Deep in the forests of Germany, nestled neatly into the hollowed-out shells of acorns, live a smattering of ants who have stumbled upon a fountain of youth. They are born workers, but do not do much work. Their days are spent lollygagging about the nest, where their siblings shower them with gifts of food. They seem to elude the ravages of old age, retaining a durably adolescent physique, their outer shells soft and their hue distinctively tawny.

Arne Svenson, Stray #55
To peer into the soul of a sea cucumber, don’t look to its face; it doesn’t have one. Gently turn that blobby body around, and gaze deep into its marvelous, multifunctional anus.The sea cucumber’s posterior is so much more than an exit hole for digestive waste.

As gratifying as it can be to see an actor disappear into a role, there’s something soul-restoring about an underappreciated star finally twinkling their way front and center in the Hollywood firmament. At 69, Jean Smart has almost five decades of ancillary and co-lead roles to her name—the rapacious Lana in Frasier, the ditsy helpmeet Charlene in Designing Women—but the new HBO Max series Hacks marks the rare time the actor has anchored a show.

Two questions have dominated politics throughout the coronavirus pandemic. Democrats and public-health experts have asked: What should we do? Former President Donald Trump, for his part, minimized the need to act. He instead spoke incessantly about a very different question: Whom should we blame?“In recent months, our nation and the world has been hit by the once-in-a-century pandemic that China allowed to spread around the globe.

One morning a few years ago, Amanda Patten, 26, invited five strangers into her home in Cincinnati. She cleared the toys off of the couch and offered everyone a seat. For three hours, she answered questions about her childhood, her hopes and fears for her own kids, and her news-consumption habits.The visitors were from E.W. Scripps, a broadcasting corporation that owns 60 TV stations in 42 markets, and they were doing something unheard-of for a news-media company.

In a strip mall just off Houston’s NASA Parkway is a restaurant called Frenchie’s Italian Cuisine. You wouldn’t know it from the unassuming beige storefront, but inside, Frenchie’s looks like a museum. The walls are covered in framed pictures of smiling astronauts, in their blue jumpsuits and puffy spacesuits, holding up bubble helmets and model spaceships.