Weekly playlist spotlights a fleeting glimmer of America’s soul

This weekly music roundup ranges across film, television, politics, and pop culture, but its emotional center is a new song described as a brief flash on the horizon, one that captures something of America’s fading spirit. The piece also revisits Steven Spielberg’s return to aliens as a way of urging humanity to be more humane.

The column notes the death of singer-songwriter Esther Shamir at 71. It also criticizes the final episodes of "Euphoria" and "The Sex Lives of College Girls" for undoing the careful groundwork built earlier in each series.

Another item reports that a major publishing house was deeply worried about a book manuscript, with legal advisers flagging 400 sentences in the text. Elsewhere, one of the Arab world’s biggest pop stars was convicted of rape, but his scheduled performance will still go ahead as planned.

The roundup also includes commentary on Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who drew a map of the Middle East in which Israel appears as the central threat, and a column by Zvi Bar'el arguing that no world leader has ever been treated with such humiliation by Donald Trump. Additional recommendations and opinion pieces touch on ideological estrangement in love, a praised album that immediately compelled repeated listening, and testimony from survivors who say they had to search for bodies to prove genocide to the world.