On September 14, Nabisco workers at a bakery in Portland, Oregon, who had been striking for more than a month to protest proposed contract changes were joined on the picket line by what might have seemed unlikely allies: players for the Portland Thorns, the city’s professional women’s soccer team.

Listen and subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google In the social-media age, we curate images of our lives on a screen—making it especially easy to translate images of perfection as the image of oneself. But the pressure to pretend we are perfect is exactly the thing holding us back from experiencing the happiness we seek—and limiting our ability to be our whole, authentic selves.

Arguably, no mode of writing has influenced the past decade of novels more than autofiction, a catchall term for books that call themselves fiction while claiming to be rooted, in some way, in their authors’ real lives. Amid this boom, critics and readers alike have shown a certain anxiety over how based in fact a novel can be—and how anyone might know, given that no autofiction writer purports to be telling the complete, unadulterated truth.

Governor Greg Abbott is afraid. Not of COVID-19, which is killing thousands of Texans, but of losing his primary.Last week, Abbott announced that he was banning COVID-vaccine mandates by “any entity” in Texas, a policy so absurd that you’d be forgiven for thinking, as the running joke on social media goes, that the coronavirus wrote the executive order itself.

Nothing about The Body Keeps the Score screams “best seller.” Written by the psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, the book is a graphic account of his decades-long career treating survivors of traumatic experiences such as rape, incest, and war. Page after page, readers are asked to wrestle with van der Kolk’s theory that trauma can sever the connection between the mind, which wants to forget what happened, and the body, which can’t.

My favorite recollection of Colin Powell was the look he got when he was amused. He’d tilt his head up and look at you under the base of his glasses, smiling, and take joy in the moment. He had such a great capacity for merriment.Powell died today, at age 84, of complications of COVID-19, his family said.

On March 16, 2017, Mount Etna almost killed Boris Behncke. He was on the volcano’s snow-covered flanks, accompanying a film crew from the BBC. Serpents of lava were slithering out of a southeastern crater, but Behncke, a volcanologist at Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology, felt no need to take his hard hat out of his bag. They were more than a mile away from the crater, seemingly far from harm’s reach.