I don’t know how the beetles got in.
Landed like plums rolling off a cloud,
soft erasers inside their mouths,
my dreams were first to go. Siphoned
out via bullet holes, like honeybees
smoked out their hive, chorus of black
lines, burned thick and dark, gilded
grill marks, hexagon honey stuck
to their eyes, there are six sides
to loneliness. Ballistic blowfly,
visions of parallel lives, you hide,
what you hold. Blind to the brilliance,
I died with my eyes at an angle
to my skull.

In recent years, an impressive number of particularly charming actors have played rabbis on TV. Adam Brody, Sarah Sherman, Daveed Diggs, and Kathryn Hahn have all donned a kippah, wrapped themselves in a tallis, and shown how fun loving (even sexy) it can feel to carve a path between the rock of tradition and the hard place of modernity. I’m not sure why progressive rabbis are the clerics to whom pop culture tends to assign this role, as opposed to, say, quirky priests or wacky imams.

On a trip to my local Joann craft-supply store recently, I felt a cheap thrill. An extremely cheap thrill. Huge signs posted on the front doors read STORE CLOSING and ENTIRE STORE 30%–70% OFF. One screamed NOTHING HELD BACK, which struck me as both desperate and alluring.
I walked in and wandered up and down the picked-over aisles, skimming my fingers across the flannels, fleeces, silks, and satins. Buckets of yarn beckoned.

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Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition.
Not all movies are meant to be watched twice. Some leave a glancing effect; others emanate so much intensity that the idea of sitting through them again feels unbearable.

The June issue of The Atlantic features an excerpt from Sam Tanenhaus’s long-awaited biography of the conservative intellectual and polemicist William F. Buckley Jr. That book—Buckley: The Life and Revolution That Changed America—will be published by Penguin Random House on June 3. Buckley exerted enormous influence not only on American politics but also on how political debate was waged (more and more, on television).