In the first episode of Loki, the trickster god of the Marvel Cinematic Universe—last seen escaping in a time-travel snafu during Avengers: Endgame—is captured and taken to a mysterious hinterland that exists outside of time and space and resembles nothing so much as a mushroom-colored 1970s airport. The walls are paneled in wood. The ceiling, covered in hundreds of circular light fixtures, stretches vastly into the distance, its composition pure Kubrick.

“This is the time of your life,” the nurse said to me as she searched for a vein. At 27, I finally had health insurance and could get the colonoscopy that doctors had been suggesting for years, so I was feeling pretty good about things—as good as one can feel after having spent the previous 12 hours in the bathroom. But she wasn’t referring to the procedure; she was talking about my age.

In April, United States Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer delivered a lecture at Harvard Law School with the less-than-scintillating title “The Authority of the Court and the Peril of Politics.” He argued strongly—and, at least in my view, unconvincingly—that Supreme Court justices are above politics. Breyer insisted that “jurisprudential differences,” not political ones, “account for most, perhaps almost all, of judicial disagreements.

For most of her life, Gulfisha Fatima showed little interest in anything beyond academics. By late 2019, the 27-year-old Delhi resident had finished her M.B.A. and was getting ready to apply for a Ph.D. Even as a student, she stayed away from activism. “Her world,” her brother Aqil told me, “revolved around books.”That began to change in December of that year.