It feels like a sin against the sanctitude of being alive to put a dollar value on one year of a human life. A year spent living instead of dead is obviously priceless, beyond the measure of something so unprofound as money. But it gets a price tag in the world of economic models. Different agencies and organizations use different estimates—no one can seem to agree on the precise going rate. But according to the Environmental Protection Agency, a statistical lifetime is valued at about $11.

It’s still a mystery why the Coen brothers stopped working together. The pair made 18 movies as a duo, from 1984’s Blood Simple to 2018’s The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, setting a new standard for black comedy in American cinema. None of those movies was flatly bad (although The Ladykillers comes close, I don’t mind it); many of them were masterpieces. Then, a few years ago, they split up—allegedly, Ethan Coen had grown tired of the grind, though neither of them ever spoke about it on the record.

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IBM’s new pension program may not change the game for workers. But it raises big questions about what companies owe their employees, and how existing retirement structures could better serve them.
First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:
Texas’s social-media law is dangerous.

Last week, as American sports fans’ eyes moved from football to baseball, a great cry—or at least a significant grumble—was heard from MLB players arriving at spring training: The new uniforms are bad.
The MLB announced the uniforms, which have been redesigned by Nike for all of the league’s 30 teams, in a press release last Tuesday. It included praise from some of the biggest baseball names on Nike’s endorsement roster.

In my childhood home, an often-repeated phrase was “All disease begins in the gut.” My dad, a health nut, used this mantra to justify his insistence that our family eat rice-heavy meals, at the exact same time every day, to promote regularity and thus overall health. I would roll my eyes, dubious that his enthusiasm for this practice was anything more than fussiness.
Now, to my chagrin, his obsession has become mainstream.

As a progressive legal scholar and activist, I never would have expected to end up on the same side as Greg Abbott, the conservative governor of Texas, in a Supreme Court dispute. But a pair of cases being argued next week have scrambled traditional ideological alliances.

After a two-day hearing in Fulton County, Georgia, we are where we were before. The defendants, charged by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis with conspiring to overturn the 2020 presidential election, attempted to make a case for her disqualification under Georgia law. In my view, they failed. The standard for disqualification has not been met, and the judge should not disqualify Willis.
But that is not the end of it.

The long decline of the Republican Party’s internationalist wing may have reached a tipping point.
Since Donald Trump emerged as the GOP’s dominant figure in 2016, he has championed an isolationist and nationalist agenda that is dubious of international alliances, scornful of free trade, and hostile to not only illegal but also legal immigration.

Photographs by Daniel Jack Lyons
Jodie Foster has spent much of her career playing the lonely woman under pressure. A young FBI agent-in-training having an underground tête-à-tête with a cannibalistic serial killer. A scientist launching into space, solo. A mild-mannered radio host who becomes a vigilante after strangers assault her and kill her boyfriend. A mother whose child vanishes in the middle of a transatlantic flight.