This story contains major spoilers for the film Avatar: The Way of Water.Avatar: The Way of Water, like any good world-building sequel, introduces a deluge of new elements to its extraterrestrial setting of Pandora. There are different locations to visit, such as the home of the Metkayina, a reef-dwelling clan. There are strange species to meet, such as the whalelike tulkun.

Photographs by Acacia JohnsonStephen Payton has spent a lot of time planning for disaster. The environmental program coordinator for the Seldovia Village Tribe in Southcentral Alaska and a board member of the Seldovia Oil Spill Response Team, he’s helped organize countless drills with volunteers, preparing to respond to an oil spill in nearby Cook Inlet. Over and over, he’s practiced setting out containment booms, floating barriers designed to slow the spread of slicks.

My first true Christmas in France, 12 years ago, almost didn’t happen. The day before flying to meet my fiancée in Paris, I’d gone to a Walgreens near my parents’ house in central New Jersey to get a flu shot. Though I trust the science, and had been assured this was impossible, within 24 hours of getting jabbed I was convulsing on my mother’s couch with one of the severest fevers and respiratory infections I had ever experienced.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.This year, the state of Alabama botched three consecutive executions by lethal injection: One man died after three hours of apparent torture, while two others lived. “The state’s incompetence,” Elizabeth Bruenig wrote last month, is “a civil-rights crisis.

No country has a perfect COVID vaccination rate, even this far into the pandemic, but America’s record is particularly dismal. About a third of Americans—more than a hundred million people—have yet to get their initial shots. You can find anti-vaxxers in every corner of the country.

In 2015, an Israeli police investigation into Jewish extremism uncovered a wedding video that shocked the public. In the clip, a group of far-right revelers were captured celebrating by stabbing a picture of a Palestinian baby who had been murdered in a recent firebombing in the West Bank village of Duma, perpetrated by a settler extremist. The guests at this affair drew from the furthest reaches of the Israeli right, and included a lawyer named Itamar Ben-Gvir.

New York City in the early days of pandemic shutdowns was a horrible place to be. As fatal chaos unfolded in the hospitals, a gloriously noisy soundscape was replaced by terrifyingly constant sirens and the thrum of refrigerated morgue trucks. Anyone on the sidewalk, many of them essential workers who had no choice but to be there, moved away from other passersby in a fearful overshoot of the recommended six-foot separation.

Winter is here, and so, once more, are mask mandates. After last winter’s crushing Omicron spike, much of America did away with masking requirements. But with cases once again on the rise and other respiratory illnesses such as RSV and influenza wreaking havoc, some scattered institutions have begun reinstating them. On Monday, one of Iowa’s largest health systems reissued its mandate for staff.