Garrett Epps

American colleges botched the pandemic from the very start. Caught off guard in the spring, most of them sent everyone home in a panic, in some cases evicting students who had nowhere else to go. School leaders hemmed and hawed all summer about what to do next and how to do it. In the end, most schools reopened their campuses for the fall, and when students returned, they brought the coronavirus along with them. Come Labor Day, 19 of the nation’s 25 worst outbreaks were in college towns, including the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Iowa State in Ames, and the University of Georgia in Athens. By early October, the White House Coronavirus Task Force estimated that as many as 20 percent of all Georgia college students might have become infected.

Given the ongoing nature of the pandemic, it may seem senseless to make a two-hour film that looks back on how the coronavirus ran rampant in the U.S. And yet, Totally Under Control—from the Oscar-winning writer-director Alex Gibney and his co-directors, Ophelia Harutyunyan and Suzanne Hillinger—not only documents the chaos of 2020 with clear-eyed precision, but also successfully argues for its own existence.

Filmed in secret over five months, Totally Under Control (streaming on Hulu) uses news footage and interviews with experts and government whistleblowers to show how the administration missed each opportunity to either stop the virus from arriving in the U.S. or prevent its spread. The filmmakers present these events in rapid, blow-by-blow succession, lending the doc an urgency that contrasts with the languid federal response to the pandemic. The result is a film that—unlike 76 Days, the moving and intimate documentary on the lockdown in Wuhan, China, made without talking heads—feels shocking to watch in retrospect for its crisp frankness. Viewers may have grown numb to the constant churn of distressing news and learned to stomach the administration’s failure to contain the virus. But Totally Under Control refuses to look away, and being reminded of how many warnings went unheeded is unnerving.

Kami West had been dating her current boyfriend for a few weeks when she told him that he was outranked by her best friend. West knew her boyfriend had caught snatches of her daily calls with Kate Tillotson, which she often placed on speaker mode. But she figured that he, like the men she’d dated before, didn’t quite grasp the nature of their friendship. West explained to him, “I need you to know that she’s not going anywhere. She is my No. 1.” Tillotson was there before him, and, West told him, “she will be there after you. And if you think at any point that this isn’t going to be my No. 1, you’re wrong.”

If West’s comments sound blunt, it’s because she was determined not to repeat a distressing experience from her mid-20s. Her boyfriend at that time had sensed that he wasn’t her top priority. In what West saw as an attempt to keep her away from her friend, he disparaged Tillotson, calling her a slut and a bad influence. After the relationship ended, West, 31, vowed to never let another man strain her friendship. She decided that any future romantic partners would have to adapt to her friendship with Tillotson, rather than the other way around.

Whether President Donald Trump wins or loses, some version of QAnon is going to survive the election. On the day of the vice-presidential debate between Mike Pence and Kamala Harris, the individual or group known as “Q” sent out a flurry of posts. “ONLY THE ILLUSION OF DEMOCRACY,” began one. “Joe 30330—Arbitrary?—What is 2020 [current year] divided by 30330? Symbolism will be their downfall,” read another, darkly hinting at satanic numerology in Joe Biden’s campaign text-messaging code. Vague, foreboding messages that could mean anything or nothing—these are the hallmarks of QAnon, the far-right conspiracy theory, built around Q’s postings on internet message boards, in which Trump is heroically battling a global cabal of devil-worshipping pedophiles. But something noteworthy lurked in Q’s final post of the night: “SHADOW PRESIDENT. SHADOW GOVERNMENT. INFORMATION WARFARE. IRREGULAR WARFARE. COLOR REVOLUTION. INSURGENCY.”

Photo illustrations by Pelle Cass

Updated at 10:03 a.m. ET on October 19, 2020.

To make the images that appear in this story, the photographer Pelle Cass locked his camera onto a tripod for the duration of an event, capturing up to 1,000 photographs from one spot. The images were then layered and compiled into a single digital file to create a kind of time-lapse still photo.

Image above: Cornell versus Dartmouth, women’s lacrosse, October 2019

On paper, Sloane, a buoyant, chatty, stay-at-home mom from Fairfield County, Connecticut, seems almost unbelievably well prepared to shepherd her three daughters through the roiling world of competitive youth sports. She played tennis and ran track in high school and has an advanced degree in behavioral medicine. She wrote her master’s thesis on the connection between increased aerobic activity and attention span. She is also versed in statistics, which comes in handy when she’s analyzing her eldest daughter’s junior-squash rating—and whiteboarding the consequences if she doesn’t step up her game. “She needs at least a 5.0 rating, or she’s going to Ohio State,” Sloane told me.

To Donald Trump’s critics, four years of posturing has left him exposed for all the world to see. The president hasn’t made America great again, they argue; he has made it weaker than it’s ever been: disrespected, ridiculed, and now even pitied, as it struggles to grapple with the coronavirus pandemic. He has failed to rebalance relations with China, failed to deal with North Korea, failed to end the endless wars in the Middle East, failed to cow Iran, failed to stop European free-riding, and even failed to improve relations with Russia. And that’s before one considers his record of undercutting or destroying international treaties on climate change, trade, and nuclear weapons.

To Trump’s supporters, this is manifestly unfair. The president has, for them, finally reversed Barack Obama’s weakness: He has reinforced red lines, put America first, ripped up bad deals, corralled allies to pay more for their own defense, led the global change in attitude against China, defeated the Islamic State, and kept the United States out of any new wars. Add to that deals in the Middle East to normalize ties with Israel and the new line of communication with Pyongyang, and the world, they say, is now a safer place, and one that is better for American workers. If he has ruffled feathers and offended people along the way, so be it.

In public, Donald Trump has spoken in glowing terms about his evangelical supporters, calling them “warriors on the frontiers defending American freedom,” people who are “incredible” and “faithful,” a bulwark against assorted moral evils.

But behind the scenes, as The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins recently reported, “many of Trump’s comments about religion are marked by cynicism and contempt, according to people who have worked for him. Former aides told me they’ve heard Trump ridicule conservative religious leaders, dismiss various faith groups with cartoonish stereotypes, and deride certain rites and doctrines held sacred by many of the Americans who constitute his base.”

Trump “mocks evangelicals behind closed doors,” Republican Senator Ben Sasse recently told his constituents.

Journalism, even practiced at its highest levels, has an element of chance. Reporters spend hours riding in taxis or trains or airplanes, or on the telephone or online, hoping to land that meeting that might yield a quote or secreted document resulting in a story. And if the story is particularly noteworthy, that’s a scoop. A big scoop for a reporter is like hitting your number at a roulette table.

In 2003, when SARS was threatening to become a global calamity, those of us covering China had to work long hours and put our chips down. SARS barely registered in the United States. The invasion of Iraq was looming, and the resources of big news operations were devoted to the Middle East. But for those of us in East Asia—I was the editor of Time Asia—SARS was what mattered. I never had a big scoop. I told myself that was because I’m not lucky. But others were able to report on the disease with a remarkable level of detail.

Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old who was charged with shooting and killing two people during protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin, is just a year older than my son was when he was convicted of murder and sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. To a great many people in this country, my son deserves to die in prison. To another great many, Rittenhouse deserves the same fate. Neither outcome is just.

What Rittenhouse is accused of doing is abhorrent. While thousands rose up to protest police violence in the aftermath of the shooting of Jacob Blake, Rittenhouse’s response was to arm himself and travel to a city not his own, out of a professed desire to defend businesses and private property. As protesters and counterprotesters clashed, eyewitness accounts and video footage suggest that he shot one man, killing him, and when protesters ran after him, he shot two others, killing one.

Horror means something different to everyone. One of my most traumatic movie memories remains the execution of a cartoon shoe in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, a comedy made for children. I’ve also yawned through many an R-rated slasher flick, untroubled as the death and viscera piled up. So in curating a list of horror films to watch this month, I tried to pull from every corner of the genre, bringing in supernatural mind-trips, knowing satires, spectacular gore-fests, and quiet dramas. Though many viewers are automatically put off by horror, so many underseen masterpieces are worth discovering, all within various comfort zones.

I ranked these 25 films according to how scary I think they are, starting with titles that are mildly unsettling and ramping up to those I’d deem intensely disturbing. But scariness is in the eye of the beholder—sometimes it’s not depictions of violence that frighten people, but the emotional tenor of a story, the resonance of the themes, or the power of certain visuals. Still, there should be something for everyone here, whether you’re into vampires, werewolves, serial killers, cannibals, witches, or bug-monsters, or if you’re more in the mood for existential dread, paranoia, grief, or the pitiless fear of the unknown.