At the end of January, reports that yet another COVID-19 vaccine had succeeded in its clinical trials—this one offering about 70 percent protection—were front-page news in the United States, and occasioned push alerts on millions of phones. But when the Maryland-based biotech firm Novavax announced its latest stunning trial results last week, and an efficacy rate of more than 90 percent even against coronavirus variants, the response from the same media outlets was muted in comparison. The difference, of course, was the timing: With three vaccines already authorized for emergency use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the nation is “awash in other shots” already, as the The New York Times put it.

Today is Prime Day. Imagine trying to explain that to an alien or to a time traveler from the 20th century. “Amazon turned 20 and on the eve of its birthday, the company introduced Prime Day, a global shopping event,” reads Amazon’s formal telling of the ritual’s 2015 origins. “Our only goal? Offer a volume of deals greater than Black Friday, exclusively for Prime members.” The holiday was invented by a corporation in honor of itself, to enrich itself. It has existed for six years and is observed by tens of millions of people worldwide. I hope you are spending it with your loved ones.

Prime Day is a singular and strange artifact, but then again, so is Prime, Amazon’s $119-a-year membership service, which buys subscribers free one-day shipping, plus access to streaming media, discounts at the Amazon subsidiary Whole Foods, and a host of other perks. Prime is Amazon’s greatest and most terrifying invention: a product whose value proposition is to help you buy more products. With 200 million subscribers worldwide, it is the second-most-popular subscription service on Earth, poised to overtake Netflix in the not-so-distant future.

When typed out in full, the chilling speech that Britney Spears gave to a Los Angeles judge yesterday afternoon comes to more than 4,500 words. Those words are now circulating online as quotations about how Spears lived in “denial” about the legal and medical arrangement that has given other people control over her life for 13 years. She says this “abusive” conservatorship forced her to take debilitating medications, smothered her daily life, and forbade her from marrying and getting pregnant. She now wants freedom.

To really understand what happened yesterday, though, you should watch a few minutes of video footage from outside the courtroom. You’ll see throngs of fans dressed in princess pink, rapt and crying as Spears’s speech crackled through a loudspeaker. You’ll hear a voice familiar to a huge swath of humankind—an upbeat squeak that over decades has been branded as the essence of girlishness, innocence, and even obliviousness. We’re used to that voice, but we’re not used to it doing this: desperately telling a story of survival and captivity, and pleading to be seen as the autonomous human being whom so much of the public has, thanks to the distorting logic of fame, never fully recognized.

The battle over access to the ballot is entering a precarious new stage. Democrats and civil-rights groups are pursuing a two-track strategy to preserve their embattled hopes of passing federal legislation establishing a nationwide floor of voting rights. What happens next will likely determine whether Congress can act at all.

Advocates are betting that a combination of what might be called inside proof and outside pressure will yield their best chance of persuading the last Democratic holdouts to restrict use of the filibuster that Republicans employed on Tuesday to block consideration of the Democrats’ sweeping voting-rights and political-reform legislation.

The inside proof is a sustained effort to demonstrate to those reluctant Democrats, particularly Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, that no federal voting-rights bill can attract the 10 Republicans currently required to break a filibuster. Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon, a lead sponsor of the legislation that Republicans filibustered Tuesday, told me that Democrats intend to quickly negotiate a new, slimmed-down bill based on the compromise principles Manchin offered last week—and to task him and Sinema with assessing whether any, much less 10, Republicans will sign on.

“How to Build a Life” is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness.

“The roots of vegetables … attach them fatally to the ground,” the philosopher George Santayana wrote in his 1964 essay “The Philosophy of Travel.” “They are condemned like leeches to suck up whatever sustenance may flow to them at the particular spot where they happen to be stuck.” I don’t know why Santayana was so hateful toward vegetables, but I understand what he means: that to travel is to be fully human.

Clearly, millions of Americans agree: Nearly a quarter say what they miss most from before the pandemic is travel. Now that COVID-19 case numbers remain low and more than half of American adults are fully vaccinated, the country is looking to the summer travel season with great gusto. In a survey of 2,000 Americans fielded by Motel 6 this spring, 60 percent of respondents said they have a stronger desire to take a trip this year than in previous years. Nearly everyone I meet asks if I have summer vacation plans, a question that just a couple of years ago would have sounded quaintly European.

Since its first flight at 1978’s Gay Freedom Day Parade in San Francisco, the rainbow flag has evolved multiple times. That earliest iteration included pink and turquoise stripes, symbolizing sex and art, respectively—parts of queer life that the designers thought were worth fighting for. Later that year, though, the flag lost its pink stripe because of fabric unavailability at the local manufacturer, and turquoise fell off the year after for the same reason. The now-familiar six-stripe flag is actually a redesign.

When I was young and newly out of the closet, around 2013, I saw LGBTQ flags for every community imaginable online, including esoteric variants, such as the green, black, white, and grey aromantic flag, and a pale pink and yellow flag for slim, hairless 20-something twinks. In 2017, Philadelphia’s Office of LGBT Affairs introduced black and brown stripes to the Pride flag to recognize queer and trans people of color. One year later, the Oregon-based graphic designer Daniel Quasar added the trans flag’s stripes as a horizontal chevron to make the Progress Pride Flag. And this year brought another version from Intersex Equality Rights UK, featuring a yellow triangle and purple circle to represent the intersex community, or people born with a reproductive anatomy that doesn’t fit typical male or female definitions.

Updated at 4:21 p.m. ET on June 24, 2021.

Quitting your job is hot this summer. More Americans quit in April than any other month on record going back to the beginning of the century, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For every 100 workers in hotels, restaurants, bars, and retailers, about five of them quit.*

Low-wage workers aren’t the only ones eyeing the door. In April, more than 700,000 workers in the bureau’s mostly white-collar category of “professional and business services” left their job—the highest monthly number ever. Across all sectors and occupations, four in 10 employees now say they’ve considered peacing out of their current place of work.

Annie Lowrey: Workers should have the power to say ‘no’

Debbie Mucarsel-Powell knew that winning reelection in her swingy Florida district would be difficult. But it wasn’t until one night in February last year that the 50-year-old Democratic representative started to worry. That was the evening when then-presidential-candidate Bernie Sanders, in a 60 Minutes interview, showered praise on Cuba’s literacy programs under the Castro regime. “Is that a bad thing? Even though Fidel Castro did it?” the senator asked Anderson Cooper. Watching at home, Mucarsel-Powell was aghast. “How ignorant can you be?” she remembers thinking. “It was a complete insult to the Cuban diaspora that had fled that country.” Right away, she condemned Sanders’s remarks, but in her South Florida district, which is home to thousands of Cuban and other Latin American immigrants, the damage had been done. Republicans used Sanders’s comments to raise money for her opponent, Carlos Gimenez, and to paint Mucarsel-Powell as an ally of the “Castro-loving socialist.” She lost her reelection bid by three points.

Divers who have seen the phenomenon firsthand describe many types of underwater sea snot. There are the “stringers,” which most resemble the sticky goo that might actually come out of your nose. But there are also floating “clouds,” white and ethereal, so delicate that they break apart in your fingers. Then there are the tiny flakes of “marine snow,” which begin as drops of mucus and accumulate organic debris as they drift slowly, slowly down to the bottom of the sea.

Then there is whatever is happening off the coast of Turkey—a downright “mucilage calamity,” in the words of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoǧan. The sea snot there has surfaced and turned monstrous, gelling into a thick layer of yellowing slime atop the water. For months, this foul mucus has blanketed the Sea of Marmara, which connects the Black Sea and the Aegean Sea in the Mediterranean. It’s smothering shellfish, clogging nets, and destroying the fishing industry.

If your wanderlust is coming on extra strong this summer, you may be wondering what to do with it. Being vaccinated may feel like a superpower, but what exactly is safe—or not?

The CDC suggests, for example, that this may be the summer for road-tripping by RV. “If traveling in a RV, you may have to stop less often for food or bathroom breaks, but you could still be in close contact with others while staying at RV parks overnight and while getting gas and supplies,” the agency advises in its travel tips for families with unvaccinated children. For long distances, RVs are more to the CDC’s liking than trains, buses, cruise ships, or river boats.

But if your wanderlust is coming on extra strong and you don’t have $40,000 to drop on a Winnebago, you might have some questions about those trains and buses (if not the river boats). Fewer state and federal rules govern travel within the United States this summer than last, but that freedom—along with the differing recommendations for people with differing vaccination statuses, and scary new coronavirus variants that spread more quickly—can still make assessing the risk involved in driving to a wedding or flying to see Grandpa quite tricky.