No industry in New York City has been hit as hard by Covid-19 as theater, and no industry is said to be as vital to the city's recovery. But the much-heralded, long-awaited reopening of Broadway remains largely aspirational. When the pandemic shuttered New York's theaters on March 12, 2020, performing-arts professionals hoped for a summer revival. As the virus spread, prospects for a reopening in the fall gave way to hope for non-virtual theater by January 2021, and then for summer 2021. Last October, the Broadway League predicted that New York theaters would finally reopen in fall 2021. In January, Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious-disease expert, made the target date vaguer by telling performing-arts professionals at a virtual conference that he thought that theaters could safely reopen "sometime in the fall of 2021," with patrons still wearing masks and social distancing, "if everything goes right."

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The release of a prominent female activist this week is Saudi Arabia's latest gesture to curry favor with the Biden administration. Will it work?

Under intense American and international pressure, Saudi Arabia has released from prison Loujain al-Hathloul, who led the charge for women to drive in the kingdom. But far more is at stake than the fate of the country's most prominent feminist activist, or that of other women and male activists who are not famous and still languish in Saudi jails.

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@realDonaldTrump is gone, for now.

After more than 36,000 tweets in four years, with 88 million followers, the self-described "Hemingway of 140 characters" has been banned, perhaps permanently, by Twitter, his favorite social media megaphone, for what the company said was condoning the deadly riot at the Capitol by his supporters on Wednesday and preventing him from inciting further violence.

Calling Twitter's decision, which followed a temporary suspension by Facebook, "absolute insanity" Donald Trump Jr. tweeted that Twitter's life-time ban of his father meant that America was entering "Orwell's 1984." "Free speech no longer exists in America," he tweeted.

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When newly-elected President Trump escalated his attacks on journalists as purveyors of "fake news" and an "enemy of the people," Washington Post Executive Editor Marty Baron didn't take the bait. "We're not at war," he said. "We're at work."

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Terror attacks in France just keep on coming. In late September, two people were seriously wounded in a knife attack by a young Pakistani refugee outside the former office of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which had just republished cartoon caricatures of Muhammad. In 2015, the initial publication of the images sparked an attack that outraged much of the West—the massacre of 12 people at the magazine's newsroom. In mid-October, an 18-year-old Chechen Russian refugee who had grown up in France beheaded Samuel Paty, a teacher, for having shown the cartoons in a civics class devoted to free speech. Paty was slaughtered for "blasphemy" just outside his school in the Paris suburb of Yvelines. The country was still reeling from his brutal murder when, less than two weeks later, a 21-year-old Tunisian killed three people and injured many more at Notre Dame Basilica in the southern city of Nice. The assailant, who had been in the country less than a month, slit the church sacristan's throat, cut a woman's neck so deeply that the police described it as an attempt to decapitate her, and stabbed a third victim multiple times; she died after staggering out of the neo-Gothic church. Only four years earlier in that same city, another Tunisian had driven a truck into crowds celebrating Bastille Day on July 14, killing 86 people.

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