Just when you thought American nuns were going extinct, they’re back and gaining momentum. In 2010, after 50 years of precipitous decline, only 50,000 “perpetually professed Catholic sisters” remained, serving God at the median age of 74. But over the past decade, things have changed radically. Becoming a nun is much more popular now, especially among young women, and increasingly among women of color.

Keith Gessen is a successful writer who lives in Brooklyn with his wife and 4-year-old son, Raffi. Like many white liberals, Mr. Gessen has read Nikole Hannah-Jones and therefore wants to send Raffi to a racially diverse kindergarten. But when theory becomes reality, he finds out that choosing a school is not easy.

At the presidential debate three weeks ago, Kamala Harris challenged Joe Biden on why he opposed busing as a means to achieve school desegregation. This prompted tons of half-baked articles that failed to explain the nuance of the issue. Enter Nikole Hannah-Jones to save the day.

The conclusions are stark. The data is sound. And the policy recommendations are as plain as day. But what makes this book outstanding isn’t just the hard-hitting numbers and the well-rendered charts and graphs. What I appreciated just as much was Prof. Johnson’s ability to tell a compelling story of the people behind the numbers.

Some say that reading is for people who refuse to get in the arena, who refrain from taking action, who prefer to hide. But I strongly disagree. For me, reading helps us to consider the perspectives of others, build our empathy, and most important, to follow the facts. Our lived experiences matter, and so do our personal truths, but reading offers a way to pass over, to connect, and to return transformed.

We live in a country where white people own 95 percent of the farms, while Latinx people own 3 percent and African Americans own 1 percent. Consider that Latinx people do 80 percent of the farm work, or that 100 years ago, Black people owned 14 percent of the farms — or that in South Africa, people of color own 27 percent.

According to food sovereignty activist Leah Penniman, owner of Soul Fire Farm and author of Farming While Black, our organized system of unequal food distribution amounts to food apartheid, which relegates white people to food abundance and people of color to food scarcity.

Most people think that mindfulness, “the state of active, open attention on the present,” helps us increase our happiness and sense of well-being, while decreasing our depression, anxiety, and stress. Thousands of schools across the country teach mindfulness to their students. It’s a good thing, right, despite its appropriation of Buddhist meditation teachings? Not so, says San Francisco State professor Ronald Purser, author of McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality. Instead of helping us gain clarity, mindfulness turns us inward, isolated from others, teaching us to accept the status quo instead of fighting against injustice. Our scary, chaotic world may overwhelm us, Prof. Purser suggests, but creating a private “religion of the self” is not the solution.

Everything was fine when Hannah came out to her family as a trans woman. But when they wanted to reintroduce themself as Salem — nonbinary, gender fluid, gender expansive — they hesitated, fearing isolation from their family, while at the same time feeling disconnection with themself. More and more young people identify as neither male or female. This article poignantly explores the struggles that nonbinary people face in a society that demands we choose a side.

When Vivia Wampler was 2 years old, she fell, hit her head on the stairs, and suffered permanent brain damage that left her intellectually disabled. Now an adult, Vivia wants to raise a child but thinks she should practice being a mom first. For the past several years, Vivia has taken care of Emma, a Reborn doll that looks, at first glance, like a real infant. The experience has brought Vivia many of the joys of motherhood — alongside the sneers of passersby, the leeriness of family, and the judgments of the author.

Get ready for a wild ride. At the Green Meadow Waldorf School in Rockland County, New York, many rich white parents refused to vaccinate their children last year, wishing to “reduce the load” of foreign substances in their children’s bodies. One parent said, “I just go based on what I believe. We’re all seed of God. We’re all stardust. My instinct is a guiding force.” When the health department banned unvaccinated students from attending the school, parents became enraged and sued.