Opinion | Casey DeSantis Is Your Obsession. Jill Biden Is Mine.

And David Von Drehle used the occasion of the P.G.A.-LIV golf merger to reflect on the odd career of a golfer centrally involved in it: “Greg Norman with a four-stroke lead in a major tournament was like a cat leaping onto a narrow shelf of Limoges. You just covered your eyes and waited for the sound of disaster.” (Christopher Dodson, Montville, N.J., and Joe Bohr, Park City, Utah, among others) Von Drehle’s article also had the clever observation that “golf was for decades — for centuries — the province of people who cared about money but never spoke of it openly. Scots. Episcopalians. Members of the Walker and Bush families. People who built huge homes then failed to heat them properly. People who drove around with big dogs in their old Mercedes station wagons. People who greeted the offer of a scotch and soda by saying, ‘Well, it’s 5 o’clock somewhere!’” (Jessica N. Lange, Beavercreek, Ohio)

In The Times, Kurt Streeter reassessed the PGA’s onetime pose of rectitude in light of the merger: “The PGA Tour presented itself as the guy who calls a penalty on himself if he accidentally moves his ball a quarter-inch. Turns out it was the guy who makes a double-bogey and marks it down as a par.” (John Daly, Richmond, Va., and Doug Hardy, Concord, Mass., among others)

Also in The Times, Ezra Klein marveled at how little, in the end, Republicans extracted from the debt-ceiling standoff: “Threatening default — and we came within days of it this time — in order to get a deal like this is like threatening to detonate a bomb beneath the bank unless the teller gives you $150 and a commemorative mug.” (Will Rothfuss, Stroudsburg, Penn., and Anita Moran, San Francisco, among many others)

In The New Yorker, Amanda Petrusich examined Paul Simon’s newest album, “Seven Psalms,” a deeply spiritual reflection on human life: “Outside religious spaces, posing the big questions — how we arrived here; what we’re supposed to do with the time we’ve been allotted — is generally considered the terrain of undergraduate philosophy majors and people who have gravely misjudged their tolerance for edibles.” (Helen Pelletier, Portland, Maine, and Michael O’Keefe, San Juan Cosala, Mexico, among many others)

An article in The Economist assessed DeSantis’s apparent reticence and long delay before he squarely took on Donald Trump: “It is as if Brutus had overslept on the Ides of March, giving Julius Caesar a chance to put on his armor, but had tried to proceed with his hit job all the same. The plot to overthrow Mr. Trump, which once seemed plausible, now looks forlorn.” (Howard Stambor, Seattle, and Harry Gerecke, Vashon, Wash.)