One of the most useless questions you can ask a kid is, What do you want to be when you grow up? The more useful question is: What are you good at? But schools aren’t giving kids enough of a chance to find out.

As a professor of animal science, I have ample opportunity to observe how young people emerge from our education system into further study and the work world. As a visual thinker who has autism, I often think about how education fails to meet the needs of our very diverse minds. We are shunting students into a one-size-fits-all curriculum instead of nurturing the budding builders, engineers, and inventors that our country needs.

Back when I went to school in the 1960s, shop class was the highlight of my day. I can vividly recall the wooden workbenches and the coping saws, hammers, pliers, screwdrivers, and eggbeater drills hung from a pegboard in a neat row. I also loved home economics. Although I was a tomboy, I enjoyed working with my hands in all kinds of ways. The skills I learned by embroidering, sewing, and measuring ingredients, I still use today.

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Late last month, analysts at the investment bank Credit Suisse published a research note about America’s new climate law that went nearly unnoticed. The Inflation Reduction Act, the bank argued, is even more important than has been recognized so far: The IRA will “will have a profound effect across industries in the next decade and beyond” and could ultimately shape the direction of the American economy, the bank said. The report shows how even after the bonanza of climate-bill coverage earlier this year, we’re still only beginning to understand how the law works and what it might mean for the economy.  

This fall, unlike the one before it, and the one before that, America looks almost like its old self. Schools and universities are in session; malls, airports, and gyms are bustling with the pre-holiday rush; handwashing is passé, handshakes are back, and strangers are packed together on public transport, nary a mask to be seen. On its surface, the country seems ready to enjoy what some might say is our first post-pandemic winter.

Americans are certainly acting as if the crisis has abated, and so in that way, at least, you could argue that it has. “If you notice, no one’s wearing masks,” President Joe Biden told 60 Minutes in September, after proclaiming the pandemic “over.” Almost no emergency protections against the virus are left standing; we’re dismantling the few that are. At the same time, COVID is undeniably, as Biden says, “a problem.” Each passing day still brings hundreds of deaths and thousands of hospitalizations; untold numbers of people continue to deal with long COVID, as more join them. In several parts of the country, health-care systems are struggling to stay afloat. Local public-health departments, underfunded and understaffed, are hanging by a thread. And a double surge of COVID and flu may finally be brewing.

Cynthia Phillips was mesmerized when she saw the latest pictures of her favorite moon. Here at last was a fresh look at Europa, an icy satellite of Jupiter. The moon resembles a truffle drizzled haphazardly with strips of melted white chocolate, as if the universe had rushed to finish a baking-show challenge. The images gave us a new sense of Europa’s topography, its collection of ridges and troughs appearing more intricate than ever. The lighting was different this time, Phillips told me, and the shadows brought out dramatic shapes in the terrain.

The images were taken by a Jupiter-observing spacecraft as it swept past Europa last week, coming within just 222 miles (358 kilometers) of the frozen surface. Phillips, a planetary geologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, immediately reached for the Europa globe on her desk and began comparing the real-world views with the topography stretched over the plastic orb. The last probe to come this close to Europa was disposed of in 2003, when NASA deliberately plunged it into Jupiter’s atmosphere after the mission started running low on fuel. “We haven’t seen Europa's surface in this level of detail for 20 years,” Phillips said.

Updated at 10:30 a.m. ET on October 6, 2022

Pull up to any intersection in Los Angeles, and you will see a column of illegally posted signs forming a kind of capitalist totem pole. Most advertise services catering to the darker side of life: “Cheap Divorce!” “Fix Your Credit!” “Liquidation Sale!” Even the now-ubiquitous “Sell Your House Fast” calls to mind desperate families collapsing under the weight of a mortgage. Yet over the past couple of years, a more hopeful sign has joined the mix: “Free ADU Consultation.”

The abbreviation needs no explanation in California, where accessory dwelling units have graduated from wonky planning jargon to popular parlance. Variously known as granny flats, mother-in-law units, or casitas, ADUs are small, additional rental units that share a lot with another structure—typically a single-family home.

Sometimes cops lie. Sometimes they shoot a man in the back and leave him facedown on the ground but tell the public something else. Sometimes they say a man was responsible for his own death because he “physically resisted,” even though he had been restrained and begging for his life. Sometimes they gun down a 12-year-old without giving him time to drop his toy firearm, yet insist otherwise. And sometimes there’s video proving that they lied.

Video, even if it does not ultimately tell the entire story, can provide uniquely compelling evidence in a way testimony or physical evidence from the scene of a crime cannot. The spread of cellphone cameras has provided grim confirmation that police can be as dishonest as any other human being. That in itself raises certain dilemmas, such as how much weight to grant police statements and uncorroborated witness testimony.

“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.

“We have willfully sinned,” millions of Jews around the world prayed in their Yom Kippur Viduy, or confession, over the past week—confession of sin being a core tenet of Judaism (as it is in many faiths). “We have committed evil … we have gone astray, we have led others astray. We have strayed from Your good precepts and ordinances, and it has not profited us.” For all people, Jews and gentiles alike, this prayer lays bare one of the greatest puzzles of human behavior: We voluntarily commit transgressions for which we are truly regretful, and they don’t even benefit us.

Recently, at a fancy arts complex in Manhattan, the billionaire Frank McCourt led a three-day series of talks and workshops about the future of the internet—part of his expensive effort to “fix technology, save democracy.”

In the lobby, attendees networked in a cocktail bar created by the superstar restaurateur Danny Meyer; in front of the main stage, they held up blue and orange glow sticks to record their votes in polls like “Which will kill us first?” (AI or climate change) and “Who would you rather take care of your children?” (a surveillance robot or TikTok stars). The agenda for this conference, Unfinished Live, was almost random in its diversity: Attendees could learn about how Indigenous communities were using decentralized technology to create their own maps, and they could also learn about importing products into the metaverse, starting with a sweater that has a microchip in it. (This allows the sweater to “accrue value based on who owned it last.”) The Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen invoked several times the necessity of a Mothers Against Drunk Driving for social media. Nadya Tolokonnikova, a founding member of Pussy Riot, vaped onstage and responded coolly to questions about how blockchain tech is used to fund the defense in Ukraine. “There’s nothing particularly magic about cryptocurrency,” she said. “It’s a tool, like a road or a gun.”

By the time I arrived at Brooklyn’s Park Slope farmers’ market in search of a pawpaw one morning last week, it was already too late: The weird green fruit had sold out within an hour. “You have to get here early,” Jeff Rowe of Orchard Hill Organics, the market’s lone pawpaw vendor, told me. The day before, I had struck out in Manhattan’s expansive Union Square Greenmarket, where a seller told me pawpaws were extremely rare. The most upscale grocery stores—the kind that sell black garlic and cotton-candy grapes—also had none to offer.

I yearned to taste the enigmatic fruit that so many people seem to be talking about lately. Food writers marvel at how “magical” it is. Bartenders mix rum-and-pawpaw cocktails. At pawpaw festivals across the country, chefs whip up dishes such as pawpaw chicken wraps and pawpaw curry puffs. The pawpaw is having a moment, perhaps because it is a mass of contradictions: Its custardy flesh, ranging in color from butter yellow to sunset orange, tastes like a mix of banana, mango, and pineapple (or so I’d heard). But unlike those fruits, pawpaws are not native to the tropics; instead, the fruit grows across the Eastern United States and up into Canada. Pawpaw trees thrive along creeks and rivers, and there’s a good chance you’ve passed one without even knowing it.

Joe Biden is an unlikely stoner hero. Three of his four Baby Boomer predecessors in the Oval Office had explored marijuana in their youth, but by the time they became president, they all disdained the stuff. But Biden, like Donald Trump, was a straight-edge who says he never touched marijuana and was skeptical of any liberalization of drug laws throughout his long career in politics.

You don’t get to have a long career in politics, though, unless you can tell which way the wind is blowing—and detect the aromas it carries. That explains Biden’s announcement Thursday that he will pardon all federal offenses for simple possession of marijuana and seek to have the drug removed from Schedule I, the highest classification of dangerous substances the federal government maintains. He also called on state and local governments to free prisoners locked up for weed possession.