It can feel like listening to Spotify, reading this way. A patchy sampling, in which huge expanses of history are available but unintuitively organized, likely to result in having heard rarities and minor B-sides before getting the full feel of a band or a genre. But that’s no bad thing. In plenty of discographies, the rarities are the best parts.

She treated war injuries as a medical student during Lebanon’s civil war, and her patients became their injuries: names and numbers. But then she had children and things changed. Now, she says, she can’t handle the blood, the gore, any of it.

As I listened to Ahern in his small office, I was struck by how much he knew about, and how much time he spent thinking about, immigration detention. He was a competent and civic-minded public servant, and he was structurally in the position of having to hope for more people to get locked up in ICE detention, or at least for more people to get locked up at Glades, so that the county and its shell corporation could make payments to their investors.

Mom’s still here. I can call her and talk to her, though not about French medical history. Not about anything, really — we mostly exchange affective states and appreciate the fact of each other’s being. Of the growing collection of losses I feel so acutely in the wake of Mom’s dementia, many are the obvious and expected. Her whole self. Her role as parent. Her daily phone calls to me. Other losses I am genuinely surprised by.

The Illinois Jacquet’s 1956 sextet rendition of “Harlem Nocturne” wasn’t simply playing but occurring, happening. Jimmy Jones’s piano glowed like the sun’s last gleam, taking the day with it. I fumbled for my phone to record, in however impoverished form, the high breeze of Roy Eldridge’s trumpet, its fleet rise and easing fall. If Little Jazz’s horn was the wind, Jacquet’s tenor was the tides: waxing and withdrawing, meeting the melody in a long, estuarine flow. The sound was total, final, at once ancient and immediate. I and a half dozen others sat there, listening on the moonlit shore.

Jace came back from vacation weird: He was now peaceful. When he learned of Vote Drunk, he clapped me and Mark Uptick on the backs and rubbed Ava-Claire’s shoulders and said he’d left the agency in good hands. And he only added one build: After voters share their Vote Drunk stories online to receive a bedazzled flask, their stories can be folded into a commemorative, punk-looking zine.

“This success then drove me to want something more, bigger, so next I funded a hospital, or really it was just a wing of a hospital. But walking past it gave me a different feeling than walking past my library, not serious and intellectual, but caring and humanitarian. I will be honest that I have never been very serious or intellectual, and I can’t say I’m particularly caring or humanitarian either. But having my name on these buildings made me feel like I was all these things, not really, of course, but in appearance.”

There were speakers everywhere, pointed out upper-story windows, throbbing on porches, wedged in the crooks of trees, and the sum of so much blasted music composed a surprisingly gentle mélange above which burbled the happy shouts and shrieks of classmates greeting each other after a summer apart. So this, Irma thought, was the Parties.

Still, he started watching the sky, really watching, and started to see the differences in the clouds: the cotton clouds and the sunlit clouds, the rough thick clouds and the slender clouds, and the clouds that danced with the wind. On the day that he first saw the sparrow, it struck him that the sparrow also lived in the sky, and that it was now closer to his mother than he was.

I had hidden everything. Monitors were not allowed to talk about themselves with residents. We could lose pay, placement, and good standing. You can find me in the DSM, I said.

As familiar as they are, these orange maps can only depict a rehearsal, a prelude. In the pre-vaccine moment the Covid maps were terrifying, but examining them, you could imagine a future after orange. One feels very different looking at the climate maps. There is no de-escalating from orange.

When Buchdahl professes that she can understand “how even white men in America are feeling,” she unwittingly reveals a structuring affinity between the politics of white reaction and her own anti-anti-Zionism. What they share, most fundamentally, is an elevation of interior experience above any number of other accepted methods for assessing the merits of competing claims about observable reality.

This is a different mode of watching film; the eye and ear must remain in a constant state of hypervigilance to confirm whether one can spy a coffee cup in the back of a frame, or if someone says “gonna be” instead of “going to be.”