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This time last year, I revisited an 1862 Atlantic article in which Henry David Thoreau argued that autumn wasn’t getting enough attention. At the time, I noted that fall didn’t exactly seem to be slipping from public consciousness—a trip to Starbucks makes that clear enough.

The first person who taught me something about death and defiance was the mother of a family friend, an older woman who had moved from Punjab to the United States to be closer to her son. I remember her as delicate and draped always in pastel salwar kameezes. After she was diagnosed with breast cancer, which moved quickly to claim her bones and her brain, her desire to return to Punjab intensified.

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In our scattered social-media age, a strange little problem has emerged: It is hard to figure out how to invite people to a party. A slew of digital tools is available—Paperless Post, Instagram stories, Partiful, a simple group text—that should theoretically make it easier to reach people.

President Joe Biden’s actions over many months suggest that Israel can determine when and where the United States goes to war in the Middle East. That is unacceptable, and the next American president must change this dynamic.
In one framing, the past 12 months have witnessed a remarkable display of America’s might and resolve in the Middle East—especially relative to our principal adversary in the region, Iran.

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Shortly after Facebook became popular, the company launched an ad network that would allow businesses to gather data on people and target them with marketing. So many issues with the web’s social-media era stemmed from this original sin. It was from this technology that Facebook, now Meta, would make its fortune and become dominant.

Terence Tao, a mathematics professor at UCLA, is a real-life superintelligence. The “Mozart of Math,” as he is sometimes called, is widely considered the world’s greatest living mathematician. He has won numerous awards, including the equivalent of a Nobel Prize for mathematics, for his advances and proofs. Right now, AI is nowhere close to his level.
But technology companies are trying to get it there.

Of the first three elements to appear after the Big Bang, only one is available to buy as a bath soak. The Sads Smashing Anti-Stress Bath Treatment, which comes in shiny silver packaging, lists lithium as an ingredient and promises to take users “from weighed down to mellowed out.” It’s one of dozens of over-the-counter lithium supplements that claim to support a healthy mood.