When Kimberly Sheldon was 47, she says made the biggest mistake of her life. That was in 2018, when she says that a dentist explained to her that cutting the tissue under her tongue would help her jaw pain, gum recession, and occasional headaches. Her issues, he said, could be due to the fact that the back of her tongue couldn’t reach the roof of her mouth.

In Joy Williams’s 1988 novel, Breaking and Entering, a drifter named Willie finds himself, inexplicably and as if against his will, saving people. A young man is struck by lightning and Willie gives him CPR. An elderly couple drives off a boat ramp and Willie pulls the door open. Willie isn’t actively looking to help anyone; he just kind of falls into it. As Williams writes, “He had never had a penchant for the saving.

When the doctor sliced open the body,
soft still to the touch, apprenticed
to expression, when the fleshwas pulled back between index and thumb
revealing the armor of breastbone,
imagine he who saw the heart froth,the heart bubble over like soda water.
Then think of grief leaving the body,
flitting like salt to the nearby sink,and joy like atoms joining in air
toward another living promise.

In The Card Counter, William Tell (played by Oscar Isaac) keeps his emotions under strict control. He’s a poker player, and the slightest facial expression could give away his hand. William’s life is equally circumscribed: He travels around the country from casino to casino, subsisting on low-stakes games and doing nothing to draw attention to himself.

The Pentagon is not the most inviting place for first-time visitors, and it was no different for Chris Lynch. When he rode the escalator out of the Pentagon metro station, Lynch was greeted by guard dogs and security personnel wearing body armor and toting machine guns. He lost cell service upon entering the building and was forced to run through more than a half mile of hallways to make his meeting in the office of the secretary of defense.

Tomorrow marks 20 years since the attacks on September 11, 2001. The adrenaline shock of that morning has long worn off, leaving behind only the horror, the loss, and two decades’ worth of grief.
It’s tempting to use this anniversary to consider the attacks as a greater political or cultural moment, to analyze where the country went right or wrong in its response. And doing so is important.

Jonathan Neman really seemed to think he was onto something. Last week, in a lengthy, now-deleted post on LinkedIn, the CEO and co-founder of the upscale salad chain Sweetgreen expounded on a topic that might seem a little far afield for a restaurant executive: how to end the pandemic. “No vaccine nor mask will save us,” he wrote. (The vaccines, it should be noted, have so far proved to be near-miraculously effective at saving those who get them.