For more than three decades, Mike Davis has offered clear and often stinging counterpoints to the prevailing vision of the “California Dream.”

We include fragments of poems that, while not contest finalists, provide one more way for America to shine a light on the ongoing horror in Ukraine.

I begged them: “Keep the money. Just give me the photos of my family.”

In “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” Marvel took all the toys that they know the fans want and then smashed them in front of us.

In “The Agitators,” Dorothy Wickenden explores 19th-century intersections of class, racism and patriarchy through the lives of the escaped slave Harriet Tubman and the activists Martha Wright and Frances Seward.

Classic plays don’t require updates or new translations to stay fresh, but if they are indeed classics, they can withstand new interpretations.