To the world, the new telescope that NASA recently launched to space is one of the most ambitious scientific endeavors in history. It is the next Hubble, designed to observe nearly everything from here to the most distant edges of the cosmos, to the very first galaxies.To Jane Rigby’s son, it’s “mama’s telescope.”Rigby, an astrophysicist, used to bring her young son to the NASA center in Maryland to watch the James Webb Space Telescope being assembled.

Five years ago, I talked to George Clooney at the Toronto International Film Festival about his latest directorial effort, Suburbicon, a strange hybrid of black comedy and social satire that failed to connect with critics. At that time, Clooney was more than 30 years into an acting career that had seen him star on the hit TV show ER, play Batman, win an Oscar, and work with directors such as Steven Soderbergh, the Coen Brothers, and Alfonso Cuarón, on top of making his own films.

If you’re trapped in COVID isolation right now, you’re making muffins. If that’s literally true, good for you, and I can recommend these. But I’m talking metaphorically. Right now, the infection you’re nursing, and the contagious risk it carries, is—hear me out—raw batter in an oven. You really, really don’t want to remove it too soon.Yes, we are in crisis right now. The pandemic’s been raging for two years, and I am talking about muffins.

January 6, 2021, didn’t happen just to America. It also happened to the rest of the world. To watch the crisis unfold from overseas, as I did from my flat in London, was to reckon with the reality that perhaps the United States wasn’t as “back [and] ready to lead the world” as Joe Biden had claimed after his victory.

This week, several high-profile Republicans have suddenly become interested in reforming the infamously incomprehensible Electoral Count Act of 1887, which lays out the process for certifying the results of presidential elections. Most prominent among them is Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who, in his typically animated way, said Wednesday that the law “obviously has some flaws. And it is worth, I think, discussing.

When I was a kid, my dad did something on family vacations that perplexes me to this day: He ran. Every day, at least four or five miles, rising before the sun and before anyone else was awake. He wasn’t training for anything. He wasn’t trying to lose weight. There was no specific goal, no endpoint, no particular reason he couldn’t take the week off while in the greater Disney World metropolitan area, which, in July, is hotter than the surface of the sun.

Sign up for Conor’s newsletter here.As the Omicron stage of the pandemic wears on, many of you are anxious, frustrated, and incredulous or even despairing as to how others are behaving––but you’re not of like mind. Some of you believe that the response to the new variant is overwrought, while others think that it is underwhelming.