Siegel: We have a practice here — to wrap up these discussions after we’ve been hearing about the horrors that lie in store for us, in our politics or in foreign wars sometimes — to just close on a note of joy, some joy you’ve experienced recently that you would like to share with us.

Molly, why don’t you kick things off?

Jong-Fast: I have a rescue dog, a naked Chinese Crested rescue dog named Incitatus. We call her Inky. Just to have a rescue dog, and to bring them into a little pack of tiny dogs that are running around and frolicking, is really wonderful, and it’s bringing me a lot of joy.

Siegel: Hear, hear.

Stephens: I’m not embarrassed to say that the greatest section of The New York Times is not Opinion or Foreign. The best desk is the Obit desk, far and away. It’s the first thing I turn to, and not just because I’m looking for real estate, as the old joke has it. It just has such great obituaries of people, of improbable figures.

And last week, The Times ran an obituary for the singer Bonnie Tyler, who passed away, sadly, at the age of 75. A Welsh singer known to anyone who came of age in the 1980s, on 1980s MTV, for her song “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” better known to a friend of mine as Total Eclipse of All Art.

But, the obituary for her in The Times, which is just kind of one for the ages, is from Alex Williams, and I just have to read these two paragraphs, if you don’t mind, on the song “Total Eclipse of the Heart”:

Slowly and inexorably, momentum builds to climax after climax, during which Ms. Tyler’s surging vocals, dancing on the edge of camp, seem like they could melt the microphone: “Together we can make it to the end of the line — your love is like a shadow on me all of the time.”

The accompanying video, extravagant even by 1980s standards, was shot in a former asylum in Surrey, England. Conjuring a mood of Gothic horror with ninjas, half-clad football players and altar boys with glowing eyes mixed in — “Turn around, bright eyes,” indeed — it seemed to play once an hour on MTV, at the height of the network’s influence.

And I just want to say thank you to Alex for absolutely making my morning with such a wonderful obituary.