Redemptorist Father Patricio Alfredo Sánchez Molinari, 53, died Oct. 17 when a large crucifix fell and struck him during Mass in Guayaquil. The archdiocese is awaiting a technical report on the cause.

It is 9:47 AM, an hour at which I have abandoned my morning but not yet earned my afternoon, and I am reading about a missile sale that fell through. I am drinking coffee out of a mug a friend gave me that says something encouraging on it, in a font I associate with hospitals. The rain outside is doing the thing where it cannot decide if it is rain or simply a mood the sky is in. And I am, for reasons I cannot fully explain to myself, deeply invested in a Norwegian arms deal.

It is 9:47 AM in a kitchen that gets about forty minutes of usable light per day, and I am eating a piece of toast that I have already decided was a mistake, scrolling past the local news to read about a train I will never take. This is one of my hobbies. I live in the Pacific Northwest and I worry, with great specificity, about the infrastructure of New York. It is cheaper than therapy and almost as humiliating. The story is this: the Long Island Rail Road, which the Associa

It is 4:18 PM in a kitchen that gets exactly twelve minutes of direct sunlight per day, and I am eating peanut butter off a spoon because I have decided that lunch was a concept invented by people with better dental insurance than mine. The spoon is one of the good ones. The peanut butter is not. On my phone, somewhere between an ad for a mattress and a notification about a calendar event I do not remember accepting, I read that the President is in Beijing, meeting Xi Jinping

I was standing in the kitchen attempting to decide whether the small amount of coffee left in the pot constituted "more coffee" or simply "a sad puddle I should pour out and pretend never existed," when I saw the headline. Retail sales up 0.5% in April. I read it the way I read most economic news, which is to say with the dim awareness that someone, somewhere, has measured me and found me to be a decimal. The Associated Press, via The Seattle Times, informed me Thursday that