The much-ballyhooed bipartisan infrastructure agreement was always a shaky proposition. When President Joe Biden announced the accord last month—“We have a deal,” the beaming president proclaimed outside the White House, flanked by 10 beaming senators—all the negotiators had agreed to was an outline, a three-page sketch of how to spend $1.2 trillion on roads, bridges, rail, and broadband, and a list of “options” of how to pay for it.

We are a nation of under-doers and over-doers. Every time the government has issued COVID-19 guidance throughout the pandemic, one slice of America has ignored it, while another slice has followed it to the letter, and then some. The government says stay six feet apart? Some Americans scoffed, while others didn’t set foot inside a restaurant for a year. The CDC’s decision to let vaccinated people go unmasked is shaping up to be another such cleavage.

In the cats-versus-dogs debate, pop culture tends to skew in one direction. Many animated movies portray cats as manipulative and nefarious, and dogs as the (less canny) embodiments of loyalty and love. Cats also have a long association with the witchy and supernatural, underscoring their folkloric legacy as otherworldly beings. While some recent works have broadened depictions of felines, a new series from Netflix does the same for the humans who love them.

At a county health department near my hometown in rural Arkansas, almost everyone who comes in for a COVID-19 test is congested and short of breath, with a sore throat and muscle aches. They might have the flu, except for the added telltale symptom of this coronavirus: the loss of taste and smell. Many of the patients now are younger than those in previous months; a nurse who works there told me she saw two cases of young children in one day.