The abrupt abandonment of handshakes and hugs. An expansion of personal space in public to six feet. And detailed conversations preceding any social plans about who else was invited and what risky behaviors they might have recently engaged in. Before the pandemic, any of these actions would have been considered rude, but over the past year, they became polite. Although etiquette has always had an undertone of safety first, during the pandemic, safety became the main point of politeness.

Stephen Menendian, a researcher at UC Berkeley, has long worried that Americans don’t understand how pervasive housing segregation is. They couldn’t, he reasoned: Much of the research on it has failed to fully capture its scope. The dominant tool that scholars have used to assess the problem, known as the dissimilarity index, measures how racially mixed a given area is. According to the dissimilarity index alone, America is more integrated now than at any point in the 20th century.

In the beginning, the small group of Americans who aspired to become astronauts had to pass an isolation test. Spaceflight wasn’t going to be easy, and the country wanted people with tough minds.For his test, John Glenn sat at a desk in a dark, soundproofed room. He found some paper in the darkness, pulled a pencil out of his pocket, and spent the test writing some poems in silence. He walked out three hours later.

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”“What brought it on?”“Friends,” said Mike. “I had a lot of friends.”— Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also RisesLike Hemingway’s Mike Campbell, the Trump Organization is confronting troubles that accumulated gradually and have coalesced suddenly. And once again, friends are at the bottom of it.

Today’s Supreme Court decision further weakening the Voting Rights Act affirmed that the only way Democrats can reverse the wave of restrictive voting laws in GOP-controlled states is to pass new federal voting rights by curtailing the Senate filibuster.Congressional action has long seemed the only realistic lever for Democrats to resist red states’ surge of voter-suppression laws, which are passing, as I’ve written, on an almost entirely party-line basis.