When I was a kid, my dad did something on family vacations that perplexes me to this day: He ran. Every day, at least four or five miles, rising before the sun and before anyone else was awake. He wasn’t training for anything. He wasn’t trying to lose weight. There was no specific goal, no endpoint, no particular reason he couldn’t take the week off while in the greater Disney World metropolitan area, which, in July, is hotter than the surface of the sun.

Sign up for Conor’s newsletter here.As the Omicron stage of the pandemic wears on, many of you are anxious, frustrated, and incredulous or even despairing as to how others are behaving––but you’re not of like mind. Some of you believe that the response to the new variant is overwrought, while others think that it is underwhelming.

When the first season of Netflix’s Emily in Paris debuted in October 2020, it was met with both delight and ridicule: delight at its escapism into sunny France and from away the election and pandemic, but also ridicule at Lily Collins’s bubbly American abroad blithely Instagramming her croissants by the Seine. (“The whole city looks like Ratatouille!”)These reactions are not mutually exclusive though, as Emily in Paris’s many conflicted fans can attest.

In 1999, Gayl Jones published a book that reads the way jazz sounds. Her fourth novel, Mosquito, is an ambitious, experimental riff that blends historical and philosophical beats and finds connections between U.S.-Mexico border tensions and the Underground Railroad. Mosquito displayed the wide-ranging talents of a writer heralded by Toni Morrison and fresh off a National Book Award nomination. It was also the last novel Jones would publish for more than two decades.

When a health-care system crumbles, this is what it looks like. Much of what’s wrong happens invisibly. At first, there’s just a lot of waiting. Emergency rooms get so full that “you’ll wait hours and hours, and you may not be able to get surgery when you need it,” Megan Ranney, an emergency physician in Rhode Island, told me. When patients are seen, they might not get the tests they need, because technicians or necessary chemicals are in short supply.