Minari is a beautifully told family drama loosely based on the childhood experiences of writer and director Lee Isaac Chung. 

In the 1980s, a Korean immigrant family leaves California and moves to rural Arkansas to start a farm. Jacob (Steven Yuen) and wife Monica (Yeri Han) have spent the last decade working in chicken hatcheries with little to show. Jacob brings his family to Arkansas with the hope of creating a “Garden of Eden.” 

William Spradlin could smell, hear, and feel the fire approaching. Around 11 p.m., the resident of Berry Creek, Calif., called his neighbors to see if they thought it was time to leave town.

“The sky was changing so many different colors,” he said. “The roar of it. It was like five freight trains.”

Suicide has been a growing problem in the West for decades now. But drastically higher rates of suicide have consistently plagued Native communities in both the United States and Canada as those populations struggle with alcoholism, drug abuse, and poverty. In Canada, an Indigenous person is three times more likely to die by his own hand than a non-Indigenous person. 

Words on Bathroom Walls, a new film based on the book by Julia Walton, takes viewers inside the mind of a teenager diagnosed with arguably the least understood and most stigmatized mental illness: schizophrenia. 

Adam Petrazelli (Charlie Plummer) is a high-school senior when he has his first psychotic episode. It occurs in a classroom, the worst place possible for a teen trying to maintain his popularity. 

The COVID-19 tracking graph for Sedgwick County, Kan., looks like the steep incline at the beginning of a roller coaster. The city of Wichita and its surrounding county went from 143 active cases on June 1 to 2,442 on July 28, according to the Sedgwick County Health Department. By the third week of July, the percentage of people testing positive had soared to 12.8 percent from less than 2 percent on June 1, and the county’s top physician reinstated a ban on gatherings of 15 people or more.

Three weeks ago, Guy Lyons had just enjoyed a late breakfast. He sat down on the couch with his phone and began scrolling through unanswered emails when his phone rang. It was his elderly neighbor, Mr. Earl, as the block called him.

Guy and Mary Lyons had moved into their diverse, lower-income neighborhood in North Little Rock, Ark., 11 years ago because they wanted to minister to neighbors like Mr. Earl. Over the years, they’d grown close to the retired police officer through neighborhood barbecues and driveway conversations. 

Four years ago the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in favor of same-sex marriage. Despite the closeness of the vote and faulty reasoning in the majority decision, that battle (unlike the 47-year battle concerning abortion) seems to be over—for now. 

Persevering pro-life counselors outside abortion businesses contribute to some last-minute changes of heart, but pro-Biblical-marriage counselors are not standing outside city halls and wedding chapels pleading with same-sex couples about to make their vows.