Parents know that winter is the season of sickness. Your kid will have approximately infinite colds. You, too, will have approximately infinite colds. Last winter, COVID precautions kept sickness at bay. But this year, school is in session, day-care colds are spreading fast, and the only cohort of people in America not yet eligible for COVID vaccination is our youngest children.

Aside from promises of clinical-trial data by the end of the year, the timeline on which children younger than 5 might be vaccinated is still unclear. The parents of these kids are staring down months more of carefully weighing the risks of COVID against the benefits of indoor cheer. My own child, now 20 months old, was born in March 2020, so my entire experience of parenting has been pandemic-inflected. As the cold creeps down the East Coast, where I live, and nudges the people around me inside, I have been thinking about how the responsibility and anxiety of navigating around this one infectious disease might linger longer for the parents of small children than for most other Americans.

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.

Conservatives in America have, in recent months, used the idea of freedom to argue against wearing masks, oppose vaccine mandates, and justify storming the Capitol. They routinely refer to themselves as “freedom-loving Americans.” Freedom, as a cause, today belongs almost entirely to the right.

This was not always the case. In the early 1960s, civil-rights activists invoked freedom as the purpose of their struggle. Martin Luther King Jr. used the word equality once at the March on Washington, but he used the word freedom 20 times.

The conservative use of the idea of absolute freedom, of freedom as your personal property, to shift American politics to the right came shortly after King’s speech, and indeed was a direct reaction to his argument that one’s own freedom depended on everyone else’s. This wasn’t an organic response. Rather, conservative activists and business leaders designed an opposite idea of American freedom to protect their own interests. That effort can be seen in the role played by one of the most overlooked yet powerful forces in 20th-century America: the nation’s Realtors.

More than 20,000 people died on American roadways from January to June, the highest total for the first half of any year since 2006. U.S. road fatalities have risen by more than 10 percent over the past decade, even as they have fallen across most of the developed world. In the European Union, whose population is one-third larger than America’s, traffic deaths dropped by 36 percent between 2010 and 2020, to 18,800. That downward trend is no accident: European regulators have pushed carmakers to build vehicles that are safer for pedestrians and cyclists, and governments regularly adjust road designs after a crash to reduce the likelihood of recurrence.

But in the United States, the responsibility for road safety largely falls on the individual sitting behind the wheel, or riding a bike, or crossing the street. American transportation departments, law-enforcement agencies, and news outlets frequently maintain that most crashes—indeed, 94 percent of them, according to the most widely circulated statistic—are solely due to human error. Blaming the bad decisions of road users implies that nobody else could have prevented them. That enables car companies to deflect attention from their decisions to add heft and height to the SUVs and trucks that make up an ever-larger portion of vehicle sales, and it allows traffic engineers to escape scrutiny for dangerous street designs.

Although masks, distancing, ventilation, testing, and contact tracing have all helped forestall a collapse of the American health-care system under the weight of COVID-19, the pandemic will come under control in only two ways: Preventives—specifically vaccines—will harness people’s immune system to keep them from becoming infected, getting sick, and spreading the coronavirus, while targeted therapeutics will offer hope to those who have already developed symptoms. The emergence of Omicron, a worrisome new variant of the coronavirus, underscores the need to use multiple tools to fight the disease. In infectious diseases, control of a pathogen means reducing its impact even if it remains endemic in the world. Fortunately, the United States is poised to authorize two oral antivirals: molnupiravir and Paxlovid. The former is the generic name of a drug made by Merck; the latter is the trade name of a drug combination made by Pfizer. Both come in pill form, and a five-day treatment course of each will provide certain patients with significant benefits.

If Donald Trump had been supported only by people who affirmatively liked him, his attack on American democracy would never have gotten as far as it did.

Instead, at almost every turn, Trump was helped by people who had little liking for him as a human being or politician, but assessed that he could be useful for purposes of their own. The latest example: the suddenly red-hot media campaign to endorse Trump’s fantasy that he was the victim of a “Russia hoax.”

Franklin Foer: Russiagate was not a hoax

The usual suspects in the pro-Trump media ecosystem will of course endorse and repeat everything Trump says, no matter how outlandish. But it’s not pro-Trumpers who are leading the latest round of Trump-Russia denialism. This newest round of excuse-making is being sounded from more respectable quarters, in many cases by people distinguished as Trump critics. With Trump out of office—at least for the time being—they now feel free to subordinate their past concerns about him to other private quarrels with the FBI or mainstream media institutions. On high-subscription Substacks, on popular podcasts, even from within prestige media institutions, people with scant illusions about Trump the man and president are nonetheless volunteering to help him execute one of his Big Lies.

This article contains spoilers through the seventh episode of Succession Season 3.

Given how this season of Succession has gone so far, the Roy siblings should have reason to celebrate. They held on to control of the family’s company, Waystar Royco, after a Hail Mary negotiation. They helped choose the Republicans’ next presidential nominee from the comfort of their father’s hotel suite. And in tonight’s episode, they hear that the Department of Justice is considering dialing back its criminal investigation of the family conglomerate. Clearly, Kendall (played by Jeremy Strong) can’t choose a better time to throw himself the “fucking best birthday ever.”

Unsurprisingly, he turns out to be horribly wrong. The reason lies in Succession’s thesis: Money has bought these characters everything except an ounce of real joy. Even when the Roys have a party, they’re surrounded by yes-men, opportunists, and, worst of all, one another. The siblings have been taught that happiness comes only from attaining more power and wealth, so backstabbing and insulting others is second nature to them, even at festivities. From this setup—toxic people in a gilded cage—the HBO drama has repeatedly mined both laughs and schadenfreude, and at times the series has felt like it’s spinning its thematic wheels. Yet in examining the siblings’ maliciousness over the course of a single, cursed night, this latest episode captures in close-up the horror of the family’s perpetual cycle of pettiness and empty triumphs.

About 20 years ago, I think, I started experiencing obscure emotions. Sometime around the winter of 2001, I started feeling gezelligheid, the cozy sense of being at home with friends while it’s storming outside. The following spring, I endured bouts of what the French call ilinx, the sudden urge to perform minor and unnecessary destructive acts— smashing plates or knocking over trash bins.

By the 2010s I was having spells of ambiguphobia, a fear of leaving things open to interpretation, and also moments of what the Inuit call iktsuarpok, the fidgeting desire to look out the window even when you’re in the middle of a perfectly engrossing conversation. As I age, I’m also definitely experiencing more cyberchondria, the anxiety you feel about imagined health issues after checking WebMD.

Congress has never been a place known for cutting-edge fashion. Instead, a stuffy formality has long been its trademark. As Allbirds and preppy quarter-zips swept into boardrooms and C-suites across the rest of the country, Capitol Hill remained one of the last bastions of traditional American business attire—the global headquarters of wing tips and ill-fitting suits, Tory Burch flats and bland Banana Republic pencil skirts. During sweltering D.C. summers, you could find communications directors and legislative aides wearing jackets and ties to work, wiping their sweaty brows on their uncuffed sleeves as the dew point climbed. The Hill is perhaps the last workplace in the country whose young employees still use the word slacks.

In 2007, in one of the first episodes of Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, Guy Fieri visited Patrick’s Roadhouse, a railway station turned restaurant in Santa Monica, California. The diner’s chef, Silvio Moreira, walked Fieri through the preparation of one of Patrick’s most notable dishes, the Rockefeller—a burger topped with mushrooms, sour cream, jack cheese, and … caviar. Fieri, looking playfully trepidatious, lifted the burger with both hands, said a fake prayer, and did what he would proceed to do thousands of times on the show: He took an enormous bite. And then he fell silent. “Wooow,” he commented, finally, shooting Moreira a what-have-you-done-to-me look.

“Different, huh?” Moreira said, grinning. “Yeah,” Fieri replied. The show’s camera discreetly cut away to the next scene.