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Over the next several days, many of Donald Trump’s Cabinet selections will appear before the Senate for confirmation hearings.

My parents spend half of the year on an island off the coast of North Carolina where many of the residents speak a distinct and alienating dialect of English—the Ocracoke or “Hoi Toider” brogue, which the BBC describes as “a mix of Elizabethan English, Irish and Scottish accents, and pirate slang.” The other half, they spend around their four children, who are in their 20s and early 30s and also speak in a manner that can be perplexing.

For the past three years, Russia has used missiles and drones to locate and destroy vital infrastructure in Ukraine—power plants, dams, electrical-transmission lines. Everyone understands that these attacks are acts of war, no matter how steadfastly President Vladimir Putin describes them as part of a “special military operation.” When Russia targets other European neighbors, though, the West resorts to its own euphemisms to avoid directly acknowledging what Putin is doing.

A century after your death, what traces of your life will remain? Perhaps someone might find discarded clothing or a few boxes’ worth of cherished effects: china, jewelry, a watch, a toy. Your signature on official forms may linger, along with plenty of photos, likely in an outdated file format.

My local independent bookstore has a corner devoted to what it calls “Palestinian Stories.” The small display of books, which went up in October 2023, is a grim collection of mostly nonfiction titles, such as Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 and Ben Ehrenreich’s The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine.