Jonathan Larson is someone who writes like he is running out of time. That’s the underlying message of “30/90,” the first song in his original musical Tick, Tick … Boom and an energized ballad about the theatrical composer’s worries that he hasn’t accomplished enough—at the age of 30. As he hammers away at a piano, Larson notes that his idol, the composer Stephen Sondheim, contributed to his first Broadway show at the age of 27.

The first part of what may be the first epidemiologic text ever written begins like so: “Whoever wishes to investigate medicine properly, should proceed thus: in the first place to consider the seasons of the year.”The book is On Airs, Waters, and Places, written by Hippocrates around 400 B.C. Two and a half millennia later, the Northern Hemisphere is staring down its coming season of the year with growing apprehension.

Photographs by Naomi HarrisIn December 1999, Naomi Harris turned down a job offer, left her apartment in New York, and checked into the Haddon Hall Hotel, in Miami Beach. She was 26. She wanted to be a photographer.The hotel was a year-round home for some and a seasonal residence for others—snowbirds, mostly in their 80s and 90s, who came down from New England or Canada and stayed all winter. They didn’t have a lot of money, and they didn’t go there for luxury.

Last weekend, Pope Francis gave my profession a gift: a thoughtful outsider’s perspective on the proper role of journalists. “Your mission is to explain the world, to make it less obscure, to make those who live in it less afraid of it and look at others with greater awareness, and also with more confidence,” he said, adding that, to succeed, journalists must first listen.By this, he meant far more than picking up a telephone or jumping onto Zoom.

For a while, during the worst of the pandemic last year, European governments largely seemed to reach a consensus. Barring a few exceptions (such as Sweden), countries in the region locked down their economies, keeping people at home in a bid to slow the pace of infection. In time, bolstered by plentiful vaccines, the continent has seen a resumption of near-normalcy: Public-health restrictions have loosened, and travel has restarted.

The United States is a nation awash in firearms, and gun owners are a powerful and politically active constituency. In state after state, they have helped elect politicians who, in turn, have created a permissive legal regime for the carry and use of firearms, rules that go far beyond how courts originally understood the concept of self-defense.

Updated at 3:34 p.m. ET on November 19, 2021.A jury has found Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager who shot three men during protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in the summer of 2020, not guilty of the charges against him. Jurors deliberated for more than three days before delivering the verdict this afternoon, accepting his attorneys’ argument that Rittenhouse was acting in self-defense.

For an outstanding chronicle of the early years of AIDS activism, look no further than Sarah Schulman’s Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987–1993, which is also an exemplary model for telling a more complete story of a political movement. In writing Let the Record Show, published earlier this year, Schulman has orchestrated a people’s history of ACT UP New York.

Emily Dickinson’s life, according to the show Dickinson, had a lot more gay sex and twerking than your middle-school English class would have had you believe. And, from what we now know of the reclusive poet’s life, at least half of that is true.

Photographs by Giancarlo D’Agostaro“We brought the car to the American people. Then we built them a truck,” a male voice boomed during the launch event for the Ford F-150 Lightning. As the streetlights of Dearborn, Michigan, flickered lazily behind the stage set up outside company headquarters, a giant screen showed black-and-white footage of workers at an early-20th-century Ford assembly plant.