Just since last November, the most closely watched measure of consumer confidence about the economy has soared by about 25 percent. That’s among the most rapid improvements recorded in years for the University of Michigan’s Index of Consumer Sentiment, even after a slight decline in the latest figures released yesterday.  
And yet, even as consumer confidence has rebounded since last fall, President Joe Biden’s approval rating has remained virtually unchanged—and negative.

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“There is nothing quite so vulnerable as a person caught up in a lyric impulse,” Roy Blount Jr. wrote in our February 1982 issue. What makes the situation even more vulnerable is to be among the group that Blount calls “the singing-impaired.

The writer Rob Henderson recalls a classmate at Yale, where he was an undergraduate, telling him that “monogamy is kind of outdated.” But she was raised by monogamous parents and said that she planned to have a traditional marriage.
Henderson shares that anecdote in his new memoir, Troubled, an account of his upbringing in foster care and his escape into the Air Force and higher education. For him, “Monogamy is kind of outdated” is a “luxury belief,” a term he coined.

When the Universal Music Group decided to pull its songs from TikTok last month in the midst of a protracted rights dispute, some called the move the “nuclear option.” UMG handles major artists including Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny, and isn’t music the lifeblood of the social app? Billboard has a separate chart for the most popular songs on TikTok; artists such as Lil Nas X effectively owe their career to the platform.

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
The temptation for a writer to turn their memoir into a self-help book must be strong. The author has looked back at her life, her choices, her blunders, her triumphs. And through this process of retrospection, she might see lessons learned that apply not just to her, but really, to everyone.

For nearly the entirety of the past decade, a question has stalked, and sometimes consumed, American politics: Why do Donald Trump and his acolytes heap such reverent praise on Vladimir Putin? The question is born of disbelief.