Updated at 9:28 a.m. on September 21, 2021.

For nearly two years now, Americans have lived with SARS-CoV-2. We know it better than we once did. We know that it can set off both acute and chronic illness, that it spreads best indoors, that masks help block it, that our vaccines are powerful against it. We know that we can live with it—that we’re going to have to live with it—but that it can and will exact a heavy toll.

Still, this virus has the capacity to surprise us, especially if we’re not paying attention. It is changing all the time, a tweak to the genetic code here and there; sometimes, those tweaks add up to new danger. In a matter of weeks, the Delta variant upended the relative peace of America’s early summer and ushered in a new set of calculations about risk, masking, and testing. The pandemic’s endgame shifted.

When Dear Evan Hansen premiered on Broadway in 2016, it drew near-universal praise from New York’s theater critics. Ben Platt, playing an anxious teenager who becomes an internet celebrity after misrepresenting his role in a local tragedy, was showered with plaudits, and the show ended up winning six Tony Awards—the most of the season—including Best Musical and a leading-actor trophy for Platt. A film version was thus hardly a surprise. But when the director Stephen Chbosky’s extremely faithful adaptation premiered as the opening-night movie of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival—the movie will be released in theaters this Friday—the reviews that followed were … broadly bad.

What changed? It wasn’t the story or the songs. Dear Evan Hansen the film is written by Steven Levenson, who wrote the narrative of the Broadway show, and largely retains the score, by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (a few of the least compelling numbers have been cut; others have been added). And while the cast around Platt is mostly filled out by movie stars rather than Broadway veterans, the performances from actors such as Amy Adams, Julianne Moore, Kaitlyn Dever, and Amandla Stenberg are uniformly solid. Did something get lost in translation, or is this an emperor’s-new-clothes moment revealing that Dear Evan Hansen never was any good in the first place?

When the camera turned to Michaela Coel after she won an Emmy for limited-series writing, she looked overwhelmed. The creator, star, writer, and co-director of I May Destroy You kept her head down, her shoulders slouched. Next to her, Coel’s former co-star Cynthia Erivo whispered something into her ear—a pep talk, maybe. But for a few seconds, Coel remained still, as if the weight of her first, historic Emmy win might keep her from going onstage.

Luckily, it didn’t. Coel gave one of the night’s shortest speeches, and perhaps its most revealing. In her remarks, Coel did something unusual: She thought about her audience, tried to reach beyond the other entertainers seated in the room with her. “Write the tale that scares you, that makes you feel uncertain, that isn’t comfortable,” she said. “I dare you … Visibility these days seems to somehow equate to success. Do not be afraid to disappear—from it, from us—for a while, and see what comes to you in the silence.” She spoke directly to the potential storytellers hoping to one day be onstage. And she didn’t just advise them; in a night of pomp and circumstance, she reminded them of the value of quieter triumphs.

As the Age of Delta scrambles back-to-office timelines, I find myself wondering what offices are good for in the first place.

I am pro-office. I miss a good eavesdropping, the promise of midday gossip, the “quick random question” that blooms into a half-hour conversation, and, theoretically, the magical combustion of creativity forged by these connections.

These things aren’t what I’m directly paid to do when I’m in the office, and they’re not what I’m annually evaluated for doing. Instead, they’re what I think of as “soft work.” “Hard work,” for me, is reading, researching, calling people, transcribing conversations, and writing articles. For others, it might include managing employees, working in Excel or PowerPoint, or reading and writing a zillion emails. (This kind of hard work, I should note, doesn’t have to be physically difficult.) If the past year and a half has taught us anything, it’s that white-collar workers can do hard work from home just about as well as they can do it in the office—and maybe even better, precisely because their colleagues aren’t interrupting them.

During the darkest days of Donald Trump’s presidency, Angela Merkel looked like the last adult on the world stage. With the United States led by an extremist, the United Kingdom in chaos, India barreling toward autocracy, and Russia and China ever more repressive, the German chancellor was widely hailed as the “leader of the free world.”

Now that Merkel is about to step down from the post she has held for the past 16 years—when she took over, her international peers were George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac, and Silvio Berlusconi—her heroic image is making international observers anxious about what might come next. Will Germany Trumpify after she retires? And will the country’s role as a defender of democracy on the international stage become a thing of the past?

Since September 1, about 6 million Texans of childbearing age have been living under one of the strictest abortion laws in the developed world. Texas Republicans wrote the law in part to score points with the state’s staunch opponents of abortion rights. But this time, they might have gone too far: Even some people who support certain abortion restrictions, or would not themselves get an abortion, have concerns about the law.

The law, known as S.B. 8, prohibits abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy, or when embryonic cardiac activity is first detected, and before many people know they are pregnant. There is no exception for rape, incest, or severe fetal abnormalities, and the law is designed to be enforced by citizen bounty hunters, who can sue anyone they suspect of having “aided or abetted” an abortion. A judge has the option to temporarily block the law next month, but its ultimate fate is unclear, given the conservative tilt of the Supreme Court, which may have to rule on the law again.

Miley Cyrus vowed not to have a baby on a “piece-of-shit planet.” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez mused in an Instagram video about whether it’s still okay to have children. Polls suggest that a third or more of Americans younger than 45 either don’t have children or expect to have fewer than they might otherwise because they are worried about climate change. Millennials and Gen Z are not the first generations to face the potential of imminent, catastrophic, irreversible change to the world they will inherit. But, it seems, they are the first to seriously entertain whether that means they should stop having children.

This question tends to cleave people into two camps: those who think considering climate change is reasonable and necessary when making decisions about having children, and those who find this premise unthinkable. “There’s a difference in caring about our climate … and asking a legitimate question about doing away with the human race,” the conservative television personality Abby Huntsman said on The View of Ocasio-Cortez’s comments.

About six months ago, a colleague asked me to guess what percentage of Americans were still working from home. I was still spending eight hours a day making calls just a few feet from my fridge. So were most of my friends. Maybe 40 percent? I guessed. I was off by half. Twenty-one percent of Americans were still teleworking as of March 2021; the other 79 percent were leaving their home like the old days.

This was a case of Beltway bias on my part, and I should have known better. My parents, in Iowa, had gone back to in-person work at that point, and many of my friends in the state had teleworked for only a few weeks at the beginning of the pandemic—if at all. Last week, The Atlantic commissioned a poll from Leger, asking Americans to estimate how many people had worked from home during the pandemic. The results weren’t entirely surprising: Those working remotely tended to overestimate how many other people were doing the same.

“It was no great distance, in those days, from the prison-door to the market-place. Measured by the prisoner’s experience, however, it might be reckoned a journey of some length.”

So begins the tale of Hester Prynne, as recounted in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s most famous novel, The Scarlet Letter. As readers of this classic American text know, the story begins after Hester gives birth to a child out of wedlock and refuses to name the father. As a result, she is sentenced to be mocked by a jeering crowd, undergoing “an agony from every footstep of those that thronged to see her, as if her heart had been flung into the street for them all to spurn and trample upon.” After that, she must wear a scarlet A—for adulterer—pinned to her dress for the rest of her life. On the outskirts of Boston, she lives in exile. No one will socialize with her—not even those who have quietly committed similar sins, among them the father of her child, the saintly village preacher. The scarlet letter has “the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and enclosing her in a sphere by herself.”

Apologies to Morticia and Gomez Addams, but a kiss to the upper arm wasn’t sexy until Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac did it on the red carpet at the Venice Film Festival. A slow-motion clip of the moment, amplified by Isaac’s singular smolder, went viral earlier this month. More than 11 million Twitter users basked in the pair’s, let’s face it, pure hotness—and then presumably had to fan themselves afterward.

I wish I had words for this but I really do not pic.twitter.com/xJVzOJJCeh

— Christina Newland (@christinalefou) September 4, 2021

HBO’s Scenes From a Marriage, the show the actors were in Venice to promote, is nowhere near this romantic—or engrossing. The drama is a remake of Ingmar Bergman’s 1973 Swedish miniseries about a relationship’s decade-long dissolution, a crisis so intense that it made Marriage Story look like Love Actually. But the new version, which takes place in present-day America, with the roles gender-flipped, has none of that force, largely because of one creative miscalculation: At the top of every chapter, the show goes out of its way to remind viewers that what they’re watching isn’t real.