When Bob Dole returned to the Senate in 1988 after the second of his three presidential defeats, he told the assembled crowd of staffers and supporters, “I am bloodied, but unbowed, as the poet said.” The famous quote from Invictus defined few American politicians of the 20th century as much as Dole, who died this morning at the age of 98.

“It’s a little anxious to be a very small animal entirely surrounded by water”
-Pigletthe world was already [young | sick | lost] when we came to it
we were busy looking [for | at | through] god
went to the dance and brought our new [shoes | father | flask]
borrowed a [shirt | religion | mask] & sat in the bleachers
[music | oil | trash] filled our rivers
stayed up for the after [party | life | math]
the forests were [protected | sold | ash]
wrote [letters | checks | ads] again

Mikey Saber, the preening, confident chump who’s the ostensible hero of Sean Baker’s new film, Red Rocket, enters on-screen to a loud and familiar tune: “Bye Bye Bye,” by *NSync. The song is a piece of mainstream pop from yesteryear (it’s a shiver-inducing 21 years old), and its usage in this arty indie film seems laced with irony.

At the bleakest moment in the pandemic, when you felt your most stressed, most scared, least centered, you probably heard some variation of the phrase This is really hard. Maybe you read it; maybe your manager said it to you; maybe you said it to yourself. But that’s the truth: Our nearly two years of living through a pandemic have been hard. And like everything else in the United States, that difficulty has not been evenly distributed.

Now that it’s December, you may be tempted to settle in and get cozy. That doesn’t mean your entertainment has to be bland.To help spice up this first weekend of the last month of the year, I asked our culture writer Shirley Li to pick a few spunky or nerve-wracking shows to stave off the winter slump. Happy watching.1. YellowjacketsThis new coming-of-age survival thriller is “sort of like Lost meets Lord of the Flies meets Jennifer’s Body,” Shirley tells me.

The NBA player Enes Freedom is showing the danger of attracting the wrong kind of supporters.Formerly Enes Kanter, the 29-year-old Boston Celtics center took a new surname when he became an American citizen on Monday.

For most everyone, 2021 has been a long and lonely year. Pop stars, it seems, are no exception. Although music about heartbreak has been around for as long as there’s been music, this past year’s charts have looked particularly lovelorn.Pop music has been a months-long opera of celebrity splits. We went from Olivia Rodrigo’s world-conquering “Drivers License” in January to Adele’s new album, 30, which she’s said is about “divorce, babe, divorce.

Sign up for Derek’s newsletter here.Imagine it’s November 2020, and I offer you the following vision of Joe Biden’s first year in office:Stocks will soar. Consumer-spending growth will set land-speed records, and the president will oversee the best labor market of this young century. Coming off a flash-freeze recession, the U.S. unemployment rate will dip under 5 percent, lower than it was in every month of 2016. Blessedly, pay is rising fastest for low-wage workers.