Saturday Night Live returned last night after a six-week hiatus, ready to tackle a turbulent period that included the insurrection at the Capitol, the inauguration of Joe Biden, and the second impeachment of Donald Trump—the kind of chaotic political fodder that’s been a mainstay of the show for the past four years.

Jorge Luis Borges was a poet, but he was also a dreamer of wild fiction, a thoughtful essayist, and—in all of his works—a philosopher. He was always pulling at the threads of perspective and reality, questioning his own point of view. In “The Other Tiger,” he marvels at the power of the creature in his mind’s eye, envisioned with such detail that he writes about the bony structure / that quivers under the glowing skin.

Until vaccines against COVID-19 are available to all, the public will need two things: a reason for hope and a vision of how to live more safely and productively in the meantime. For both, Americans can look to the examples set by a number of colleges and universities—a surprising turn, perhaps, given the widespread anxieties that these institutions’ reopening in the fall created.

Chloé Valdary is the founder of Theory of Enchantment, a diversity and resilience training company that the 27-year-old African American entrepreneur runs from Downtown Brooklyn.

If you’ve ever seen a picture of a lost city—maybe in the pages of National Geographic or in the first Tomb Raider movie—you were probably looking at the crumbling temples and immense, empty canals of Angkor, the former capital of the Khmer empire in present-day Cambodia. Thick tree roots have wrapped themselves around massive blocks of stone in its legendary palaces. Flowers grow from cracks in hundreds of ornate towers carved with the Buddha’s serene face.