After Ted Hughes
Out on the moors in the late June light,
I stood where the infinite hills halved the sky
and saw where you first saw your horses.
Were they left over from a fever dream,
dropped momentarily from some other planet?
But in that instant, they existed: ten of them,
megaliths with draped manes and tilted
hind hooves; each utterly silent, unmoving
in the icy morning air. As you passed by,
the big sun erupted, darkness shook open
and showed you its fires.

On a bookshelf near my desk, I still have the souvenir United States flag that I received during my naturalization ceremony, in 1994. I remember a tenderhearted judge got emotional as the room full of immigrants swore the Oath of Allegiance and that, afterward, my family took me to Burgerville to celebrate. The next morning, my teacher asked me to explain to my classmates—all natural-born Americans—how I felt about becoming a citizen at age 13.

Late last month, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy released a document detailing its vision for scientific integrity. Its nine tenets, first laid out in President Donald Trump’s executive order for “Restoring Gold Standard Science,” seem anodyne enough: They include calls for federal and federally supported science to be reproducible and transparent, communicative of error and uncertainty, and subject to unbiased peer review.

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Announcements of yet another book-to-film adaptation are usually met with groans by fans of the source material. But sometimes a new movie can be a chance to lift the best elements of a story.

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A family vacation can seem like the solution to all of life’s tensions: You’ll spend time together, bond, and experience a new place. But travel isn’t a panacea.

The early aughts were the worst possible kind of golden age. Tans were inescapable—on Britney Spears’s midriff, on the flexing biceps outside of Abercrombie & Fitch stores. The Jersey Shore ethos of “gym, tan, laundry” infamously encapsulated an era in which tanning salons were after-school hangouts, and tanning stencils in the shape of the Playboy bunny were considered stylish. Self-tanning lotions, spray tans, and bronzers proliferated, but people still sought the real thing.