Who can get pregnant? It sounds like a trick question. For centuries, English speakers have talked about “pregnant women” without a second thought, but a vocal and growing movement wants to replace that phrase with the more inclusive pregnant people. And because the United States hasn’t yet found an issue it can’t turn into a polarized debate, a partisan divide has already formed. The received wisdom is now that a good liberal should always say “pregnant people,” if only because it upsets Tucker Carlson.

I disagree. Language evolves, and inclusion for transgender people matters. But for now I will keep using pregnant women in almost all circumstances.

Pregnant people is a relatively new phrase. Google’s Ngram viewer, which trawls English-language books dating back to 1800, finds absolutely no trace of it before 1978, and a sharp spike in the past decade. It now appears in CNN headlines, Planned Parenthood advice, Washington Post columns, and CDC guidelines on COVID-19 vaccination. Its usage reflects a growing awareness that not everyone who gets pregnant defines themselves as a woman—transgender men and nonbinary people can give birth too. (Nonbinary is itself a very recent coinage; the usage examples given in Merriam-Webster’s dictionary date back only to 2015.) Using more inclusive language, the American Civil Liberties Union’s deputy legal director, Louise Melling, recently told my colleague Emma Green, “should do a fair amount of work to help address discrimination. If we talk about ‘pregnant people,’ it’s a reminder to all of us to catch ourselves when we’re sitting in the waiting room at the GYN that we’re not going to stare at the man who’s there.”

In 1999, Karen Knierman picked up a free mug at her first big astronomy conference, just before she started grad school. It bore the logo of an ambitious observatory, designed to peer at the most distant galaxies in the universe: NGST, short for Next Generation Space Telescope. The mug was on Knierman’s desk in 2002 when NASA made a surprise announcement: NGST was going to become JWST, after James Webb. Knierman sipped from her suddenly out-of-date mug and wondered, Who?

That was the prevailing reaction among scientists at the time. Webb, who died in 1992, was more of a behind-the-scenes manager than a space-science star; he had served as NASA’s second administrator, in the 1960s, during the run-up to the Apollo moon landings. But scientists went with the rebrand. Work on the telescope continued. Scientists got new merch, new mugs.

The election of the elders of an evangelical church is usually an uncontroversial, even unifying event. But this summer, at an influential megachurch in Northern Virginia, something went badly wrong. A trio of elders didn’t receive 75 percent of the vote, the threshold necessary to be installed.  

“A small group of people, inside and outside this church, coordinated a divisive effort to use disinformation in order to persuade others to vote these men down as part of a broader effort to take control of this church,” David Platt, a 43-year-old minister at McLean Bible Church and a best-selling author, charged in a July 4 sermon.

Platt said church members had been misled, having been told, among other things, that the three individuals nominated to be elders would advocate selling the church building to Muslims, who would convert it into a mosque. In a second vote on July 18, all three nominees cleared the threshold. But that hardly resolved the conflict. Members of the church filed a lawsuit, claiming that the conduct of the election violated the church’s constitution.

Many years ago, when I was a junior professor at Yale, I cold-called a colleague in the anthropology department for assistance with a project I was working on. I didn’t know anything about the guy; I just selected him because he was young, and therefore, I figured, more likely to agree to talk.

Five minutes into our lunch, I realized that I was in the presence of a genius. Not an extremely intelligent person—a genius. There’s a qualitative difference. The individual across the table seemed to belong to a different order of being from me, like a visitor from a higher dimension. I had never experienced anything like it before. I quickly went from trying to keep up with him, to hanging on for dear life, to simply sitting there in wonder.

This story contains spoilers for the Netflix series Midnight Mass.

The Exorcist is a film I’ve long loved because it raised the bar not just for horror, but also for movies that explore questions of faith and doubt, good and evil, life and death. I know all of its beats by heart, but when I recently rewatched the 1973 classic, the ending hit differently. The movie concludes with an exorcism, naturally. Chris MacNeil has brought her daughter, Regan, to a host of medical professionals in a desperate attempt to save her from what turns out to be a demonic possession. But the only person who can save the girl, it seems, is a priest. The camera lingers on the mother’s exhausted face as two priests close the door to her daughter’s bedroom and go to work.

Before I tell you what happened at exactly 2:28 p.m. on Wednesday, January 6, 2021, at the White House—and how it elicited a very specific reaction, some 2,400 miles away, in Menlo Park, California—you need to remember the mayhem of that day, the exuberance of the mob as it gave itself over to violence, and how several things seemed to happen all at once.

At 2:10 p.m., a live microphone captured a Senate aide’s panicked warning that “protesters are in the building,” and both houses of Congress began evacuating.

At 2:13 p.m., Vice President Mike Pence was hurried off the Senate floor and out of the chamber.

At 2:15 p.m., thunderous chants were heard: “Hang Mike Pence! Hang Mike Pence!”

At the White House, President Donald Trump was watching the insurrection live on television. The spectacle excited him. Which brings us to 2:28 p.m., the moment when Trump shared a message he had just tweeted with his 35 million Facebook followers: “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution … USA demands the truth!”

Having grown up in Germany, I am skeptical of the popular notion that life is so much more rational and efficient in the country than it is anywhere else. Those who believe that Germans are incapable of irrationality should suggest imposing a speed limit on the country’s highways. And those who believe that Germans are incapable of inefficiency should learn how much time and money were spent to build Berlin’s new airport.

And yet I have, since returning to Germany about a month ago, been struck by how much more rational, efficient, and pragmatic the country’s handling of the late stages of the coronavirus pandemic has been. While the American response to COVID-19 has barely gone beyond the measures that were first adopted in the spring of 2020, Germany has phased in a series of additional policies over the past 18 months. None of them adds serious disruptions to daily life, and yet they collectively put the country in a much better position to contain the virus.

Ivermectin is an antiparasitic drug, and a very good one. If you are infected with the roundworms that cause river blindness or the parasitic mites that cause scabies, it is wonderfully effective. It is cheap; it is accessible; and its discoverers won the Nobel Prize in 2015. It has also been widely promoted as a coronavirus prophylactic and treatment.

This promotion has been broadly criticized as a fever dream conceived in the memetic bowels of the internet and as a convenient buttress for bad arguments against vaccination. This is not entirely fair. Perhaps 70 to 100 studies have been conducted on the use of ivermectin for treating or preventing COVID-19; several dozen of them support the hypothesis that the drug is a plague mitigant. Two meta-analyses, which looked at data aggregated across subsets of these studies, concluded that the drug has value in the fight against the pandemic.

In the fall of 2019, Facebook launched a massive effort to combat the use of its platforms for human trafficking. Working around the clock, its employees searched Facebook and its subsidiary Instagram for keywords and hashtags that promoted domestic servitude in the Middle East and elsewhere. Over the course of a few weeks, the company took down 129,191 pieces of content, disabled more than 1,000 accounts, tightened its policies, and added new ways to detect this kind of behavior. After they were through, employees congratulated one another on a job well done.

It was a job well done. It just came a little late. In fact, a group of Facebook researchers focused on the Middle East and North Africa had found numerous Instagram profiles being used as advertisements for trafficked domestic servants as early as March 2018. “Indonesian brought with Tourist Visa,” one photo caption on a picture of a woman reads, in Arabic. “We have more of them.” But these profiles weren’t “actioned”—disabled or taken down—an internal report would explain, because Facebook’s policies “did not acknowledge the violation.” A year and a half later, an undercover BBC investigation revealed the full scope of the problem: a broad network that illegally trafficked domestic workers, facilitated by internet platforms and aided by algorithmically boosted hashtags. In response, Facebook banned one hashtag and took down some 700 Instagram profiles. But according to another internal report, “domestic servitude content remained on the platform.”

Several years ago, I went on a somewhat fanatical quest to find a satisfying version of what I called a “metacookbook”—a book that doesn’t just list out recipe instructions, but also explains the thinking behind them.

The food journalist Priya Krishna and David Chang, the founder of the Momofuku family of restaurants, have together written a charming new entry in this subgenre, Cooking at Home: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Recipes (And Love My Microwave). The book’s “recipes-that-aren’t-really-recipes” tend to forgo precise measurements of ingredients and time, and instead emphasize intuition, personalization, and experimentation. Krishna and Chang provide a set of adaptable culinary blueprints for readers to iterate on—for instance, a general formula for cooking a cheap cut of meat or whipping up a vinegary condiment—and envision a recipe not as “a rigid instruction manual, but a Mad Lib.”