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For years, leading Republicans have chosen to let their memory lapse about things they once said about Donald Trump. It’s a disingenuous forgetting that has deepened since Trump went on trial in New York.

Joe Biden is, at the moment, losing his reelection campaign. And he is doing so while presiding over the strongest economy the United States has ever experienced.
The jobless rate is below 4 percent, as it has been for nearly two and a half years. Wage growth is moderating, but it is higher than it was at any point during the Obama administration; overall, Biden has overseen stronger pay increases than any president since Richard Nixon.

In a recent scene from HBO’s The Sympathizer, a communist spy whom we only know as the Captain (played by Hoa Xuande) sits outside a Los Angeles car-repair station, staking out the man he’s planning to kill. His target is a former senior military officer, Major Oanh, who fled with him from Vietnam to the U.S., and who is starting over as a mechanic. When the Captain learns that Oanh is importing expired Vietnamese candy as a side hustle, he confronts him. To his shock, the man embraces him.

Updated at 3:45 p.m. ET on May 20, 2024
One day the French writer Colombe Schneck, a total stranger, came to my house. She was a friend of a friend who lived in Paris, and it had somehow been arranged that she would drop by. The afternoon was gray and drizzly, and I felt slightly awkward about having this visitor I had never met coming to my house. But then she walked in, brisk, at ease. I liked her immediately. We launched right into big subjects; there was no chatter or small talk.

Of all the creatures stricken with this new and terrible H5N1 flu—the foxes, the bears, the eagles, ducks, chickens, and many other birds—dairy cattle are some of the most intimate with us. In the United States, more than 9 million milk cows live on farms, where people muck their manure, help birth their calves, tend their sick, and milk them daily.

Accidents happen everywhere, but not all accidents are equal. Many hours after initial news broke about an “incident” involving a helicopter carrying Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, the country’s state media has still not confirmed whether he is dead or alive. Various state outlets have published contradictory news—Was Raisi seen on video link after the accident? Was he not? Was the National Security Council meeting? Was it not?—signaling chaos and panic.

Whether it’s an impression from a cast member or from its teeming roster of celebrity guests, Saturday Night Live’s political sketches often favor highlighting the absurd over making a point. That approach has only snowballed in our current era, when a growing swath of politicians practically write their own punch lines.

At the start of the spring of 2015, Jeffrey, a three-year-old meerkat, was happily eating, tussling with his brothers, and surveying zoo patrons from his usual perch, his forepaws gathered and his black-tipped snout aloft. But one day in April, his caretakers discovered him in his enclosure, so weak that he could barely lift his head. By the time he was brought to Eric Baitchman, the head vet at Massachusetts’s Stone Zoo, Jeffrey was losing consciousness.

We’d gathered that day at the cafeteria’s “Black” table, cracking jokes and philosophizing during the free period that was our perk as upperclassmen. We came in different shades: bone white, tan and brownish, dark as a silhouette. One of my classmates, who fancied himself a lyricist, was insisting that Redman, a witty emcee from nearby Newark, New Jersey, was the greatest rapper ever. This was the late ’90s, and for my money, no one could compete with Jay-Z.

In 2021, on the eve of the Tokyo Olympics, 23 top Chinese swimmers tested positive for the drug trimetazidine. In its proper clinical setting, the medication is used to treat angina. But for an athlete or a coach willing to cheat, it is a performance-enhancing drug, boosting the heart muscle’s functioning. Nonprescription use of trimetazidine, or TMZ, is prohibited at all times, not just during competition; the default sanction for an athlete’s violation is a four-year ban.