth pearl-scattering origin story for the character.

Kyiv is often described as the cradle of Slavic civilization. According to legend, the city was founded in 482, when a group of siblings from a royal Slavic tribe staked out a settlement along the banks of the Dnipro River. By the end of the millenium, under the leadership of Volodymyr the Great, it had become the capital of a major European civilization—Kyivan Rus. At this point, Moscow was barely a village.

For the past few decades, whenever a geopolitical crisis or market tumult has led to higher oil prices, policy makers in the United States have generally followed the same playbook.First, they try to get more oil on the market as soon as they can. That almost invariably has meant asking Saudi Arabia, which geology has blessed with the world’s most agile oil reserves and which the U.S. has blessed with several billion dollars in weapons, to pump and sell more petroleum.

A month ago, another installment in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre series was released, an attempt to modernize the horror franchise while still harkening back to its gritty 1970s roots. It was a creative failure, too reliant on digitally enhanced gore and thudding callbacks. The task of matching an all-time classic seemed impossible.

If a new coronavirus variant surges in the United States this year—perhaps the one currently tearing through Europe—there’s a reasonable chance that the country will be unprepared to fight it. You can thank Congress for that.Last week, lawmakers passed a massive spending bill without any additional funding for COVID-19 relief, despite White House pleas for more. Democrats would like to fulfill the administration’s request.