At one point in her new book, the NPR journalist Michaeleen Doucleff suggests that parents consider throwing out most of the toys they’ve bought for their kids. It’s an extreme piece of advice, but the way Doucleff frames it, it seems entirely sensible: “Kids spent two hundred thousand years without these items,” she writes.

Editor’s Note: With Lori Gottlieb on book leave, Rebecca J. Rosen, the editor of “Dear Therapist,” begins another month as The Atlantic’s “Dear Therapist” archivist, pointing readers to some of Lori’s most beloved columns. Today marks the first day of March, the third month of Lori’s book leave. March is always a time of rebirth, a time when we look ahead to spring.

So much of the homework advice parents are given is theory-based, and therefore not entirely helpful in the chaos of day-to-day life. People are told that students should have “
This post was excerpted from Freireich and Platzer’s new book.
Because most of us are programmed to focus on present rather than future fulfillment, it’s easy to put off something we dread.

Anne Rearick / Agence vu / ReduxA gentleman comes from the East Coast to make his fortune. When the train lets him off in a dusty Wyoming town, he encounters an array of cowpunchers, card sharps, and ne’er-do-wells, whose coarse manners shock and intrigue him. At the saloon, he’s treated to their opinions on the local women, as well as one man’s boast that he never forgets a face—so long as that face is white.

They want to put out the light of God with their mouths—want, like the sovereignty of the dead, extending just short of flesh. Theirtoday is broken, they suggest tomorrow, who right now is dancing in the sun withputty over his eyes. Like an ocean coughing up trash, I’m squeezing Godout from my pores, intention throbbing like a moon. Which ofthe jokes I told was best—the difference between man and light?Light won’t ask for your tongue. Good joke, the taste of lemon.

The night that sports began shutting down was the night that the United States began shutting down. On March 11, 2020, an announcer at the Oklahoma City Thunder’s home arena told fans just before tip-off that the evening’s game had been postponed. Within an hour, the visiting Utah Jazz revealed that a player—soon identified as the center Rudy Gobert—had tested positive for COVID-19, and the NBA also declared that it was indefinitely suspending the season.

Why wouldn’t someone want a COVID-19 vaccine?Staring at the raw numbers, it doesn’t seem like a hard choice. Thousands of people are dying of COVID-19 every day. Meanwhile, out of the 75,000 people who received a shot in the vaccine trials from Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, and Novavax, zero died and none were hospitalized after four weeks.

The National Women’s Hockey League is just six years old, has only six teams, and, like many women’s professional sports leagues, has faced slow early growth. The players are part-time, often competing only on the weekends, and the salaries are small—just $7,500 a year on average. Their games are broadcast on Twitch, an online streaming platform usually used for video games. And the coronavirus pandemic ended last year’s season early.