In early September of 2020, Joe Biden, then the Democratic nominee for president, promised to put values—values held in contempt, he argued, by the man he would go on to defeat—at the center of American foreign policy. To act on his promise, he said, he would do something Donald Trump had neglected to do. “I’ll meet with His Holiness the Dalai Lama,” Biden said.

it could’ve been an email,
or a knife gliding over the bruise of an apple,
a surgical sweetness.
it could’ve been a pebble,
a vagrant lullaby,
a slow walk through the neighborhood
when spring let loose
and buckled through the field,
throwing its head back.
delight will not ruin me.
i walk over the melting roof,
watch the space between the buildings.  
and none of this, no scent, no miracle,
is original.

For some, the world suddenly goes blurry. Others describe it as having a dust storm in your eyes, or being shaken up in a snow globe. People might see flashing lights or black spots drifting through their field of vision, or acquire a sudden sensitivity to light, worse than walking into the sunlight after having your eyes dilated. If patients aren’t treated, some will inevitably go blind.
Many medical providers never suspect the culprit: syphilis.

Among prominent economists, no one was more explicit than former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers in warning that President Joe Biden and the Federal Reserve Board risked igniting inflation by overstimulating the economy in 2021. Soaring prices over the next few years proved Summers correct.
Now Summers sees the risk of another price shock in the economic plans of former President Donald Trump.

Until Thursday’s verdict in Donald Trump’s hush-money trial, whose effect on the presidential campaign remains to be seen, virtually nothing had changed in the race for months: Poll after poll has shown President Joe Biden behind—down slightly in the “blue wall” states of the industrial Midwest, and more substantially in the Sun Belt.

Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings or watch full episodes here.  
This week, a New York jury found Donald Trump guilty of engaging in a financial scheme to pay hush money to the adult-film actor Stormy Daniels.

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.
In 2018, Deborah Copaken listed “30 simple shared truths” she learned at her 30th Harvard reunion. Among them:
“No one’s life turned out exactly as anticipated, not even for the most ardent planner.

This article was originally published by Undark Magazine.
When Mana Parast was a medical resident in 2003, she had an experience that would change the course of her entire career: her first fetal autopsy.
The autopsy, which pushed Parast to pursue perinatal and placental pathology, was on a third-trimester stillbirth. “There was nothing wrong with the baby; it was a beautiful baby,” she recalls. We’re not done, she remembers her teacher telling her. Go find the placenta.

In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared “unconditional war on poverty,” and since then, federal spending on anti-poverty initiatives has steadily ballooned. The federal government now devotes hundreds of billions of dollars a year to programs that exclusively or disproportionately benefit low-income Americans, including housing subsidies, food stamps, welfare, and tax credits for working poor families. (This is true even if you exclude Medicaid, the single-biggest such program.

According to forecasts from a range of sources, the hurricane season that begins today could be the direst in recorded history. Abnormally warm waters in the Atlantic Ocean, coupled with the persistently strong winds formed by an emerging La Niña weather front, create dangerous conditions that could lead to as many as 25 named storms in the North Atlantic, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.