It’s the work you respond to, not them. — There are a small number of people who have had profound impacts on my professional and personal life that aren’t family members or close friends, but Roger Angell was one of them. The longtime New Yorker writer died on Friday at the age of 101, and he leaves behind decades…

Let’s rank stuff! — We are now ranking things, every Friday. We will attempt to stick to rankings of things that have some sort of connection to the news of that week, but we can’t guarantee anything. Want us to rank something? Put it in the responses, or email us at williamfleitch@yahoo.com.

And now they can get one. Get them one. — The FDA is recommending, as of today, that all 5-to-12-year-olds get booster shots. I will confess, as the father of two children exactly in that age range — a 10-year-old and a seven-year-old — I hadn’t really thought that much about getting boosters for the kids. I wasn’t against it…

We can’t be shocked anymore, but we should be. — The movie Mass, written and directed by actor Fran Kranz (you may remember him as the movie nerd from The Cabin in the Woods), is a devastating film about the parents of a school shooter (Reed Birney and Ann Dowd) meeting with the parents of one of the children their…

Let’s rank stuff! — We are now ranking things, every Friday. We will attempt to stick to rankings of things that have some sort of connection to the news of that week, but we can’t guarantee anything. Want us to rank something? Put it in the responses, or email us at williamfleitch@yahoo.com.

Do you want to find out what happened? You have to wait. Sorry, that’s how it works. — One of the best books I’ve read in the last year is Carol Leonnig’s and Philip Rucker’s I Alone Can Fix It, a detailed, intimate, absolutely terrifying look at the Trump administration’s disastrous response to the Covid-19 pandemic. We all lived through it, of course, but the book has incredible…

At least campus bars are healing … — When I was in college at the University of Illinois in the late 1990s, there was nothing quite as pathetic as a townie. Sure, I was here for four years, I had to be, but who were these people who were here all the time? Why would they choose to…

Let’s rank stuff! — We are now ranking things, every Friday. We will attempt to stick to rankings of things that have some sort of connection to the news of that week, but we can’t guarantee anything. Want us to rank something? Put it in the responses, or email us at williamfleitch@yahoo.com.

And they shouldn’t. — It has been roughly 20 hours since Politico’s incredible scoop of the Supreme Court draft opinion striking down Roe v. Wade hit, and I, like millions of Americans, am still stunned. The number of people’s lives who are going to be devastated by the ruling — if it ends up…