William Faulkner and his wife, Estelle, stand outside their home, in Oxford, Mississippi, in the spring of 1955. (Bettmann / Getty)In June 2005, Oprah Winfrey announced a surprising choice as the 55th selection for her influential book club. The coming months would be, she proclaimed, a “Summer of Faulkner,” focused on three of his novels—As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, and Light in August, available in a special 1,100-page box set weighing in at two pounds.

Simone Noronha“To tolerate existence, we lie, and we lie above all to ourselves,” Elena Ferrante observed in a 2002 interview. “Falsehoods protect us, mitigate suffering, allow us to avoid the terrifying moment of serious reflection, they dilute the horrors of our time, they even save us from ourselves.

A few days before Donald Trump’s inauguration, then-National Security Adviser Susan Rice held a press briefing in her office to talk about the threats she saw on the horizon as Barack Obama’s presidency drew to a close. “What keeps you up at night? one reporter asked toward the end of the meeting. Her answer: a pandemic that spirals out of control.

America has botched its coronavirus response in so, so many ways since the pandemic began. Even in a country that stands apart from the world for its horrific failures, there have been as many leadership bungles as there are states: Some failed to heed early warnings. Others refused to learn the lessons of outbreaks that came before theirs. Still others played politics instead of following science. And then there’s Georgia.Georgia’s response to the pandemic has not been going well.

Despite the continued spread of the coronavirus, many colleges around the country plan to welcome students back to campus over the coming weeks.Colleges want to reopen for good, nontrivial reasons. Administrators believe that most students learn better when they are physically assembled in the same place. And they know that the American college experience, at any rate, has long been about more than the classroom.

News of scientific developments now reaches a much wider audience in this pandemic. But not all science news is created equal, and the difference between a meaningful study and a meaningless one is often distinguished only through terms many Americans aren’t familiar with.