Jonathan Neman really seemed to think he was onto something. Last week, in a lengthy, now-deleted post on LinkedIn, the CEO and co-founder of the upscale salad chain Sweetgreen expounded on a topic that might seem a little far afield for a restaurant executive: how to end the pandemic. “No vaccine nor mask will save us,” he wrote. (The vaccines, it should be noted, have so far proved to be near-miraculously effective at saving those who get them.

A now-familiar joke that started circulating within the first year or two after September 11, 2001, goes like this:
“Knock-knock!”
“Who’s there?
“9/11.”
“9/11 who?”
“You promised you’d never forget.”
The punch line, of course, refers to the refrain that became ubiquitous in the United States following the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people and shattered the country.

If you’re in the mood for ’90s nostalgia, the first episode of Impeachment: American Crime Story is a scrunchie-wearing, SlimFast-drinking, Jane magazine–reading coast down memory lane. It has shopping malls and step-aerobics classes and pagers and the Gap, where Monica Lewinsky bought a sapphire-blue collared dress that would become one of that decade’s most defining emblems.

On the verge of a landmark victory by judicial fiat, the Republican Party is being strangely quiet.As my colleague David Graham has written, Republican Party leaders and conservative intellectuals haven’t been trumpeting the Supreme Court’s decision to allow a Texas ban on abortions to go forward, which for women in the state has all but nullified the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that guaranteed the right to an abortion.

In Sally Rooney’s novels, idealistic college students espouse Marxism despite never having read any of the ideology’s foundational texts; they advocate for radicalism while keeping up their grades and wrestling with deeply traditional romantic desires. They are startlingly realistic—but their role as political actors is much fuzzier. Indeed Rooney has long been criticized as insufficiently political.