This article contains spoilers through the third season of Master of None.Of all the unnerving things I’ve witnessed in the anxiety cauldron that is New York’s Penn Station, one stands out. Back in 2019, I noticed a couple arguing in the middle of the squalid Amtrak waiting area. There was something transfixing about their escalating row—even before one of them stormed off, presumably leaving the other to board a train alone or cancel their trip altogether.

The thousand or so wolves that live in Wisconsin may inadvertently be doing a service to humanity, saving the lives of dozens of people. On average, 19,757 Wisconsinites collide with deer every year, leading to about 477 injuries and eight deaths. But according to Jennifer Raynor, a natural-resource economist at Wesleyan University, more would do so if wolves weren’t around.

Even when our most basic civilizational values are in dispute, there are a few sets of rules and regulations that we nevertheless manage to share. The laws of the sea, for example, or the norms governing the conduct of air-traffic controllers. Pilots of any nationality, even when flying to Caracas, Havana, or Pyongyang, have no reason to believe that the instructions they receive from the ground are political or deceitful, or meant to achieve any purpose other than a safe landing.

The three teenagers—two boys and a girl—could not have known what clues their lungs would one day yield. All they could have known, or felt, before they died in Germany in 1918 was their flu-ravaged lungs failing them, each breath getting harder and harder. Tens of millions of people like them died in the flu pandemic of 1918; they happened to be three whose lungs were preserved by a farsighted pathologist.