Donald Trump Jr. is both intensely unappealing and uninteresting. He combines in his person corruption, ineptitude, and banality. He is perpetually aggrieved; obsessed with trolling the left; a crude, one-dimensional figure who has done a remarkably good job of keeping from public view any redeeming qualities he might have.There’s a case to be made that he’s worth ignoring, except for this: Don Jr.

Despite losing the dining table to it
for weeks, our family stays
with the puzzle, teetering plates
upon knees before the television
and then returning to the soft symphony
of shifting the oneness of a cardboard shape
into the satisfied oneness of another,
over and over, the thousand little clicks
of pleasure:—More than that
if you count how, from time to time,
someone will recognize the need
to undo what we took for perfection
but what, in fact, was silently stalling
the possibility of se

The heaviest drinkers in the animal kingdom are punier than you might expect. Elephants, for example, are massive, but they are relative lightweights—they lack a gene for alcohol metabolism. Humans actually rank pretty highly, thanks to our ancestors’ propensity for picking fermented fruit off the ground. But to find the real champs, you have to think smaller.Think hoarder.Think hamster.

“I do not see a scenario for any kind of shutdown,” New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio declared this week, as parts of New York were in fact shutting down all around him. Broadway canceled show after show. Restaurants closed their kitchens. De Blasio’s successor, Eric Adams, who will take office January 1, nixed his inauguration gala. There has been no March 2020–style universal shutdown, but New York is not back anymore, baby.

GARDEN CITY, Kan.—A century after the Dust Bowl, another environmental catastrophe is coming to the High Plains of western Kansas. The signs are subtle but unequivocal: dry riverbeds, fields of sand, the sound of irrigation motors straining to pump from dwindling aquifers.

listen little sister
angels make their hope here
in these hills
follow me
I will guide you
(From Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place, by bell hooks)
For all the things that bell hooks was—one of the foremost Black intellectuals in the world, renowned feminist, author of more than 40 books, revolutionary cultural critic—and all the places she lived, she was still Gloria Jean Watkins from Hopkinsville, daughter of Rosa Bell and Veotis.

My mother and I spent an afternoon unfurling my lola’s apartment a few days after she died, back in 2017. In her closet, my grandmother had stored a big cardboard box with an address in Manila written on the side in thick marker. Inside the box were neatly arranged cans of food, bags of rice, drugstore makeup, and clothes she had bought on sale.

In Dickinson’s third and final season, the titular poet (played by Hailee Steinfeld) travels forward in time and meets the author Sylvia Plath (Saturday Night Live’s Chloe Fineman). Sylvia, it turns out, has a deep knowledge of her predecessor’s legacy. Apparently, Emily Dickinson lived a “miserable life,” should be considered “the original sad girl,” and, Sylvia whispers scandalously, “was a lesbian.