Reading Maxine Kumin in quarantine solitude, I’ve found something familiar in the way that little details come alive when larger, flashier things have fallen away. Kumin is known for quiet, observational poems, and “Winter’s Tale,” published in The Atlantic in 2009, is quiet both in style and subject matter. “Even from my study at the back of the house I can hear an orange drop upstairs,” she writes.

“Have you ever met anyone who’s read the party platform? I haven’t,” the former Republican House Speaker John Boehner said during a 2012 interview about his party’s manifesto. Last week, the Democratic National Committee released a draft of its new platform. But in this case, when it comes to China, the document merits a close read.

Summer blockbusters have started to look the same in recent years: iterations from the same franchises, with comic-book superheroes leading the pack again and again. But because of the coronavirus pandemic, the 2020 summer-movie season never really began. With Hollywood’s biggest films delayed for months, or indefinitely, I’ve assembled a list of unconventional and underrated movies with a much more eclectic range of heroes to cheer for or be thrilled by.

The project began, in one telling, five years ago, in a castle that overlooks the Bavarian Alps, where three dozen of the world’s most successful and rivalrous earth scientists came together for a week of cloistered meetings.They gathered, in part, out of embarrassment. For the past four decades, their field—the study of Earth’s natural phenomena, including its land, ocean, and climate—had boomed.