Every weekday evening, our editors guide you through the biggest stories of the day, help you discover new ideas, and surprise you with moments of delight. Subscribe to get this delivered to your inbox.Dina Litovsky / ReduxThe United States is home to just 4 percent of the world’s population but a quarter of its confirmed coronavirus cases and deaths.

On this episode of the podcast Social Distance, Katherine Wells and James Hamblin investigate a new pandemic-compatible hobby.Listen to the episode here:Subscribe to Social Distance on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or another podcast platform to receive new episodes as soon as they’re published.Some highlights from their conversation:Jason Ward: The birds that you’re seeing in your yard or in your neighborhood are not there year-round.

A giant dies and the world left behind feels a bit more tawdry and mundane and uninspiring and small. A melancholy descends, filled with insecurity about the present and seductive nostalgia for the certainty of the past. Where have the great leaders gone, one wonders—the great causes and morality, the clarity and vision? The death of the Nobel Prize–winning Irish politician John Hume is such a moment.

Almost as soon as Serena Lyn stepped back inside the Magic Kingdom, she burst into tears. It’d been four months since the theme park and crown jewel of Walt Disney World’s Florida stronghold had shut down because of the coronavirus pandemic. Before the parks closed, Lyn had been visiting them twice a week; it was part of her job as a Disney blogger and an Instagrammer with more than 71,000 followers.

In recent years, as SpaceX launched rocket after rocket without incident, liftoff became the company’s second-most-impressive feat. The truly dazzling moment came after the rocket had left the ground, and its booster—or, sometimes, two boosters—reversed course high up in the air, flipped around, and glided back down, landing upright on the ground or a barge floating in the Atlantic Ocean, ready to be refurbished and used again.