At the height of the conspiracy theories about Kate Middleton’s whereabouts after a planned surgery, as rumors swirled about body doubles, deepfakes, and other deceptive tactics of the disinformation age, it struck me that the British monarchy was again—ironically—proving its resilience. Outside of world leaders and Taylor Swift (more on her shortly), who but the future Queen of England could generate such attention, such interest, such unhinged speculation? The truth turned out to be humbling, scary, and all too common. A cancer diagnosis is the great leveler, the kind of thing everybody fears and all the money in the world can’t prevent. In our cover story, Katie Nicholl explores its chilling effect on the House of Windsor, in a season when not one but two of its four core members began treatment for cancer and the family was forced to find a new balance between privacy and publicity. They’ve also had to reconcile King Charles’s vision of a “slimmed-down monarchy” with the reality that, for an institution that trades not just on pomp and circumstance but on personal presence, a deep bench may be necessary.

As for our American queen, at least for the moment: I had read about the Harvard class being taught this spring on Taylor Swift and then realized that the professor, in addition to being an influential poetry scholar and critic, was a former classmate of mine (also at Harvard). Stephanie Burt’s piece about the experience of teaching Taylor Swift and Her World at a university that had a tumultuous year, to put it mildly, reminded me that whatever else we read and see about college life, its core competency ought to be education in the most liberal sense. I’m a humanist and an idealist, granted, but I think her goal—to teach students how to think about works of art—is a noble and valuable one. Given the protests that swept across campuses this year, Harvard included, I submit both that students are more politically engaged than older generations give them credit for being, and that precisely because of our fractured culture, it’s all the more important that the younger generation be able to interpret and navigate the world with a critical eye. They’re the ones we need to help put it back together. Maybe some of them will do it through song.

With all that in mind, I went to my 30th college reunion in June and bought a collection of Stephanie’s poems, titled We Are Mermaids, at the Grolier Poetry Book Shop. Its slim spine belies its expansiveness; with wit and great generosity of spirit, Stephanie gives voice to a range of objects and abstractions, from airplanes to shields to marks of punctuation, within the context of larger explorations of identity. The rhymes and forms sneak up on you, potent little surprises. It had been a while since I made room for poetry, read a whole contemporary volume in one sitting the way you’d listen to a new album or walk through an exhibition. I closed the book feeling exhilarated. I highly recommend the experience.