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.

When a Saturday Night Live host really commits to the job, even a sketch with a simple premise can feel surprising. Consider last night’s “Mattress Store,” in which Rami Malek, the show’s latest celebrity guest, and cast member Aidy Bryant play a couple searching for the right mattress by enacting every over-the-top scenario they might encounter in bed. Their skits escalate predictably, and Malek matches Bryant’s melodramatic line readings, leaning into the absurdity. When the two act out a lovers’ spat, the Oscar winner catches the audience off guard by miming masturbation under a blanket. When the pair pretend an intruder has entered their bedroom and shot Malek’s character, he flops across the mattress, clutching his heart in a pitch-perfect piece of physical comedy.

In the spring of 2020, as Boston’s first COVID-19 wave raged, I was the gastroenterologist on call responding to a patient hospitalized with a stomach ulcer. Wearing a layer of yellow personal protective equipment over a pair of baggy scrubs, I spent 30 minutes explaining to him that he needed an endoscopic procedure. We built a rapport, and by the end of our conversation about the pros and cons, he seemed to agree with my recommendation. I told him we would be ready to perform his endoscopy within half an hour.

“Well, before we do anything, I’m going to need to discuss it with the doctor.”

I blinked.

When I entered the room, I had introduced myself as the doctor. I had also just explained, in great detail, a highly specialized procedure.

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.

From the moment when scores of Afghans were filmed clinging to an American aircraft in a desperate bid to escape Taliban rule to the day of the departure of the last American soldier, international attention was trained almost exclusively on Afghanistan—until it wasn’t. By mid-September, just weeks after the Taliban took control of Kabul, the sense of crisis that had galvanized the world’s focus began to wane. Today, Afghanistan has all but disappeared from daily headlines.

This is the opportunity that the Taliban has likely been waiting for. In the initial days and weeks that followed the group’s recapture of Kabul, it reaffirmed its commitment, set out in a 2020 peace deal with the United States, to leave its old way of doing things in the past. The Taliban pledged that under new leadership, women, who were once subject to some of the group’s most hard-line restrictions, would have their rights respected (albeit within a strict interpretation of Islamic law). The press would not be inhibited from doing its work so long as it didn’t go against “national values.” Those who had worked with the former Afghan government, or alongside the U.S. and other NATO forces, would not be subject to reprisals.

Damian Adams grew up knowing that his parents had used an anonymous sperm donor to conceive him, and as a teen, he was even proud of this identity. He considered donating to help other families have children. Becoming a father himself, however, changed everything. When his daughter was born 18 years ago, he cradled her in his arms, and he instantly saw himself in her and her in himself. He felt a biological connection so powerful that it made him reconsider his entire life up until then. “What I’d had there with my daughter,” he says, “was one thing I had been missing in my life.” He felt the need to know where he came from.

Adams, a biologist in Australia, would spend years searching for his biological father, running into one dead end after another. Meanwhile, he also began campaigning to end donor anonymity for others like him. In 2016, he and fellow activists pushed the state of Victoria to retroactively abolish anonymity for all sperm donors. (A previous law had already banned it from 1998 onward.) Donor-conceived people in the United Kingdom have also successfully campaigned to ban anonymous sperm donation. In the United States, where anonymous donation is still technically offered, some donor-conceived people are asserting a right to know their genetic origins and even to contact their biological parents, who may or may not welcome the surprise.

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.

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.”

Sometimes my work feels more like ministry than therapy. As a psychologist specializing in family estrangement, my days are spent sitting with parents who are struggling with profound feelings of grief and uncertainty. “If I get sick during the pandemic, will my son break his four years of silence and contact me? Or will I just die alone?” “How am I supposed to live with this kind of pain if I never see my daughter again?” “My grandchildren and I were so close and this estrangement has nothing to do with them. Do they think I abandoned them?”  

Since I wrote my book When Parents Hurt, my practice has filled with mothers and fathers who want help healing the distance with their adult children and learning how to cope with the pain of losing them. I also treat adult children who are estranged from their parents. Some of those adult children want no contact because their parents behaved in ways that were clearly abusive or rejecting. To make matters worse for their children and themselves, some parents are unable to repair or empathize with the damage they caused or continue to inflict. However, my recent research—and my clinical work over the past four decades—has shown me that you can be a conscientious parent and your kid may still want nothing to do with you when they’re older.

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.