After the torture of eight disconnected hours, the plane lands at Heathrow. We’re still rolling when I turn on both phones, hitting refresh on my email, burning at the twirling wheel. Effing phone and its thinking. The messages finally arrive but won’t load. I curse all the way to passport control trying not to run into people as I scan emails and texts. Immigration officer No. 1268 waves me down to the right.

“Why are you here?” she asks.

“The Test match between England and India,” I answer.

“When does it start?”

“Tomorrow.”

“When does it end?”

“Monday.”

“Why does it last so long?”

“I don’t know,” I tell her honestly. “It just does.”

An extremely thought-provoking piece on test cricket, the modern world, globalisation, and the speeding up of life.

The fury over Planned Parenthood is two political passions—opposition to abortion and opposition to government programs for the poor—acting as one. So far, it has nearly led to the shutdown of the federal government, required Republican Presidential nominees to swear their fealty to the pro-life lobby, tied up legislatures and courts in more than half a dozen states, launched a congressional investigation, and helped cripple the Democratic Party. What’s next?

Three teenagers were clustered around the cell phone, heads almost touching as they peered at the video. “Eww…that’s nasty.” A surge of excitement, of almost electric disgust, passed between them. It was Monday after the long Thanksgiving weekend. The Texas morning was warm and overcast, the air spongy. In the cafeteria of Cleveland High School, the students jockeyed with one another to get a better view of the tiny screen. They could see a naked girl lying on a mattress. A guy moving on top of her. A wall of legs surrounded the couple, like a slatted fence. The faces of the others in the room weren’t visible, only their legs and feet, shifting impatiently. It looked like there were eight to ten guys watching the girl, watching and waiting their turn. Each time the guys switched places, another face was revealed—some of them were boys in their school. (One later told a female classmate that he’d stuck a beer bottle into the girl.) Others were older and unfamiliar. But as the video flew from phone to phone that day, almost everyone recognized the girl on the mattress—that long ink black hair, the brown eyes and baby cheeks. She was a sixth grader from the middle school next door. An 11-year-old.

On July 16, 1945, the first atomic bomb test took place in the Tularosa Basin of the Jornada del Muerto desert near Socorro, New Mexico. Just three weeks later, Hiroshima and Nagasaki would be bombed: the only time nuclear weapons have ever been used in war. The test was code-named Trinity, and it forced a radical shift in the way that human beings came to regard their place on earth; from that day onward, for almost seventy years, we’ve lived in the uneasy knowledge that a very few people might gain the power to destroy all civilization—all life, even. The events of this day produced the chief wellspring of every kind of modern-day political and cultural anxiety, cynicism and depression. At that moment, humankind was forced to grow up, whether we knew it or not.

The South Tangerang Branch of the Indonesia Ulema Council spoke out on Tuesday against a move by health authorities to distribute free condoms to sex workers to help halt the spread of HIV/AIDS in the city close to Jakarta.

“Distributing contraception means legalizing the existence of female sex workers in South Tangerang,” said Abdul Rozak, secretary of the South Tangerang branch of the organization, known as MUI.

The South Tangerang administration is planning to distribute 12,500 condoms to sex workers as HIV infections continue to rise across Indonesia.

Abdul Rozak, however, said that MUI rejected the idea because it was contrary to the city’s motto of being smart, modern and religious.

He claimed that distributing free condoms would increase the number of female sex workers in the city.

“We’re pessimist that the distribution of contraception would prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS,” he said. “There are many ways to prevent the spread of HIV and AIDS, but not by giving them contraception.”

Excuse me while I go hit my head against the wall for a while.

A smugly enamored couple sit in a restaurant, their hands clasped as they fret over the menu. The chicken, for instance: can the waitress tell them a little bit about its provenance? Of course she can, because this is the kind of cool restaurant in Portland, Oregon, where patrons regularly seek elaborate assurances about the virtuousness of their food. The waitress informs the couple that the place serves only local, free-range, “heritage-breed, woodland-raised chicken that’s been fed a diet of sheep’s milk, soy, and hazelnuts.” But because the diners, Peter and Nance, are characters on “Portlandia”—a television comedy in which precious concerns spin into giddy lunacy—the conversation does not stop there. Peter, played by Fred Armisen, asks if the hazelnuts, too, are local. Nance, played by Carrie Brownstein, needs to know the size of the parcel of land where the chicken roamed freely. (Four acres.) The waitress excuses herself and returns to the table with a file folder and a photograph. “Here is the chicken you’ll be enjoying tonight,” she says, with therapeutic solemnity. “His name was Colin.” Peter seems appeased: “He looks like a happy little guy who runs around.” But then he wonders if the animal had “a lot of friends—other chickens as friends?” The waitress, who finds this a reasonable question, admits, “I don’t know that I can speak to that level of intimate knowledge about him.”

On the morning of October 10, 2007, the [Fijian] beauticians boarded their flight to the Emirates. They carried duffelbags full of cosmetics, family photographs, Bibles, floral sarongs, and chambas, traditional silky Fijian tops worn with patterned skirts. More than half of the women left husbands and children behind. In the rush to depart, none of them examined the fine print on their travel documents: their visas to the Emirates weren’t employment permits but thirty-day travel passes that forbade all work, “paid or unpaid”; their occupations were listed as “Sales Coördinator.” And Dubai was just a stopping-off point. They were bound for U.S. military bases in Iraq.

Jonas and Wyatt Maines were born identical twins, but from the start each had a distinct personality.

Jonas was all boy. He loved Spiderman, action figures, pirates, and swords.

Wyatt favored pink tutus and beads. At 4, he insisted on a Barbie birthday cake and had a thing for mermaids. On Halloween, Jonas was Buzz Lightyear. Wyatt wanted to be a princess; his mother compromised on a prince costume.

Once, when Wyatt appeared in a sequin shirt and his mother’s heels, his father said: “You don’t want to wear that.’’

“Yes, I do,’’ Wyatt replied.

“Dad, you might as well face it,’’ Wayne recalls Jonas saying. “You have a son and a daughter.’’