The name of the poor wretch is lost to history, but the year is recorded: It was in 1631 that last German Jew was burned at the stake, falsely accused of desecrating the Host.

Flash forward a few hundred years. In 1989, the AIDS activist group ACT UP disrupted services in St Patrick's Cathedral, New York. One protester grabbed a consecrated communion wafer, broke it, and tossed it to the floor. He and some 100 others were arrested. A few of the protesters were sentenced to community service. None went to prison. Needless to say, none was burned at the stake.

From a Catholic perspective, defiling a consecrated communion wafer does violence to the body of God. It would be hard to imagine a more brutal affront to the most cherished beliefs of faithful Catholics.

When Florida Governor Rick Scott arrived in Washington on Wednesday to sit down with Sylvia Burwell, the secretary of health and human services, he was  fulfilling a time-honored ritual. For generations, governors, mayors, and other local leaders have journeyed up to the nation's capital, proverbial hat in hand, to solicit federal dollars. Scott's one-on-one with Burwell, however, carried a complicating factor: Just a week ago, the governor sued her department over the very issue—healthcare funding—he had come to lobby for.

Not surprisingly, Scott came back empty-handed.

Like most current political disputes over healthcare, this one goes back to Obamacare. Yet the debate over the 2010 law has roiled Florida's politics in ways unimaginable in many other states, especially those like Florida in which Republicans control the government. Florida lawmakers have fought so bitterly over the question of expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act that the Senate last month sued the House for cutting short its legislative session before finishing the state budget.

On May 1, 1915, the RMS Lusitania sailed from New York, bound for Liverpool. On May 7, it was torpedoed by a German submarine off the Old Head of Kinsale on the southern Irish coast. The ship’s captain, William Thomas Turner, believing himself to be the last living person on board, climbed the halyards to keep from being washed away and to remain with his ship to the end. Eventually, he clung to a floating wooden oar and then a chair as the ship sank beneath him. Only later, when viewing the scene from some remove, did Turner discover to his horror that others had remained on board and were sucked under as the great vessel sunk below the waves. Turner had been denied the grace of being the last on his ship and going down with it too.

In June 2009, The Atlantic published a cover story on the Grant Study, one of the longest-running longitudinal studies of human development. The project, which began in 1938, has followed 268 Harvard undergraduate men for 75 years, measuring an astonishing range of psychological, anthropological, and physical traits—from personality type to IQ to drinking habits to family relationships to “hanging length of his scrotum”—in an effort to determine what factors contribute most strongly to human flourishing.

Recently, George Vaillant, who directed the study for more than three decades, published Triumphs of Experience, a summation of the insights the study has yielded. Among them: “Alcoholism is a disorder of great destructive power.” Alcoholism was the main cause of divorce between the Grant Study men and their wives; it was strongly correlated with neurosis and depression (which tended to follow alcohol abuse, rather than precede it); and—together with associated cigarette smoking—it was the single greatest contributor to their early morbidity and death. Above a certain level, intelligence doesn’t matter. There was no significant difference in maximum income earned by men with IQs in the 110–115 range and men with IQs higher than 150. Aging liberals have more sex. Political ideology had no bearing on life satisfaction—but the most-conservative men ceased sexual relations at an average age of 68, while the most-liberal men had active sex lives into their 80s. “I have consulted urologists about this,” Vaillant writes. “They have no idea why it might be so.”

In a four-bedroom, white house by the airport in Tulsa, Oklahoma, 2-year-old Jacob squirmed around in Mickey Mouse pajamas, his explosion of poofy black hair pulled into a topknot. He smiled shyly, pushed a red toy car back and forth, and shoved his fingers into his mouth. He appeared to be a typical toddler. Meanwhile, his mother, Amber Briana Smith, was 40 miles away in Taft, Oklahoma, sharing a prison dorm with dozens of other women after having pled guilty to neglecting Jacob by using meth while she was pregnant with him. Three of her other six children were also born with drugs in their systems. She’s seen Jacob just a handful of times in the past year, she says, and some of her other offspring even less frequently. (I changed the names of all the children in this story to protect their privacy.)

George Lucas is not involved with the creation of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. When interviewed by Stephen Colbert about the forthcoming sequel, the now-retired filmmaker said "I'm excited, I have no idea what they're doing"—they being director J.J. Abrams and his team.

But according to Bruce Handy's new Vanity Fair cover story on the creation of Episode VII, Lucas at one point did have a vision for the story that the new Star Wars film would tell. By the time he sold Lucasfilm and related properties to Disney for more than $4 billion, he’d “sketched out ideas for episodes VII, VIII, and IX,” writes Handy, and had already approached Harrison Ford, Carrie Fischer, and Mark Hamill about being involved. Once the property was in Disney’s hands, though, the company and executive producer Kathleen Kennedy mostly scrapped Lucas's ideas. Why? Apparently, people involved may have been getting flashbacks to child actor Jake Matthew Lloyd’s performance in the first prequel:

On June 22, 1991, Billboard announced a new album had surpassed Out of Time, by R.E.M., to become the most popular in the country. It was Niggaz4life, by N.W.A., which had debuted the previous week at number 2 and sold nearly a million copies in its first seven days. Billboard had published an album chart for 45 years, but this marked a historic week: It was the first time that a rap group claimed the top spot on the Billboard 200.

For several years, music historians have considered this, the consecration of rap on mainstream music charts, the watershed moment in modern music, marking the death of hard rock and the dawn of a period where hip-hop has merged with several genres, including country, dance, and even alt-rock, to become the modern sound of pop.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.