What is the border crisis? Is it the recent surge of migrants, or is it the treatment of those migrants in detention facilities? The answer to that question—or whether you consider the situation at the border to be a crisis at all—most likely determines what you think the Biden administration should do about it.For conservatives, the answer is clear: Democrats invited the increase in migrants with their permissive, open-borders immigration policies.

It’s been more than a year of big grocery-store hauls in preparation for cooking, and more cooking, and … more cooking. During the pandemic, whether you were lovingly tending to your sourdough starter or simply boiling some water for another box of mac and cheese, many of us became intimately familiar with our kitchens.

Kipling Williams has studied the effects of the silent treatment for more than 36 years, meeting hundreds of victims and perpetrators in the process:A grown woman whose father refused to speak with her for six months at a time as punishment throughout her life. “Her father died during one of those dreaded periods,” Williams told me. “When she visited him at the hospital shortly before his death, he turned away from her and wouldn’t break his silence even to say goodbye.

Cherry blossoms in London, lava flowing in Iceland, Nowruz celebrations in Iraq, spring training in Florida, a COVID-19 memorial in Prague, a “rally against hate” in New York, record flooding in Australia, a stuck ship in the Suez Canal, and much more.

The recent shootings in Atlanta highlighted a surge of anti-Asian violence in the United States throughout the pandemic. Disease stigma and racism have together shaped pandemic response and policy for centuries.And so to better understand this history, on the podcast Social Distance, co-hosts James Hamblin and Maeve Higgins speak with Alexandre White, a sociologist and medical historian at Johns Hopkins University.