The newly discovered coronavirus had killed only a few dozen people when Feixiong Cheng started looking for a treatment. He knew time was of the essence: Cheng, a data analyst at the Cleveland Clinic, had seen similar coronaviruses tear through China and Saudi Arabia before, sickening thousands and shaking the global economy. So, in January, his lab used artificial intelligence to search for hidden clues in the structure of the virus to predict how it invaded human cells, and what might stop it. One observation stood out: The virus could potentially be blocked by melatonin.

Melatonin, best known as the sleep hormone, wasn’t an obvious factor in halting a pandemic. Its most familiar role is in the regulation of our circadian rhythms. Each night, as darkness falls, it shoots out of our brain’s pineal glands and into our blood, inducing sleep. Cheng took the finding as a curiosity. “It was very preliminary,” he told me recently—a small study in the early days before COVID-19 even had a name, when anything that might help was deemed worth sharing.

Yesterday evening, President Donald Trump issued 15 pardons and five commutations, including two for individuals found guilty of charges arising from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. He is reportedly considering a raft of other Christmas pardons—for sympathetic allies, for loyal retainers, and even for family members.

The prospect of a president using his power to protect aides accused of breaking the law is disturbing, but it’s hardly novel. In 1973, President Richard Nixon mulled over the idea of issuing Christmas pardons for his Watergate co-conspirators.

Nixon’s pardons would have been—and many of Trump’s pardons certainly would be—bad presidential pardons. In 1925, thanks to a Chicago innkeeper’s decision to ignore a court injunction to stop selling alcohol during Prohibition, the Supreme Court took the time to explain why: “To exercise [the pardon power] to the extent of destroying the deterrent effect of judicial punishment would be to pervert it.”

If Disney’s animated-movie formula relies on tales of heroes and princesses, of villains destroyed and personal freedom achieved, then Pixar’s formula is far more mundane. For decades, the computer-animation studio has made movies that portray transcendent feelings and experiences as the products of ordinary jobs, performed diligently by strange little beings behind the scenes. Monsters, Inc., in 2001, revealed that our fears were created by cuddly, blue-collar creatures. Inside Out, in 2015, personified our emotions as brightly colored sprites pressing buttons and pulling levers. Now, Soul imagines how our personalities are created at a cartoony summer camp, where smiley blobs and squiggles convene to generate human souls.

“Lights, please.”

For half a century, it’s been one of the most significant phrases in American Christianity. A prelude to something sacred in an unlikely place: the Gospel of Luke, King James translation, as recited by Linus van Pelt in A Charlie Brown Christmas.

My parents were atheists; I knew almost nothing about Christianity as a child, although I got the lay of the land when I was sent to Catholic school in sixth grade. Before that, my parents—especially my mother—actively worked to keep me and my sister free from religion, Christianity in particular. But we had our gods. Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny reigned over us, with great kindness and generosity, and if we came, eventually, to a crisis of faith, we dealt with it privately. My sister and I understood that our feelings about Christmas were very important to our parents. The brief—transmitted in the silent language of the family—was to be happy, because our parents had had terrible childhoods, and instead of working out their pasts in psychoanalysis or “involvement,” they threw themselves into these perfect Christmases. It was the most wonderful, extremely tense time of the year.

Donald Trump’s descent into madness continues.

The latest manifestation of this is a report in The New York Times that the president is weighing appointing the conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell, who for a time worked on his legal team, to be special counsel to investigate imaginary claims of voter fraud.

As if that were not enough, we also learned that former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who was pardoned by the president after pleading guilty to lying to the FBI, attended the Friday meeting. Earlier in the week, Flynn, a retired lieutenant general, floated the idea (which he had promoted before) that the president impose martial law and deploy the military to “rerun” the election in several closely contested states that voted against Trump. It appears that Flynn wants to turn them into literal battleground states.

President Donald Trump uses his pardon power as an instrument of personal ambition. He pardons people who have lied to protect him, and people who have expressed loyalty to him. Yesterday, he pardoned Charles Kushner, whose son is married to one of Trump’s daughters. More Trump-family pardons may soon be coming.

Public-spirited citizens are understandably angry about these abuses. As the former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, once a leading member of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team, wrote, “The pardons from this President are what you would expect to get if you gave the pardon power to a mob boss.”

Trump used the pardon power as a tool of self-defense against a criminal investigation. Potential witnesses were induced to keep silent—or to lie outright. To quote Weissmann again, Mueller had to structure his plea-bargain agreements with former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort “in anticipation of a pardon” by President Trump.

For his first three years of life, Izidor lived at the hospital.

The dark-eyed, black-haired boy, born June 20, 1980, had been abandoned when he was a few weeks old. The reason was obvious to anyone who bothered to look: His right leg was a bit deformed. After a bout of illness (probably polio), he had been tossed into a sea of abandoned infants in the Socialist Republic of Romania.

In films of the period documenting orphan care, you see nurses like assembly-line workers swaddling newborns out of a seemingly endless supply; with muscled arms and casual indifference, they sling each one onto a square of cloth, expertly knot it into a tidy package, and stick it at the end of a row of silent, worried-looking babies.

This year has highlighted the particularities of that thing called reading. Some found books impossible to pick up; sustained attention to text on a page is hard when the world is in so much pain. Others turned to literature anew, rediscovering the ways it can refresh and inspire. Below are the titles we were most drawn to in 2020: a wide-ranging list that includes new spins on epic poems, stories about the interior lives of women, memoirs that eloquently challenged industries, and, yes, essays that made us laugh.

The Meaning of Mariah Carey, by Mariah Carey, with Michaela Angela Davis

Marcel Proust had his madeleine, Charles Foster Kane had his sled, and Mariah Carey has her Ritz Cracker. “I’d hold the buttery, salty, crunchy goodness up to my nose, close my eyes, and breathe in one long, luxurious sniff,” she writes early in her memoir, sharing a childhood memory of her father’s strict rationing of snacks. “With precision, I would take one teeny-weeny bite along the scalloped edge.” Small moments like this, rendered in prose that’s amusingly fussy yet still lucid, elevate The Meaning of Mariah Carey from celebrity propaganda into impressive storytelling. The journalist Michaela Angela Davis has helped distill Carey’s knotty trajectory into a narrative propelled less by the reader’s voyeurism than by the authentic tensions of Carey’s life. Sharp analysis about race, poverty, fame, and control—plus insider takes on how popular culture has transformed since the late ’80s—harmonizes with the scene-setting detail work. The results are like Carey’s music: grandiosity made into art by humor, craft, and complexity. — Spencer Kornhaber

Nearly every day for the past nine months, I’ve spent the last few hours before I go to sleep or the first few hours after I wake up in the morning reading news stories about and personal remembrances of those we’ve lost to the coronavirus pandemic. I then share the stories on the FacesOfCOVID Twitter feed, which I run. I make sure to read everything from start to finish, striving for accuracy as I write the corresponding posts, and, most important, I try to bear witness to the loss of this person from the Earth. I try to find something unique to lift up in each post, with the hope that people will recognize the loved one they are mourning just from reading a few words in a tweet.

More than 300,000 people are dead from COVID-19 in the United States. I find their faces scattered across the Obituaries sections of local newspapers, in profiles from local news, and in the wrenching testimonials submitted directly to me. Throughout my more than 250 days chronicling the devastation of the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S., one story at a time—now more than 4,000 and growing by the day—I’ve had the honor of remembering them through the beauty and goodness of the lives they lived.

This is a time of much division. Families and communities are splintered by polarizing narratives. Outrage surrounds geopolitical discourse—so much so that anxiety often becomes a sort of white noise, making it increasingly difficult to trigger intense, acute anger. The effect can be desensitizing, like driving 60 miles per hour and losing hold of the reality that a minor error could result in instant death.

One thing that apparently still has the power to infuriate people, though, is how many spaces should be used after a period at the end of an English sentence.

The war is alive again of late because a study that came out this month from Skidmore College. The study is, somehow, the first to look specifically at this question. It is titled: “Are Two Spaces Better Than One? The Effect of Spacing Following Periods and Commas During Reading.”