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 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.

Quitting your job is hot this summer. More Americans quit in May 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 last month.

Low-wage workers aren’t the only ones eyeing the door. In May, 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’

Why the sudden burst of quitting? One general theory is that we’re living through a fundamental shift in the relationship between employees and bosses that could have profound implications for the future of work. Up and down the income ladder, workers have new reasons to tell their boss to shove it. Lower-wage workers who benefited from enhanced unemployment benefits throughout the pandemic may have returned to the job and realized they’re not being paid enough. Now they’re putting their foot down, forcing restaurants and clothing stores to fork over a higher wage to keep people on staff.

In November 2018, The Washington Post published a disturbing headline: “‘They Were Threatening Me and My Family’: Tucker Carlson’s Home Targeted by Protesters.”

The Post story quoted the prime-time Fox News host at length. “Someone started throwing himself against the front door and actually cracked the front door,” Carlson claimed. “It wasn’t a protest. It was a threat … They weren’t protesting anything specific that I had said. They weren’t asking me to change anything. They weren’t protesting a policy or advocating for legislation … They were threatening me and my family and telling me to leave my own neighborhood in the city that I grew up in.”

Even more alarming, according to the Post, “A woman was also overheard in one of the deleted videos saying she wanted to ‘bring a pipe bomb’ to his house, [Carlson] said.”

This article was published online on June 21, 2021.

When I look out my window, a few floors up in New York City, I see Star Wars. Rooftop bouquets of dirty satellite dishes, jumbled architectural styles united by peeling paint, variously shaped (and largely face-masked) life-forms jostling on the sidewalk—each sign of shabby modernity feels like something I glimpsed in childhood while hypnotized by George Lucas. In the director’s 1977 space fantasy, wizards lived in what appeared to be crumbling stucco huts, and moon-size superweapons had onboard trash compactors. As a kid, I believed that Earth was just another planet in Lucas’s universe. Today, I’m still susceptible to that lovely illusion.

When the NBA announced Wednesday that Phoenix Suns point guard Chris Paul was being sidelined indefinitely under the league’s coronavirus-safety protocols, the next question was obvious: Had Paul been vaccinated?

For COVID-19 concerns to interrupt Paul’s brilliant playoff run seemed particularly cruel—not only because the widespread availability of vaccines has made transmission of the virus largely preventable, but also because the Suns had just secured a spot in the Western Conference finals. Even though Paul is one of the best NBA point guards ever, this week’s development was another unfortunate entry in his long history of medical problems during the playoffs.

The television analysts Matt Barnes and Jalen Rose, both of whom are former NBA players, soon reported that Paul had indeed been vaccinated. But all the discussion of his status raised another important question: Do fans even have the right to know, and do journalists have the right to ask, if a player has been vaccinated against COVID-19?

In the spring of 2020, as a brand-new disease spread rapidly across the United States, millions of Americans arrived at the same conclusion: They wanted a beer.

This was, to be fair, the same conclusion that many of us were coming to before the pandemic began, but the ways we could satisfy that thirst had changed dramatically. As beer spoiled in kegs inside idle bars and restaurants, Americans set out in search of six-packs. Liquor stores and grocery stores, which were both categorized as “essential businesses” and allowed to operate during even the tightest local lockdowns, saw their alcohol sales spike. Booze-delivery services such as Drizly more than tripled their sales. As with things like paper towels and flour, beer producers and distributors scrambled to divert their product into the right packaging and onto the right shelves.

When ProPublica published its report last week on the tax profiles of 25 of the richest Americans, jaws dropped across the United States. How was it possible that plutocrats such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett could pay nothing in income taxes to the federal government? What sneaky sleights of pen, what subterfuge, what acts of turpitude could have led to this result?

The shock stems, in part, from a disturbing reality: Nowhere does ProPublica assert that these men cheated, lied, or did anything felonious to lower their tax burdens. The naked fact of the matter is that not a single one of the documented methods and practices that allowed these billionaires to so radically minimize their tax obligations was illegal.

This much is clear: The coronavirus is becoming more transmissible. Ever since the virus emerged in China, it has been gaining mutations that help it spread more easily among humans. The Alpha variant, first detected in the United Kingdom last year, is 50 percent more transmissible than the original version, and now the Delta variant, first detected in India, is at least 40 percent more transmissible than Alpha.

What’s less certain, however, is how the virus’s increased transmissibility will affect the pandemic in the United States. Alpha’s arrival prompted worries about a new surge in the spring, but one never came. The proportion of Alpha cases kept going up, but the total number of cases kept going down. People got vaccinated. Alpha became dominant in the U.S. Cases fell even further. The virus had become more biologically transmissible, but it wasn’t being transmitted to more people.

Around 597 a.d., Pope Gregory I dispatched an expedition to England to convert the Anglo-Saxon king of Kent and his subjects. The leader of the mission, a monk named Augustine, had orders to shoehorn the new Christians into Church-sanctioned marriages. That meant quashing pagan practices such as polygamy, arranged marriages (Christian matrimony was notionally consensual, hence the formula “I do”), and above all, marriages between relatives, which the Church was redefining as incest. Augustine wasn’t sure who counted as a relative, so he wrote to Rome for clarification. A second cousin? A third cousin? Could a man marry his widowed stepmother?

He could not. Pope Gregory wrote back to rule out stepmothers and other close kin not related by blood—another example was brothers’ widows. He was lax about second and third cousins; only the children of aunts and uncles were off-limits. By the 11th century, however, you couldn’t get engaged until you’d counted back seven generations, lest you marry a sixth cousin. The taboo against consanguineous family had expanded to include “spiritual kin,” who were, mostly, godparents. (It went without saying that you had to marry a Christian.) Pope Gregory and Augustine’s letters document a moment in a prolonged process—begun in the fourth century—in which the Church clamped down, and intermittently loosened up, on who could marry whom. Not until 1983 did Pope John Paul II allow second cousins to wed.

The worst things can happen on the most beautiful days. My family’s worst day was a perfect one in the summer of 2019. We picked my daughter up from camp and talked about where to go for lunch: the diner or the burger place. I don’t remember which we chose. What I do remember: being woken up, again and again, by doctors who insist on asking me the same questions—my name, where I am, what month it is—and telling me the same story, a story that I am sure is wrong.

“You were in a car accident,” they say. But this cannot be. We’re having lunch and then going on a hike. I had promised the think tank where I work that I’d call in to a 4 p.m. meeting.

“You are in Dartmouth-Hitchcock Hospital in New Hampshire.” Another ludicrous statement. I started the day in Vermont. Surely if I had crossed the river to New Hampshire I would know it.