Pop-culture gossip is like catnip for Saturday Night Live. Celebrity misbehavior has fueled many, many of the show’s sketches over the years—some of them quick-witted and clever, some of them bizarre duds. But not all celebrity news is created equal: There’s Will Smith’s Oscars slap, and then there’s the befuddling recent fallout of the YouTube stars the Try Guys.

On Saturday, the Ukrainians hit the Kerch Strait Bridge, which leads from Russia to Crimea, with something—a missile, explosives planted by naval commandos, a truck laden with explosives. No one who knows is saying for sure. As is the way of military commentary in 2022, experts—real, fake, self-proclaimed—are studying the imagery floating around Twitter and insisting that they know just what happened.

When “Litany for Dictatorships” was published in 1935, the world was gripped by cruelty. Adolf Hitler had established concentration camps and—the same month the poem appeared in print—passed the Nuremberg Laws stripping German Jews of citizenship. Joseph Stalin controlled the Soviet Union through secret police and Gulags, while encouraging neighbors to turn one another in for supposed disloyalty.

As election returns rolled in on the evening of November 3, 2020, a local news host in Phoenix was starring in an intensely awkward broadcast. The Fox 10 anchor Kari Lake was refusing to call Arizona for Joe Biden—even though her network had already done so. “If [voters] wake up tomorrow or two days later and it flips,” she insisted, her pendant earrings swinging, “there’s distrust in the system.” Lake’s co-anchor, John Hook, lost patience.

Hajera gave birth to her daughter, Sarah, in Kabul two weeks after the Taliban took over Afghanistan last summer. Hajera is 35 and worked as a government economist. She and her husband already had two sons and were happy to be welcoming a daughter. But they soon lost their jobs, and the Taliban erased the rights women had gained over the previous two decades.An Afghan women’s-rights activist had connected me with Hajera, who was too afraid to share her last name.