Sign up for Caleb’s newsletter here.In The Matrix, Morpheus, a cool bald guy wearing sunglasses and a black crocodile trench coat, offers Keanu Reeves (and, by extension, the audience) a choice. Morpheus has just shown us that the world we thought was real is merely a simulation, and that the actual real world is mired in an interminable, violent power struggle between robots and humans. He proffers two capsules, one in each hand (they are reflected in his tiny sunglass lenses).

Corner stores don’t look like much. Maybe the one nearest to you has dusty shelves lined with bags of chips and cookies, and the cashier sitting next to the cigarettes and mini–shampoo bottles only takes cash. In some places, these mom-and-pop shops are simple roadside stalls or kiosks. They have largely operated the same way for decades: Many still order their products over the phone and manage their books on paper.

The first time Billie Eilish appeared on Saturday Night Live, the then-17-year-old put her famously green hair in two topknots, donned a graffiti-print outfit, and climbed the walls of a rotating room to underscore her eerie, enigmatic image. She rose to fame creating dark, ASMR electro-pop that distilled the fears of her generation with wry directness. Yet months later, she swept the 2020 Grammys with her debut album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? and her rising star turned meteoric.

The overlarge seas. Salt pressing
the blue. Still, some sparrows.
The sky. The tumbling relief of sky
in the after-winter seasons. Words,
their bright shattering. The wars,  new and continuing, elsewhere
and in the same places. Our village, its
versing downward into
a deeper rust. The church tower we
spiraled together, a punchof cloud. I teach languages now.
A lengthening list of curses  
and conjugations and ways of asking
for forgiveness. Love, its myths
of many apples.

Joe Biden’s Commission on the Supreme Court voted on the final version of its report last week. In five dense chapters, it lists the pros and cons of reforms such as adding justices, limiting their terms, reducing the Court’s power, and improving its inner workings. A couple of minor exceptions aside, the commission hewed to the task the president gave it, which was not to endorse anything but to weigh the “merits and legality” of different options.

The owners of million-dollar beach homes aren’t a particularly sympathetic political constituency. Conservatives deride them as (literal) coastal elites; progressives demand they fork over more in taxes. Both parties happily accept their campaign contributions, but few members of Congress shed tears for the plight of waterfront barons, and fewer still are willing to wage a public fight on their behalf.Robert Menendez, the senior senator from New Jersey, is one of those brave lawmakers.