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On rainy days, Kaitlyn Loftus likes to imagine herself somewhere else. Not on a sun-soaked beach, but on another world in the middle of its own rainstorm. Beneath the swirling storms of Jupiter or Saturn’s hazy cloud tops, where helium drops from the sky. On Neptune, where it might drizzle diamonds. Maybe Titan, a moon of Saturn, where methane rain can fill entire lakes.Loftus is a planetary scientist at Harvard, and for her, otherworldly rain is more than a daydream.

By the time Republicans and centrist Democrats had united late last week to scold Representative Ilhan Omar for a tweet—one of the few pastimes that still draw the two parties together, and something those selfsame chiders would doubtlessly decry, under different circumstances, as cancel culture or censorship—it no longer mattered what, exactly, Omar had said. They had already managed to make a news cycle out of it: mission accomplished.

With the promise of a delightfully normal summer in the United States comes the resumption of the summer wedding season. Late spring through early fall is historically the most popular time for couples to get married. This year, however, widespread vaccination in the U.S. and the ensuing easement of gathering restrictions, after more than a year of the coronavirus pandemic, are making for a wedding season of grand proportions.