When President Biden stepped to the microphone in the East Room on Monday, he wasn’t there to talk about the rising casualties in the conflict between Israel and Hamas militants in Gaza. He wasn’t there to talk about ways his Administration was working behind the scenes with Egypt and Qatar to broker a ceasefire. Instead, he did what he’s been trying to do for a week as violence in the Middle East has surged and calls for more U.S. involvement have grown louder: stay on message.

Around 8:30 pm, Tuesday, May 11. The first missile attack from Gaza to Tel Aviv began. The teen patients at the Geha Mental Health Hospital (where I work as a clinical psychologist) were just getting ready to bed, when the alarms started. For most of them this came as a complete surprise. They knew nothing about the clashes between Israeli police and Muslim protestors in East Jerusalem.

NEW DELHI — India’s total virus cases since the pandemic began swept past 25 million on Tuesday as the country registered more than 260,000 new cases and a record 4,329 fatalities in the past 24 hours.

The numbers continue a trend of falling cases after infections dipped below 300,000 for the first time in weeks on Monday. Active cases in the country also decreased by more than 165,000 on Tuesday — the biggest dip in weeks.

The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled on Monday that an exception to the Fourth Amendment for “community caretaking” does not allow police to enter and search a home without a warrant.

The “community caretaking” exception originated from a 1973 case, Cady v. Dombrowski, in which an officer took a gun out of an impounded car without a warrant.

Girls. That’s who “run the world” in the Beyoncé hit that lends a title to this glossy new comedy about four glamorous, ambitious, 30-something Black women in New York who’ve been friends forever.

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — Israeli warplanes unleashed a new series of heavy airstrikes at several locations of Gaza City early Monday, hours after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu signaled the fourth war with Gaza's Hamas rulers would rage on.

Over the past year, most of us have spent at least some time speculating on the ways in which the pandemic will change us. We’re never going to take hugging for granted. We’re going to wear sequins for daytime. We’re going to look forward to boring in-person meetings, having learned that boring Zoom meetings are hardly an improvement. To this cheerful patchwork vision of our future selves, I’m adding one hopeful scrap: we’re going to go to the movies more.

Pop culture may be a crucial tool in effecting change, but for oppressed groups and their respective liberation movements, mainstream representation is often a mixed blessing. Well-meaning TV shows and movies can nonetheless make spectacles of Black pain or paint feminists as unhinged. For decades, it was rare to see LGBTQ characters who didn’t conform to broad stereotypes or meet with tragic ends; trans people tended to fare worst of all.

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Washington is a place of patterns.

A new President takes office. He — and, this newsletter will note that it’s always a he, until it’s not — runs his first Hundred Days, an utterly arbitrary marker that drives political operatives nutty. He gives his first speech to Congress.