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The Hairbrush

Barbara Keating was 72 when American Airlines Flight 11 carried her into the North Tower. She had spent the summer on Cape Cod visiting her grandchildren, and she was flying home to Palm Springs. On August 7, 2025, the New York City medical examiner’s office gave her name back. Technicians had identified her from minute remains recovered in the trade center wreckage, matched through advanced DNA testing against a hairbrush from her home and samples from her relatives. Her son Paul told reporters that a scrap of her ATM card was the only other trace of her ever found. She was the 1,652nd person identified among the 2,753 killed at the World Trade Center. Her family has buried her beside her husband.

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The Sun Drift

The General Conference on Weights and Measures opens on Tuesday, October 13. The setting is the Palais des Congrès de Versailles, a short walk from the palace that Louis XIV built under the emblem of the sun. Delegates from the states party to the Metre Convention will spend three days on the business of measurement. Near the close of the meeting, at the twenty-fifth item of the agenda, they will vote on a paper called Draft Resolution C. The paper proposes that on May 20, 2027, the world’s civil clock stop answering to the sky. Resolutions reach this conference after years of committee negotiation, and they are usually adopted as drafted. If this one carries, a deference that began on June 30, 1972, with the first leap second, comes to an end.

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The Man at the Table

The evolutionary psychologist Gad Saad has a favorite classroom ritual. He ran through it again on a podcast not long ago. When he teaches at Concordia University, he asks his students to name the strongest predictor of child abuse in a home. The first answer is usually an absent parent. Then come the rest: alcoholism, poverty, a parent who was beaten as a child. He writes the answers on the board and calls them all reasonable. Then he tells the class that none of them is right. The number one predictor, he says, is a stepparent, and the effect is a hundredfold, a ratio he describes as astronomically larger than anything science ordinarily publishes. He reports getting goosebumps every time he tells it.

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Population One, All in Favor

The election notice goes up on the tavern wall. That is how the mayoral race begins in Monowi, Nebraska, the only incorporated village in America with a population of one. Elsie Eiler tapes the announcement up inside the Monowi Tavern, the bar she and her husband bought in 1971, and then, as the BBC’s filmmakers recorded, she votes for herself. She wins unanimously. She has won every year since the count fell to one, because she is the entire electorate and the entire government: mayor, clerk, treasurer, librarian, and bartender of Monowi, population one.

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The $20,500 Ceiling

Columbia’s journalism school paused its midcareer degree three months after Washington capped what America will lend a journalist. The timing is the story. The email went out on a Thursday afternoon. On October 1, 2026, Dean Jelani Cobb told alumni of the Columbia Journalism School’s Master of Arts program that admissions were paused for the coming cycle. The message landed in the inboxes of people who had paid six figures for the degree it described. The school, Cobb wrote, had begun “a critical evaluation” of the M.A. curriculum, and the pause would give the review “the focus it deserves.” The school’s admissions page now carries the same message and dangles a future “relaunch” for anyone willing to wait.

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Rudy’s Library Is Open

The key to the public library in Monowi, Nebraska hangs on the wall of the town’s only tavern, within reach of the bartender. Ask and she hands it over. Then the shed a few steps from the bar is yours for the afternoon: five thousand books and magazines, floor-to-ceiling shelves, and a sign painted by grandchildren on the side of an old refrigerator that reads Rudy’s Library. There are no library cards and no overdue fines, and there is no librarian at a desk, because the librarian is the woman who just handed you the key. She is also the mayor. You borrow on honor and you return when you can. That is the whole system, and it has held for twenty-two years.

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Still on the Nail: The Farmers’ Almanac in the Age of Digital Knowing

The 210th edition of the Farmers’ Almanac reaches the checkout racks this month, which means a locked box in Lewiston, Maine, has already done its work. The winter of 2026 and 2027 is settled and printed: snow, sleet, and surprises, with El Niño shoving the storm track south and the Northeast warned of a tricky mix. Whoever buys the booklet today already knows, in calm little type, what the sky will do in February. Or claims to. It will be read out loud at kitchen tables all winter.

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