For the man getting home late to the line. He calls calling with a
miniaturist’s awareness (cold to touch), though somewhere still on
fire. He couldn’t write to save the monsoon in his eye. Twinkling
cities in competing moats. Louchely entering together the lesser gulf
as it hammers down like fibers
in a cut card mill
before the shower.

The novelist Muriel Spark died almost 20 years ago, but she still regularly appears on lists of top comic novelists to read on this subject or that. Crave more White Lotus–level skewering of the ridiculous rich? Try Memento Mori, The New York Times suggests. An acerbic take on boring dinner parties? Symposium.

Vladimir Putin is coming to America, despite the international warrant for the Russian president’s arrest, despite his years of hostile threats against NATO, and despite him showing no remorse for his invasion of a sovereign nation.
None of that matters to President Donald Trump, who announced Friday night that he would meet the globally shunned leader this Friday in Alaska.

Something is rotten in the village of Little Nettlebed. There isn’t enough rain. A sturgeon of ungodly proportions has been beached on the bank of the Thames. Worse, five sisters have tried to save its life, defying both the mysterious beneficence that brought the fish to shore and local norms dictating that it must be killed for food. In the glow of the late-afternoon sun, the world is no longer beautiful.

No one can say that the Trump administration is entirely against alternative energy. In his first bold policy stroke as NASA’s interim head, Sean Duffy has directed the agency to put a 100-kilowatt nuclear reactor on the moon by decade’s end. This is not a lark. If humanity means to establish a permanent settlement on the moon, nuclear power will almost certainly be essential to its operation.

When gunfire pelted the Atlanta-based headquarters of the CDC yesterday, hundreds of employees were inside the campus’s buildings. The experience was terrifying. But some of the employees were not particularly shocked. “I’m actually surprised it didn’t happen sooner,” a nearly 20-year veteran of the agency told me. (She, like others I spoke with for this article, requested anonymity out of fear of losing her job.)
This was, in one sense, the first attack of its kind on the CDC.

If still-life painting is the art of arresting decay, then it makes a lot of sense that Rachel Ruysch grew up to become one of the greatest still-life painters in the history of art. In the 17th century, Frederik Ruysch, her father, was an internationally famous embalmer. His job was to make a natural object seem permanently alive and pleasing to the eye. He could transform the corpse of a bullet-pierced admiral into the “fresh carcase of an infant,” Samuel Johnson once said.