Sign up for Derek’s newsletter here.Let’s start with a simple mystery: What happened to original blockbuster movies?Throughout the 20th century, Hollywood produced a healthy number of entirely new stories. The top movies of 1998—including Titanic, Saving Private Ryan, and There’s Something About Mary—were almost all based on original screenplays. But since then, the U.S.

World, meet Omicron; Omicron, meet a lot of people who are very, very anxious to know more about you.The arrival of the newest coronavirus variant, first identified in Botswana and South Africa and now present in the United States, might be bad news, or it might be terrible news—or maybe it’s just a temporary distraction from Delta.

Over the past few years, climate advocates have gained two atypical allies. For the cosmopolitan progressives who normally dominate environmental policy making, these two new groups are somewhat embarrassing to rub shoulders with, which is why discussion of the two shifts has been rejected or muted. But they signal that a new era has begun in climate politics—one that advocates have long wished for, but also one that they may now rue.

Sign up for Conor’s newsletter here.I once hoped that Facebook and Twitter would enable better conversations among strangers trying to think through our complicated world together. And I’ve learned a lot and interacted with wonderful people on social media. But many of the most thoughtful people I know no longer engage there. It is too hostile, too time-consuming, and too influenced by outrage and bad actors.  Let’s converse here instead.

It was Madonna who first introduced me to Stephen Sondheim, which sounds infinitely more chic than what happened in reality: Someone gave a 7-year-old girl a cassette of I’m Breathless, the 1990 album Madonna recorded during her gauzy showgirl period, pegged to her role as Breathless Mahoney in the movie adaptation of Dick Tracy. At the time, Cats had been running on Broadway for eight years.