I first noticed that something weird was happening this past spring.

In April, the number of workers who quit their job in a single month broke an all-time U.S. record. Economists called it the “Great Resignation.” But America’s quittin’ spirit was just getting started. In July, even more people left their job. In August, quitters set yet another record. That Great Resignation? It just keeps getting greater.

“Quits,” as the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls them, are rising in almost every industry. For those in leisure and hospitality, especially, the workplace must feel like one giant revolving door. Nearly 7 percent of employees in the “accommodations and food services” sector left their job in August. That means one in 14 hotel clerks, restaurant servers, and barbacks said sayonara in a single month. Thanks to several pandemic-relief checks, a rent moratorium, and student-loan forgiveness, everybody, particularly if they are young and have a low income, has more freedom to quit jobs they hate and hop to something else.

At the end of Dave Chappelle’s latest Netflix stand-up special—after 72 brutal, bruised, combative minutes that conclude with the story of a suicide—my other half turned to me and said: “That wasn’t very funny, was it?”

Was it even meant to be? The emotion that defines The Closer is not laughter, but anger. Chappelle once delivered his most offensive jokes with a goofy, quizzical, little-lost-boy smile, removing some of their sting, but here the humor feels sour and curdled. The stoner who never gave a shit seems genuinely frustrated and goaded on by social-media pile-ons. An alternative title for the special might be A Response to My Critics.

Artists tend to be annoyed when critics grade their work on its political content rather than its technical and creative choices, and yet responding to The Closer any other way is hard. The special draws its energy from one of the hottest debates in popular culture, about competing claims to victimhood. Its jokes about LGBTQ people have led to boycott threats, calls to remove the special from Netflix, and even the brief suspension of a transgender Netflix employee who protested the special. In GQ, the writer Saeed Jones declared, “I feel like a fool to have rooted for Dave Chappelle for so long.”

The Tribune Tower rises above the streets of downtown Chicago in a majestic snarl of Gothic spires and flying buttresses that were designed to exude power and prestige. When plans for the building were announced in 1922, Colonel Robert R. McCormick, the longtime owner of the Chicago Tribune, said he wanted to erect “the world’s most beautiful office building” for his beloved newspaper. The best architects of the era were invited to submit designs; lofty quotes about the Fourth Estate were selected to adorn the lobby. Prior to the building’s completion, McCormick directed his foreign correspondents to collect “fragments” of various historical sites—a brick from the Great Wall of China, an emblem from St. Peter’s Basilica—and send them back to be embedded in the tower’s facade. The final product, completed in 1925, was an architectural spectacle unlike anything the city had seen before—“romance in stone and steel,” as one writer described it. A century later, the Tribune Tower has retained its grandeur. It has not, however, retained the Chicago Tribune.

The Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition, founded in 1965, is an annual international showcase of the best nature photography. This year, the contest attracted more than 50,000 entries from 95 countries. Wildlife Photographer of the Year is developed and produced by the Natural History Museum, London. The owners and sponsors have once more been kind enough to share the following winning images from this year’s competition. The museum’s website has images from previous years and more information about the current contest and exhibition. Captions are provided by the photographers and WPY organizers, and are lightly edited for style.

Molly didn’t feel particularly patriotic as she said goodbye to her husband, a Navy doctor, early one morning in September. He was leaving on his second deployment in nine months, with just four days’ notice (he’d gotten only 36 hours’ notice ahead of his previous operation). And although his initial mission had been to the Middle East—on an aircraft carrier as a critical-care physician in case of a COVID-19 outbreak on board—this time he was deploying within the continental United States to support a hospital that was overwhelmed with unvaccinated COVID patients.

The pandemic had been raging in the United States for almost a year and a half. He was leaving behind five children, including his 10-month-old daughter, during a time when support for parents was particularly hard to come by. “The civilian world is asking a lot of the military world right now,” Molly sighed. “And … really, it’s hard.” (I agreed to withhold Molly’s last name, and those of several other military spouses in this story, because the military discourages service members and their families from discussing their deployments with the public.)

It’s common now for Democrats to argue that the agenda they are struggling to implement on Capitol Hill represents the party’s most ambitious since the “Great Society” Congress convened in 1965. That’s a reasonable assessment—but one that the party today should consider as much a warning as an inspiration. Under the relentless prodding of President Lyndon B. Johnson, the Democratic-controlled House and Senate passed landmark legislation at a dizzying pace during that legendary 1965–66 legislative session.

Over those two years, the 89th Congress, finally completing a crusade started by Harry Truman almost two decades earlier, created the massive federal health-care programs of Medicare for the elderly and Medicaid for the poor. It put a capstone on the civil-rights revolution by approving the Voting Rights Act. It created the first large-scale system of federal aid to elementary and secondary schools and launched the Head Start program. It approved breakthrough legislation to combat pollution in the air and water. It created new Cabinet departments, a new agency to regulate automobile safety, and national endowments to fund the arts and humanities. It transformed the face of America with sweeping immigration legislation that finally undid the restrictive quotas that had virtually eliminated new arrivals since the early 1920s.

Dear Therapist,

My daughter gave a child up for adoption about 25 years ago. She already had one child, and although I offered to help her raise both children, she felt it wouldn’t be fair to us or to the baby, so she gave her up to a very nice couple, whom we both interviewed and liked. The couple has kept in touch with us both over the years, sending pictures and updates on their daughter.

My daughter always felt that in time the child would want to get in touch with her, and in fact, her adoptive parents have encouraged this, but the girl has always said she didn't want to. This is very painful for my daughter. Can you give us an idea as to why the young woman might not want to meet her birth mother, or offer any explanation that would make my daughter feel less rejected? She has even tried contacting her on Facebook, and the response was that Facebook was not an appropriate place to discuss this relationship. But no reciprocal contact has ever been made.

Watching Succession’s second season, which to my mind is one of the most dexterous and enthralling seasons of television in recent history, was like an immersion in all the different ways tension can manifest on-screen: a loaded conversation between two people, a fraught family event, a hunting excursion during which executives literally scuffle to bring home the bacon. You perhaps remember less about the specifics of each scene than the visceral feeling of watching them. A four-minute conversation in the sixth episode, “Argestes,” between Shiv, one scion of the wealthy Roy family (played by Sarah Snook), and the fixer Rhea Jarrell (Holly Hunter) was almost incidental in terms of plot, and yet the palpable hostility between the two women conveyed infinitely more than was in the script. The setting of Succession is 21st-century Extreme Wealth Island, but the mood is ancient Greece. Brutality and fate and ritualistic violence are never far from the surface.

In 2014, the executives at a brand-new start-up called Andela made a decision whose consequences they would only understand much later. Andela’s model was to recruit and train promising African engineers, then place them at Western tech firms, which meant its employees and clients were scattered across time zones; it desperately needed a way for its distributed workforce to share information and make decisions easily and asynchronously, ideally without subjecting anyone to a deluge of emails. So the company started using Slack.

The maker of the chat software had recently become one of San Francisco’s trendiest new companies, based on a promise to make work communication more transparent and fluid. And at Andela, it did. As the company grew, Slack became its central nervous system, the place where business was conducted and where the company’s culture was formed.

James Carville is furious. “It’s the LAW!!! If you do not enforce it, Dems will look as weak as people think they are,” he texted me earlier this week. “I would ask if we could use DC jail for Bannon.”

What has Carville itching to put former President Donald Trump’s ex-adviser behind bars? Defiance. The special congressional committee charged with investigating the January 6 insurrection gave former Trump White House officials Steve Bannon, Mark Meadows, Kash Patel, and Dan Scavino until the end of this week to comply with its subpoenas for testimony and records. Bannon has so far refused to cooperate.

Congressional Democrats, who control both chambers and have a majority on the January 6 committee, can ask the House or Senate sergeant-at-arms to arrest Bannon. Yesterday afternoon, though, Representative Bennie Thompson, the Mississippi Democrat who chairs the committee, announced that he will pursue a more moderate path: Next week, the committee will vote on whether to refer Bannon to the Justice Department for potential criminal prosecution.