Doug Robertson is the kind of doctor who eats his own dog food. As a gastroenterologist in the Department of Veterans Affairs health-care system, he is overseeing a 50,000-person study comparing two different ways to screen for colon cancer: Patients aged 50 to 75 are randomly assigned to receive either a colonoscopy or a fecal immunochemical test, which can be conducted at home and detects tiny amounts of blood in a patient’s poop.

Maybe the rise of the term fuckboy to mock men who can’t keep their Dickies zipped is a sign of progress. I’ll never forget when my middle-school social-studies teacher, introducing the class to the concept of sexism, filled the whiteboard with all the ugly words for female promiscuity—slut, whore, etc.—but could muster only praising (stud) or outdated (cad) terms for men.

How cavalier
people are—with language
and with silence.Any ghost will
tell you—the last thing
we meanto do
is leave you.This poem appears in the October 2021 print edition. When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

A popular saying in football is that a player’s best ability is his availability. The idea explains why injured players in professional football are often cut, released, or relegated to lesser roles. It’s why an NFL player’s history of missing games can keep him from getting a big contract. It’s why players who face criminal allegations are handled according to whether they’ll miss time on the field.

Dan Darling was the consummate evangelical insider, until he wasn’t. Over the years, he has run the communications shop for several big-name Christian organizations, most recently the National Religious Broadcasters, or NRB, an association of more than 1,000 Christian radio hosts, television producers, and other media professionals. But at the end of August, he was fired.