Parent diplomacy has always been a dicey endeavor for educators. The war stories teachers swap about nightmare parents are the stuff of legend. But in the decade since I started teaching in a public school outside of Boston—and particularly during the pandemic—strained conversations have become the norm. Expectations about how much teachers communicate with parents are changing, burnout is getting worse, and I’m worried about what this might mean for the profession.

Cyprus is home to 1 million or so free-roaming cats that wander its streets, parks, and even luxury resorts. They are about as numerous as people. So when a deadly cat outbreak began sweeping across the Mediterranean island this year, the humans quickly noticed something was terribly wrong.Stray and feral cats died by the thousands. Pet cats died, too.

The morning after a wedding in Vermont this summer, my friends were recovering in a hot tub while I battled a garbage disposal. And scrubbed the kitchen counter. And stripped the bed. And took out the recycling. Everyone was blissed-out at a hotel before braving the six-hour drive back to New York—except my boyfriend and me, who made the mistake of staying at an Airbnb. Despite the $95 cleaning fee, we were stuck completing a baffling list of pre-checkout chores.

Last week, the Council on Foreign Relations invited me to a roundtable discussion it will be hosting Tuesday with the president of Iran, Ebrahim Raisi, who will be in New York for the United Nations General Assembly. As a longtime member of the council, I wrote back to decline the invitation and published a brief statement about why I believe that Raisi, a man who ought to be behind bars for mass murder, must not be accorded this legitimacy.

All our pretty sons on the playground
running in bright colors, their high, bright voices ringing out.
Now the slides, now climbing, now leaping from swings.
They’re wonder-struck at the sight of
a green maple tree spilling its magic,
waving its arms at blue sky. They are so little, the language
of violence hasn’t yet entered them.
Older boys haven’t yet taught them how to be cruel.

This article originally appeared in Undark Magazine.In 2016, Ox Lennon was trying to peek in the crevices inside a pile of rocks. Lennon, who uses they/them pronouns, considered everything from injecting builders’ foam into the tiny spaces to create a mold to dumping a heap of stones into a CT scanner. Still, they couldn’t get the data they were after: how to stack rocks so that a mouse wouldn’t squeeze through, but a small lizard could hide safely inside.Lennon, then a Ph.D.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is staff writer Annie Lowrey, who covers economic policy, housing, and other related topics.

“Should I mention that I saw Anne Frank in Belsen? Do you think they’d be interested in that?” I was in my late teens when my mother was first asked to give a talk about her experiences as a German refugee and Dutch Jew in the Second World War. Until the late 1970s, people rarely asked her about it, and she didn’t want to be a bore.Then things began to change. Within a few years of her first speech, she was giving lectures in schools quite regularly.