Steven Spielberg has been making films that feel like musicals for his entire career. No, the fearsome shark of Jaws and dinosaurs of Jurassic Park didn’t belt out a tune, and heroes like Indiana Jones and Tintin weren’t dancing through their set pieces, but they might as well have been. Spielberg is an expert at the careful choreography of camera blocking; his gift for legibly communicating complicated sequences of movement on a massive scale is second to none.

By April 1968, Charles de Gaulle was bored. “None of this amuses me anymore,” the French president told his aide-de-camp, Admiral François Flohic. “There is no longer anything difficult or heroic to do.

Last year, TV became essential. When the stages we used to go to—concert halls, movie theaters, sports arenas—closed amid the pandemic, the small screen became the only outlet for safe viewing entertainment. Things have begun to change this year: Artists are announcing tours, people have trickled back into cinemas, and even the Summer Olympics happened. (Sort of.)But TV, thankfully, hasn’t stopped keeping us enthralled.

Sign up for Derek’s newsletter here.The flood of Omicron news can be overwhelming. The endless data, anecdotes, and studies are hard enough to synthesize. But what makes the information even harder to parse is that so much evidence (i.e., what people are seeing) is intertwined with opinion (i.e., what people are hoping and fearing).

Even before the arrival of Omicron, the winter months were going to be tough for parts of the United States. While COVID transmission rates in the South caught fire over the summer, the Northeast and Great Plains states were largely spared thanks to cyclical factors and high vaccination rates. But weather and the patterns of human life were bound to shift the disease burden northward for the holidays—and that was just with Delta.