At one point in her new book, the NPR journalist Michaeleen Doucleff suggests that parents consider throwing out most of the toys they’ve bought for their kids. It’s an extreme piece of advice, but the way Doucleff frames it, it seems entirely sensible: “Kids spent two hundred thousand years without these items,” she writes.

Her deeply researched book, Hunt, Gather, Parent: What Ancient Cultures Can Teach Us About the Lost Art of Raising Happy, Helpful Little Humans, contains many moments like this, in which an American child-rearing strategy comes away looking at best bizarre and at worst counterproductive. “Our culture often has things backward when it comes to kids,” she writes.

Doucleff arrives at this conclusion while traveling, with her then-3-year-old daughter, to meet and learn from parents in a Maya village on the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico; in an Inuit town in a northern Canadian territory; and in a community of hunter-gatherers in Tanzania. During her outings, she witnesses well-adjusted, drama-free kids share generously with their siblings and do chores without being asked.

Imagine it’s 2026. A man shows up in an emergency room, wheezing. He’s got pneumonia, and it’s hitting him hard. He tells one of the doctors that he had COVID-19 a few years earlier, in late 2021. He had refused to get vaccinated, and ended up contracting the coronavirus months after most people got their shots. Why did he refuse? Something about politics, or pushing back on government control, or a post he saw on Facebook. He doesn’t really remember. His lungs do, though: By the end of the day, he’s on a ventilator.

You’ll pay for that man’s decisions. So will I. We all will—in insurance premiums, if he has a plan with your provider, or in tax dollars, if the emergency room he goes to is in a public hospital. The vaccine refusers could cost us billions. Maybe more, over the next few decades, with all the complications they could develop. And we can’t do anything about it except hope that more people get their shots than those who say they will right now.

Every so often, an emerging technology changes the global balance of power, alters alliances, and shifts the relationships among nations. After World War II, nuclear weapons overthrew all of the existing geopolitical paradigms. The countries that got the bomb were considered global powers; countries that did not have it sought it, so that they could be considered powerful too.

Now a different technology is shifting global politics: the coronavirus vaccines—or, quite possibly, vaccines more broadly. Unlike nuclear weapons, vaccines don’t have the potential to end life on Earth, and their production and distribution will never require rigid rules to limit who gets them. Indeed, the international institutions being created to govern vaccine distribution are designed to promote proliferation, not restrict it. Nevertheless, global politics will be shaped by the vaccines, as will domestic politics in some countries, and in ways that might outlast this particular pandemic.

The Trump presidency may be over, but the Trump era has only just begun—at least when it comes to influence over the nation’s courts. Measured solely by the number of judges he appointed, Donald Trump’s impact is staggering: 234 judges, including 54 powerful appellate judges, almost one out of every three. By comparison, President Barack Obama appointed 172 judges (30 of them appellate) in his first term, while George W. Bush managed 204 (35 appellate). But Trump will have an even greater influence than this measurement suggests. That is because his judges won’t reach the apogee of their power until the early 2040s, when Trump-appointed chief judges are on track to simultaneously sit atop nearly every appeals court in the country.

The stock market has had quite a year. Plenty of cash is sloshing around, the pandemic recession notwithstanding, thanks to loose monetary policy, rampant inequality, crypto-speculation, and helicopter drops of cash. Plenty of bored people are reading market rumors on the internet, pumping and dumping penny stocks, riding GameStop to the moon, and bidding up the price of esoteric currencies and digital artworks. The markets are swooning and hitting new highs as kitchen-table investing—laptop-on-the-couch investing, really—is having a heyday not seen since the late 1990s.

Yet economists, policy makers, and investors are worried that American markets have become inert—the product of a decades-long trend, not a months-long one. For millions of Americans, getting into the market no longer means picking stocks or hiring a portfolio manager to pick them for you. It means pushing money into an index fund, as offered by financial giants such as Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street, otherwise known as the Big Three.

Here’s a cool trick for blowing any American’s mind. Tell us that in France, so many boulangeries shut down for vacation every summer that it can be tough to snag a baguette. Bakers aren’t the only ones who get time off. In August, up to half of the country’s salaried employees have been known to take at least a full week off from work. Half!

Americans are good at lots of different things, but going on vacation is not one of them. Every year in parts of Europe, summer turns into a mini-sabbatical. In Norway, during the tradition of fellesferie, the nation simply shuts down for a few weeks of July fun. In Italy, so many people take the last two weeks of August off that Rome’s transit system runs on a reduced “festivi” schedule. Meanwhile, guess which industrialized country is the only one that doesn’t guarantee time off to its workers? Guess which country left 768 million vacation days on the table in 2018? Guess which country … arghhhhhhhh.

For this month’s look-back at “Dear Therapist” columns, I’ve decided to turn not to a specific theme, but to a handful of columns that have been reader favorites over the years.

Rereading them, I understand why. Though the topics they cover are disparate—among them the loneliness of singledom, the shame brought on by abuse, the difficulties of extended family—each does something that I think of as typical Lori: providing readers (and the letter writers themselves) with a whole new framework for thinking about a problem.

One letter, to a woman who has a troubled relationship with her sister-in-law, stands out to me as paradigmatic. “Unfortunately, I can’t stand her,” the letter writer says. “Everything about her rubs me the wrong way. She sees the world in black and white, while I see infinite shades of gray.” How should she build a relationship with someone she so detests?

In 2019, Gennady Borisov, an amateur astronomer in Crimea, discovered his seventh comet. This icy object wasn’t like the others Borisov had found, or like any of the other comets in the solar system. This one wasn’t orbiting the sun.

Instead, it had been drifting alone in interstellar space, following its own path, until one day, it entered our solar system and grazed past the sun. Warmed by the heat of a star, for the first time in who knows how long, the icy comet thawed just a little bit.

Some of Earth’s most powerful telescopes captured the cosmic interloper as it went by. Astronomers could see the comet enveloped in a fuzzy glow of once-frozen dust particles loosed by the sun.

By analyzing these particles from afar, researchers have managed to learn about the comet’s composition, its origins, and its long journey here. One recent finding demonstrates something rather melancholy.

In August 2011, Mitt Romney was campaigning for president at the Iowa State Fair and explaining why he didn’t want to raise taxes on the American people when a heckler shouted that corporations should pay a greater share of taxes.

“Corporations are people, my friend,” Romney replied. He was jeered in the crowd, and jeered even more by Democrats afterward. “I don’t care how many times you try to explain it,” Barack Obama said on the stump. “Corporations aren’t people. People are people.”

Ten years later, there’s been a strange inversion. Corporations, responding to pressure from Democrats, are acting more like people—using their clout to weigh in on legislation and social-justice issues that don’t immediately affect their taxes or bottom line. Republicans, meanwhile, are furious at the idea that companies might act this way.

Across the United States, cases have started rising again. In a few cities, even hospitalizations are ticking up. The twists and turns of a pandemic can be hard to predict, but this most recent increase was almost inevitable: A more transmissible and more deadly variant called B.1.1.7 has established itself at the precise moment when many regions are opening up rapidly by lifting mask mandates, indoor-gathering restrictions, and occupancy limits on gyms and restaurants.

We appear to be entering our fourth surge.

The good news is that this one is different. We now have an unparalleled supply of astonishingly efficacious vaccines being administered at an incredible clip. If we act quickly, this surge could be merely a blip for the United States. But if we move too slowly, more people will become infected by this terrible new variant, which is acutely dangerous to those who are not yet vaccinated.