Kaid Benfield

Last Thursday, a group of 20 mothers in Boston met up outside a local high school. Their goal wasn’t to socialize, drink wine, or even share COVID-related tips. They were there for one reason and one reason only: to stand in a circle—socially distanced, of course—and scream.

“I knew that we all needed to come together and support each other in our rage, resistance and disappointment,” Sarah Harmon, the group’s organizer, wrote on Instagram before the gathering. Ironically, some 20 other moms who had RSVP’d “yes” had to cancel at the last minute because they or other family members had COVID, Harmon told me.

When mothers feel there is no more appealing way to spend an evening than to yell into the frigid January darkness, something is very, very wrong. Parents in the United States are living through a universally terrible moment. For two years, we’ve been spending each and every day navigating an ever-changing virus that’s threatening not only our well-being but our livelihoods. The situation has reached a fever pitch during this wave, when we’re expected to function normally even though nothing is normal and none of the puzzle pieces in front of us fit together.

Updated at 5:20 p.m. ET on January 21, 2022

The Rivian R1T, the $75,000 debut pickup from America’s new electric-truck maker, is unlike any vehicle I have ever driven.

It is, first, really big: 18 feet long and six feet tall, it weighs three and a half tons, heavier than a white rhinoceros or a tricked-out Ford F-150. But this girth is belied by everything else about it. The R1T has an aesthetic unity missing from every mass-market automobile on the road, Teslas included. Like an iPhone, it feels like a cohesive product designed by a single team: The same colors, angles, and textures appear on its seat cushions, its door interiors, its onscreen interface. It can even be—just look at the yellow flashlight hidden in its passenger-side door—downright charming.

“It started as a joke, actually,” Elena Korngold told me. But late last month, the 40-something radiologist from Portland, Oregon, and her family decided that their unsanctioned scheme couldn’t hurt. Elena began the proceedings by unwrapping the sterile swab from a BinaxNOW rapid test for SARS-CoV-2, part of the family’s dwindling supply. She swirled the swab around the insides of each of her nostrils. Then she passed it to her husband, a cardiologist named Ethan, who swirled it around the insides of each of his nostrils. Then their two children did the same. It was “like some sort of religious ritual,” Elena said.

The snot-saturated swab went into the test card. The test card showed a negative result. The Korngolds, now bonded by something even thicker than blood, went to their dinner party. Nobody got COVID.

To hear Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema tell it, they hoped to defend voting rights. They also hoped, even more fervently, to defend the Senate filibuster.

In the end, they did neither.

It’s true that by joining their Republican colleagues this week to reject a rules change and block a pair of voting-rights bills, the two Democrats ensured that the filibuster remains temporarily intact. But Manchin and Sinema’s goal was not merely to block a piece of legislation or preserve a procedural rule in the short term. As Manchin himself put it, “We must never, ever, ever, ever tear down the only wall, the necessary fence, that this nation has against the excesses of the executive branch and the resultant haste and tyranny of the majority.”

Yesterday, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis sent a letter to the chief judge of the Fulton County Superior Court requesting to empanel a special grand jury “for the purpose of investigating the facts and circumstances relating directly or indirectly to possible attempts to disrupt the lawful administration of the 2020 elections in the State of Georgia.”

The request was triggered by the reluctance of key witnesses, including Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, to cooperate without being subpoenaed to testify. The special-purpose grand jury wouldn’t have the power to bring indictments, but it “may make recommendations concerning criminal prosecution as it shall see fit.”

With this letter, Willis brought back to the fore the actions surrounding the 2020 election contest by former President Donald Trump that are most suspect under both state and federal criminal law. The district attorney seeks a special grand jury with good reason, as Trump appears to have crossed the line into outright illegality, and that behavior merits a serious and thorough criminal investigation.

Even before Omicron hit the United States in full force, most of our bodies had already wised up to SARS-CoV-2’s insidious spike—through infection, injection, or both. By the end of October 2021, some 86.2 percent of American immune systems may have glimpsed the virus’s most infamous protein, according to one estimate; now, as Omicron adds roughly 800,000 known cases to the national roster each day, the cohort of spike-zero Americans, the truly immunologically naive, is shrinking fast. Virginia Pitzer, an epidemiologist at Yale’s School of Public Health and one of the scientists who arrived at the 86.2 percent estimate, has a guess for what fraction of the U.S. population will have had some experience with the spike protein when the Omicron wave subsides: 90 to 95 percent.

Hundreds of thousands of books are published in the United States each year, and this dramatic influx of titles largely runs the calendars of the publishing and media industries—usually to the detriment of any work that isn’t brand new. Even best sellers or novels by famous authors get lost in the deluge, and books that were beloved on release can fall off readers’ radar quickly. But many were popular or critically acclaimed for good reasons, and they’re worth revisiting.

Here is a list of 15 fiction titles from the past two decades that you may have forgotten about in the years since. Some are from familiar names such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Margaret Atwood, and Louise Erdrich; others are by authors you may not have heard of at all. These selections include plenty of drama, and there’s an undercurrent of gentle comedy, even in novels with dark themes or plots. Their characters define love in many different ways, and they seek fulfillment across geographies and time periods—contemporary London, Vichy France, Nigeria, North Korea. Ultimately, these stories are bound together by a compassion for their characters’ struggles and shortcomings—a quality that only our finest writers are able to cultivate.

Coaches such as David Culley, just fired from the Houston Texans, and Brian Flores, of the Miami Dolphins until very recently, face a major problem in the NFL. It’s not their pedigree. It’s not their experience. It’s not their ability to relate to players. It’s not their offensive or defensive schemes.

It’s that they’re Black.

That conclusion might seem harsh, but it’s been almost 20 years since the NFL adopted the Rooney Rule, which was intended to give candidates of color a better shot at head-coaching jobs and was eventually expanded to cover front-office openings as well. What the league has to show for its efforts in 2022 is the Pittsburgh Steelers’ Mike Tomlin as the lone Black head coach in the league. The reason is painfully obvious: In a league where roughly 70 percent of players are Black, owners have no real interest in seeing Black coaches thrive.

Over the past two years of the pandemic, old, reliable shows with new lives on streaming platforms have been a mainstay for audiences. (Who wants new plotlines when headlines about COVID-19 variants offer enough of that already?) And the deepest well for comfort watches may be the ’90s sitcom. Friends, Seinfeld, and the rest of “Must See TV” add up to hundreds of hours of cheery sets filled with familiar faces.

Of these shows, Frasier may be the strangest—as well as the most rewatchable. The sitcom topped ratings charts and won 37 Emmys in its 11-year run, but the fact that, over the course of a decade, one of the most popular shows in America followed two opera-loving snobs playfully sniping at each other still seems like something of a marvel.

For many months now, Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine has been slowly making its way into smaller arms in smaller doses—from teens to adolescents to elementary-school-age kids in the fall. Now it’s just the under-5 crowd left, and the word on the lips of parents raring to protect their children is still, simply, when. Somehow, no one yet seems to know.

Back in September, the party line was that under-5 trial data would arrive “before the end of the year,” as Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla declared at The Atlantic Festival. Those data never appeared. Instead, the week before Christmas, Pfizer announced in a maddeningly cryptic press release that two little-kid-size doses of vaccine had failed to elicit a hefty-enough immune response in 2-, 3-, and 4-year olds in late-stage trials. (Doubly dosed kids in the six-month-to-2-year-old range, though, did produce enough antibodies to satisfy the company’s criteria.) But the company had a plan—researchers would test a third injection eight weeks after the second—and a new timeline, with data arriving in the “first half of 2022,” maybe April-ish. Add to that the few weeks the FDA typically takes to review the data submitted for emergency-use authorization, and the earliest shots for this group are still probably two or three months away.