First, Brandon Hicks’s illustrated meta-story of advertising woe, “Your Face Here: A Biography.”

Then, Jonathan Harper recounts the challenges he faced growing up as a queer gamer in the Saturday Essay. From Dungeons & Dragons to video games like Dragon Age and Baldur’s Gate, Harper traces the slow but encouraging decline of homophobia in gaming plots. These fantasies provide hope for erasing some of the inequalities of our flawed reality.

Finally, in the Sunday Essay, C.W. Cannon creates a New Orleans playlist for the ages. The “breathless abandon” of the city’s spirit comes out through its music. Musical saints from the Big Easy, like Dr. John and The Neville Brothers, round out Cannon’s ode to this mystical and troubled metropolis.