I’m sure I looked comical as I staggered down a downtown San Francisco street on a recent weekday, arms full of packages—as I dropped one and bent down to pick it up, another fell, and as I tried to rein that one in, another toppled.

Yet it wasn’t funny, not really. There I was, wearing a bright-yellow safety vest and working for Amazon Flex, a program in which the e-commerce giant pays regular people to deliver packages from their own vehicles for $18 to $25 an hour, before expenses. I was racing to make the deliveries before I got a ticket—there are few places for drivers without commercial vehicles to park in downtown San Francisco during the day—and also battling a growing rage as I lugged parcels to offices of tech companies that offered free food and impressive salaries to their employees, who seemed to spend their days ordering stuff online. Technology was allowing these people a good life, but it was just making me stressed and cranky.

Jared Kushner, it seems, is feeling optimistic.

On Sunday, in his first-ever interview with a Palestinian newspaper, the U.S. president’s son-in-law and Middle East peace envoy said that despite appearances to the contrary, “prospects for peace are very much alive” and confirmed that the administration is getting ready to release its long-awaited plan for Israeli-Palestinian peace. Asked how that plan is different from previous efforts, Kushner explained he has done “a lot of listening” and is convinced the Palestinian people are “less invested in the politicians’ talking points” than they are in seeing how a deal will improve their prospects for a better life.

Given the serious risks of escalating violence, the desperate humanitarian situation in Gaza, and the continued costs of the status quo, Kushner’s desire to move forward even in the face of long odds is understandable. Unfortunately, his interview also revealed that he is living in a fantasy world and preparing an approach more likely to compound the current problems than to resolve them. The assumptions on which he appears to be basing his plan—whatever its precise contents turn out to be—are so flawed that it is fair to wonder if his aim is really to start serious negotiations, or simply to please President Trump’s base by gearing up to blame the Palestinian side for the failure to come.

White conservative evangelicals in America are anxious people. I know because I am one.

Our sense of fear, perhaps more than any other factor, explains why evangelicals voted in such large numbers for Donald Trump in 2016 and continue to support his presidency.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson once wrote, “Fear is not a Christian habit of mind.” The great poet of the Jersey shore, Bruce Springsteen, sings, “Fear’s a dangerous thing, it can turn your heart black, you can trust. It’ll take your God-filled soul and fill it with devils and dust.”

Robinson and Springsteen echo verses in nearly every book of the Bible, the sacred text that serves as the source of spiritual authority in evangelical life. Moses told the Israelites to “Fear not, stand firm, and see the salvation of the Lord, which he will work for you today.” The Hebrew God told Job: “At the destruction and famine you shall laugh, and shall not fear the beasts of the earth.” The Psalmist wrote: “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff they comfort me.”

“Silicon Valley” was not always just a name for the computer-technology industry. Today, the phrase mostly conjures up a catalog of corporate successes: Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, Facebook, Google, Apple, Uber, and all the start-ups aspiring to similar wealth and glory.

But Silicon Valley is also a real geographic place, with a real history, where real people live and work—and not just in tech, but also in its shadow.

That place can be difficult to describe to folks outside the Bay Area, because as far as places go, Silicon Valley is a pretty banal one. Seen by car (the dominant local mode of transportation), the two counties and dozen or so cities and towns that comprise the region blend into a single, seamless expanse of suburbs, strip malls, and tilt-up concrete office buildings. Starchitect-designed tech campuses have only recently begun to punctuate that monotony. The scarcity of architectural monuments and disorienting car culture make defining the heart of the area challenging. Writing for The Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal once fixed the “center” of Silicon Valley at a storage unit in Sunnyvale.

President Donald Trump’s repeated claims that the FBI planted a “spy” in his campaign has handed his associates a new way to characterize any suspicious interactions they may have had during the election: those interactions, especially those being examined by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, were an FBI setup. Mueller is investigating whether the Trump campaign abetted a Russian disinformation campaign, and whether the president sought to obstruct that investigation.

Earlier this month, The Washington Post revealed that Roger Stone and Michael Caputo, two former advisers to Trump’s campaign team of interest to special counsel Robert Mueller, were approached during the election by a Russian national who was offering dirt on Hillary Clinton. Stone and Caputo told the Post that they believe the man was acting as an informant for the FBI. The wife of another campaign aide now cooperating with Mueller, George Papadopoulos, is telling a similar story: Papadopoulos did nothing without the campaign’s consent, she has said, and was targeted by western agents trying to entrap him.

At the end of 2017, U2’s Bono made one of his periodic pronouncements about the state of rock and roll. “I think music has gotten very girly,” he told Rolling Stone. “There are some good things about that, but hip-hop is the only place for young male anger at the moment—and that’s not good … In the end, what is rock & roll? Rage is at the heart of it.” He was airing the sort of conventional wisdom you most commonly hear ranted from a barstool: Rock and roll is rooted in virility, and the genre’s decline in popularity represents a worrisome triumph of the feminine. Though such gender anxieties uncannily mirror the ones driving national politics, rock is of course bigger than one gender or one emotion—ask Joan Jett or Courtney Barnett. If angry men loom large in the genre’s history, it’s not because they have tapped into some elemental well of gender-specific sentiment. Instead, they have often made their mark by expanding the boundaries of what anger or sadness, or anger and sadness together, can sound like for guys.

Ben Jealous, a tall, gregarious man wearing a suit, stepped to the center of the room at Morgan State University. The comedian Dave Chappelle, wearing stylishly torn clothes and clutching a cup of coffee, took a seat on a table to the left. Jealous launched into one of his favorite stories, punctuated by Chappelle’s occasional interjections—the time Chappelle saved his life.

It was the early ‘90s, and the former NAACP chief was then a young activist organizing protests against Mississippi Governor Kirk Fordice, who had threatened to call out the National Guard rather than comply with a court ruling to fund his state’s historically black colleges. Fordice had suggested closing one of them and turning it into a prison. Jealous had just picked up Chappelle, his godbrother, from the airport in Mississippi. Shortly after Chappelle told Jealous that he had a dime bag of marijuana in his luggage, they were pulled over by a pair of police officers in an unmarked Ford Crown Victoria.

1. The Aristocracy Is Dead …

For about a week every year in my childhood, I was a member of one of America’s fading aristocracies. Sometimes around Christmas, more often on the Fourth of July, my family would take up residence at one of my grandparents’ country clubs in Chicago, Palm Beach, or Asheville, North Carolina. The breakfast buffets were magnificent, and Grandfather was a jovial host, always ready with a familiar story, rarely missing an opportunity for gentle instruction on proper club etiquette. At the age of 11 or 12, I gathered from him, between his puffs of cigar smoke, that we owed our weeks of plenty to Great-Grandfather, Colonel Robert W. Stewart, a Rough Rider with Teddy Roosevelt who made his fortune as the chairman of Standard Oil of Indiana in the 1920s. I was also given to understand that, for reasons traceable to some ancient and incomprehensible dispute, the Rockefellers were the mortal enemies of our clan.

In May 2016, a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat sold for $57.3 million. One year later, another painting of his from 1982, Untitled, sold for $110.5 million, making it the sixth-most-expensive work of art ever purchased at auction, and setting a record for an American artist. Basquiat is not the first painter to have a canvas sell for a price that strikes ordinary people as obscene. But when Jeffrey Deitch, a prominent curator and dealer, said after the sale, “He’s now in the same league as Francis Bacon and Pablo Picasso,” it was hard to pin down the precise meaning of the word league. Was Basquiat now considered as great an artist as Picasso? Or was he merely as expensive to own?

Basquiat became famous in the early 1980s, when the idea that artists were supposed to be commercial innocents fell apart for good, and when the idea of the “art star”—a funnily abbreviated inversion, if you think about it, of starving artist—first came into vogue. In 1985, The New York Times Magazine ran a cover story on Basquiat, titled “New Art, New Money.” Its tone was both awed and suspicious, with constant references to a hot, possibly gullible, market in contemporary art. His work was said to be selling “at a brisk pace—so brisk, some observers joked, that the paint was barely dry,” and Basquiat himself was quoted as worrying he had become a “gallery mascot.” Whatever else was true, as the art historian Jordana Moore Saggese has said since, “this was not the starving artist the public was accustomed to seeing.”

Every week for the second season of Westworld, three Atlantic staffers will discuss new episodes of HBO’s cerebral sci-fi drama.

Sophie Gilbert: So much of the last half hour of “The Passenger” felt like a series finale. Dolores was reborn (born isn’t quite the right word but we do the best we can) into Charlotte Hale’s body, waved through security protocols by a (perhaps) in-on-the-secret Stubbs, and escorted onto a boat to her new life among humans on the mainland. Maeve made a triumphant escape, and survived long enough to usher her daughter to safety in a kind of robot paradise coded by Ford. Akecheta also made it to the other side, and a reunion with Kohana that was one of the most poignant moments of the season. Sizemore went out in a blaze of glory that seemed … unnecessary, logically? (He couldn’t have bought Maeve that much time, and Hector died anyway.) Dolores somehow (it’s unclear) brought Teddy back to life and dispatched him to host Eden, even though the portal had already closed.