On a weekday evening in early July, Jim Lysen, a retired health-clinic director, and Ed Fallon, a grandfather and veteran, ignored the pouring summer rain as they knocked on the front door of a townhouse in an affordable-housing development on the banks of the Androscoggin River in Lewiston, Maine.“I am a volunteer with the Maine People’s Alliance, and we’re making sure people know about the child tax credit,” Lysen said.

Crucial to the upcoming family film Space Jam: A New Legacy is the premise that the historic Warner Bros. studios are built atop a supercomputer that algorithmically decides what movies should be made next. That detail is presented as a hilarious bit of sci-fi, but it also comes across as a guilty admission of the truth—that corporate cinema these days isn’t so much written as it is generated by passionless machines that recycle and smash together bits of intellectual property.

Gregory Halpern / Magnum
At the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, it was practically impossible to find hand sanitizer and toilet paper at stores around the United States. The upheaval had a dystopian feel: Some stores even ran out of sympathy cards, a reminder that we were—and still are—living in the valley of the shadow of death.

For starters, you need to know that a fish tongue is not like a human tongue. Our tongues are flexible, muscular, and magnificently mobile; they help us speak, suck, swallow, whistle, lick, taste, and tease our friends. Fish tongues—properly called basihyals—don’t do a lot of those things. They are, in their most basic form, just flat stubs of bone, perhaps topped with a scant pad of soft tissue, that protrude from the base of the mouth.

For all the passionate words President Joe Biden delivered in defense of voting rights in his speech yesterday, it was the one word he never mentioned that provoked the strongest response from civil-rights advocates: filibuster.Nowhere in his remarks did Biden utter what may go down as the political word of the year.