For more than four months, since this hurricane season began, the Atlantic has been eerily placid—a remarkable stretch without a single hurricane. That prolonged calm has been rudely interrupted by Hurricane Isaias, a Category 3 fastball that is bearing down on the Gulf Coast and is expected to make landfall this evening near the Alabama-Florida line.

Before the mid-19th century, executions in America were presumptively public. Most prisoners were hanged on a gallows, following an hours-long affair that began with the condemned person’s exit from jail accompanied by ministers, the sheriff and his deputies, and sometimes a military escort. Spectators joined the humiliating procession, gathering by the thousands to watch the noose lowered over the prisoner’s neck.

Yesterday, in an interview aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the United States would soon carry out its first public execution since the 1930s. “We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it,” he said. Pentagon officials later confirmed that the execution will be livestreamed. The condemned man is former Major Nidal Hasan, who shouted “God is great” in Arabic before murdering 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009.

The week has a heartbeat, and its rhythm is changing.
When Neal Caren, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, recently dug into data from the American Time Use Survey to look at when people were hanging with their friends over the course of a week, he mapped out a pattern that reminded him of an EKG. He saw steady pulses of friend time every weekday evening after work hours, and then bigger spikes on Friday and Saturday nights—like an arrhythmia caused by having fun.

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The literature of ancient Greece and Rome seems to be in vogue. This summer, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey turned Homer’s epic poems into best sellers, and yesterday the Nobel Prize was awarded to Anne Carson, a poet who has made a career of repurposing ancient-Greek works.