There is such a thing as too much history. Although this may be a strange reflection for a historian who has just finished a world history in a time of European and Middle Eastern war, the fetishistic obsession with curated versions of nations and empires in the past can blind one to the present and what really matters: how people and their families today wish to live. Yet history is a deathless arsenal of stories and facts that teaches us how humans lived and also sometimes how we should live.

Are Americans one people, or many? Our national motto, “e pluribus unum,” seems to offer the definitive answer to the question: We are many, but one. Even on the verge of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln insisted in his first inaugural address that Americans were united by “the mystic chords of memory” stretching back to Revolutionary battlefields and Patriot graves.

A couple of years ago, an old flame of mine had the nerve to start dating a new woman. He had posted a photo with her on Instagram; they were wrapped around each other, smiling, with a cheeky caption that I took to be some sort of lovers’ inside joke. I clicked on her username. She had a public Instagram account, so I was free to peruse her photos until I reached her high-school graduation, or until I made myself cry, whichever came first. I noticed she’d posted an Instagram story that day.

If there’s one message that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign to redefine healthy eating has imparted, it’s that Americans need to eat their beef. In January, the health secretary rolled out the new food pyramid—with a marbled rib eye in the pole position. Weeks later, Kennedy modeled good beef-eating behavior, posing for a pic on his 72nd birthday while tucking in to a bone-in steak decked out with candles.

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Donald Trump’s efforts to change the architecture of Washington, D.C. have included projects such as repainting the Reflecting Pool, tearing down the East Wing of the White House, and proposing the construction of a triumphal arch.

On a recent morning partway through France’s historic heat wave, Dhafer Kahri, an air-conditioning technician, let me join him on a house call to an apartment in Paris’s 16th arrondissement, where he was trying to bring a unit back to life. Kahri’s phone rang so often—several times an hour, all day long—that he worked with his AirPods in.

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For something that sounds so simple, leisure can be surprisingly difficult. Give people an hour with nothing scheduled, and many fill it with thoughts of to-dos: the unanswered email, the errand that’s been put off, the project due next week.

This article contains spoilers through the series finale of The Bear.
If an episode of The Bear were a dish being served at the show’s titular restaurant, the recipe would probably go something like this: In a saucepan, combine headache-inducing worry, financial pressure, and familial dysfunction. Stir vigorously until the mixture boils over and causes the staff to scream.