A quick skim of the CDC’s latest COVID guidelines might give the impression that this fall could feel a lot like the ones we had in the Before Times. Millions of Americans will be working in person at offices, and schools and universities will be back in full swing. There will be few or no masking, testing, or vaccination mandates in place. Sniffles or viral exposures won’t be reason enough to keep employees or students at home. And requirements for “six feet” will be mostly relegated to the Tinder profiles of those seeking trysts with the tall.

Americans have been given the all clear to dispense with most of the pandemic-centric behaviors that have defined the past two-plus years—part and parcel of the narrative the Biden administration is building around the “triumphant return to normalcy,” says Joshua Salomon, a health-policy researcher at Stanford. Where mitigation measures once moved in near lockstep with case numbers, hospitalizations, and deaths, they’re now on separate tracks; the focus with COVID is, more explicitly than ever before, on avoiding only severe illness and death. The country seems close to declaring the national public-health emergency done—and short of that proclamation, officials are already “effectively acting as though it’s over,” says Lakshmi Ganapathi, a pediatric-infectious-disease specialist at Boston Children’s Hospital. If there’s such a thing as a “soft closing” of the COVID crisis, this latest juncture might be it.

With each new scandal involving Donald Trump, the question arises again: Is this the one that will finally exact some pain on the former president?

The question is in the air once more following the FBI’s seizure of top-secret documents from Mar-a-Lago last week. On the one hand, as both Trump’s allies and adversaries have noted, such a warrant on a former president is unprecedented, one of Trump’s lawyers reportedly told the government all files were returned prior to the search, and Trump has offered nonsensical defenses, all of which point to the seriousness of the situation. On the other, many cases involving mishandled classified information end without charges—just ask Hillary Clinton—and some experts speculate that the goal of the search may simply have been to recover the documents rather than to build a criminal case against Trump.

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It’s rare to see a politician speak hard truths to surly—and even dangerous—fellow citizens, but that’s exactly what Liz Cheney did in her concession speech last night.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

• Paul Manafort is back.
• Monkeypox doesn’t need to be renamed.
• The Court’s liberals still have power.

‘I Love My Country More.’

Representative Liz Cheney was blown out in her reelection bid last night. She lost the Wyoming Republican primary to Harriet Hageman, which in their deep-red state is tantamount to losing the general election. Hageman was once a Cheney ally and a critic of Donald Trump, but she is now a Trump booster and an election denier. Like so many Republicans, Hageman has decided that the humiliation of bending the knee to Trump is a price worth paying in order to live in Washington, D.C.

A quick question. If someone is yelling “repent” at you in the street, are they more likely to be (a) a religious preacher or (b) a left-wing activist?

The answer depends on where you are. Last October, a crowd gathered outside Netflix’s offices in Los Angeles to protest the release of Dave Chappelle’s comedy special The Closer, which contained a long riff criticizing transgender activists. Inevitably, there was a counterprotest: a lonely Chappelle fan holding a sign that read We like Dave. This went over badly. Someone took the sign from him and ripped it up. Someone else shouted in his face, and their word choice was notable. The man who liked Dave was urged to “repent.”

David Frum: Dave Chappelle’s not kidding

The defiant speech from Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming after her defeat in yesterday’s Republican primary could be reduced to a single message: This is round one.

Cheney didn’t specify how, or where, she intends to continue her struggle against former President Donald Trump, after Harriet Hageman, the candidate Trump endorsed, routed her by more than two to one in the primary for Wyoming’s lone congressional seat.

But Cheney dropped a big hint when she noted that the GOP’s Founding Father, Abraham Lincoln, lost elections for the House and Senate “before he won the most important election of all” by capturing the presidency. This morning, she went a step further, telling the Today show that she was “thinking about” joining the 2024 Republican presidential race.

Just as the AR-15 rifle has become a sacred object for Christian nationalists in general, the rosary has acquired a militaristic meaning for radical-traditional (or “rad trad”) Catholics. On this extremist fringe, rosary beads have been woven into a conspiratorial politics and absolutist gun culture. These armed radical traditionalists have taken up a spiritual notion that the rosary can be a weapon in the fight against evil and turned it into something dangerously literal.

Their social-media pages are saturated with images of rosaries draped over firearms, warriors in prayer, Deus Vult (“God wills it”) crusader memes, and exhortations for men to rise up and become Church Militants. Influencers on platforms such as Instagram share posts referencing “everyday carry” and “gat check” (gat is slang for “firearm”) that include soldiers’ “battle beads,” handguns, and assault rifles. One artist posts illustrations of his favorite Catholic saints, clergy, and influencers toting AR-15-style rifles labeled SANCTUM ROSARIUM alongside violently homophobic screeds that are celebrated by social-media accounts with thousands of followers.

In 1953, the British pediatrician and psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott began writing about the idea of “good-enough” parenting—a term he coined, and one he’s still famous for today. According to Winnicott, after infancy, babies do not need tirelessly responsive or self-sacrificing parents. In fact, he wrote, it is developmentally key for parents to lessen their “active adaptation” to their children’s needs over time. In doing so, they teach their kids to “account for failure” and “tolerate the results of frustration”—both necessary skills at a very young age, as anyone who’s watched a baby learn to crawl knows.

In his recent book The Good-Enough Life, the scholar and writing lecturer Avram Alpert radically broadens Winnicott’s idea of good-enoughness, transforming it into a sweeping ideology. Alpert sees good-enoughness as a necessary alternative to “greatness thinking,” or the twin beliefs that everybody has the right to embark on “personal quests for greatness” and that the great few can uplift the mediocre many. Adam Smith’s invisible hand of capital is an example of greatness thinking; so is its latter-day analogue, trickle-down economics. So are many forms of ambition: wanting to win the National Book Award, to start a revolution that turns your divided and unequal country into a Marxist utopia, or to make a sex tape that catapults you to global fame.

“How to Build a Life” is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life.

Think of an opinion that people around you don’t know you hold. Now think about what keeps you from sharing it.

Perhaps you fear offending others. You wouldn’t be alone here: According to a recent survey from the Cato Institute, most Americans—62 percent—say that the political climate these days prevents them from “saying things they believe because others might find them offensive.” Research shows that people display significantly more silence when they believe their opinions represent the minority view.

Last spring, my boyfriend sublet a spare room in his apartment to an aspiring model. The roommate was young and made us feel old, but he was always game for a bottle of wine in the living room, and he seemed to like us, even though he sometimes suggested that we were boring or not that hot.

One night, he and my boyfriend started bickering about which Lorde album is better, the first one or the second one. This kind of argument can be entertaining if the participants are making funny or interesting points, but they weren’t, and they wouldn’t drop it. The roommate was getting louder and louder; my boyfriend was repeating himself. It was Friday; I was tired. I snapped and said, loudly, “This conversation is dumb, and I don’t want to keep having it.” I knew it was rude, but I thought it was expedient, eldest-sibling rude. So I was sort of shocked when the roommate got up without a word, went into his room, slammed the door, and never spoke to me again.

A new riddle in our everything-is-weird economy: Homebuilders say that the U.S. is in a “housing recession.” But rents are at an all-time high—and official rent inflation is still surging.

If you’re a new renter thinking you’ve never seen anything like 2022 in your lifetime, you’re not alone. In Manhattan, the average monthly rent jumped to a record $5,000. In Miami and Tampa, the typical rent is up nearly 50 percent since before the pandemic, and nationwide, the median monthly rent just topped $2,000 for the first time ever.

“Our annual index of rent growth was pretty stable in the last few years, from about 3 percent to 4 percent,” Jeff Tucker, a senior economist at the online real-estate marketplace Zillow, told me. “This year, it hit a record-high 17 percent. So the time series of rent growth looks like a flat line followed by the beginning of a huge roller coaster.”