Marie Howe’s “What the Living Do” begins with an address to her brother: The kitchen sink has been clogged for days, she writes. The Drano won’t work … it’s winter again … the heat’s on too high.The poem might seem at first like a list of complaints, but it’s a list of gratitudes. Most readers won’t know that Howe’s younger brother John died of AIDS-related complications in 1989.

This fall I received desperate messages from many of my students at Temple University, Philadelphia’s public university. They wanted to know where they could find help catching up on bills, and described having to choose between rent, groceries, and gas. Five of my undergraduates lost a family member to COVID-19.A college education is more essential than ever to economic stability.

“When television is good, nothing—not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers—nothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing is worse.”Nearly 60 years ago, the FCC chair Newton Minow delivered an excoriation of television that was officially titled “Television and the Public Interest” but would be remembered, among the broader American public, as the “vast wasteland” speech.

Protest movements aren’t designed to last forever. And when they do reach their inevitable conclusion, they tend to follow one of two familiar sequences: In one scenario, a protest triggers the resignation of an opposed leader, the reversal of an unpopular policy, or other concessions (think of the successful recent revolutions in Algeria and Sudan).

This year has highlighted the particularities of that thing called reading. Some found books impossible to pick up; sustained attention to text on a page is hard when the world is in so much pain. Others turned to literature anew, rediscovering the ways it can refresh and inspire.