Last month, a source emailed a colleague of mine with a complicated theory that, the source claimed, proved Pete Buttigieg had been in the CIA. “The American people have the right to know if he was ever an agent or officer,” the person wrote, with the kind of baseless confidence that lives on the internet.

By then, Buttigieg’s critics on the left had started to focus more on what the South Bend, Indiana, mayor could have been doing at McKinsey, a company that seems to look worse with each passing week. Progressives, and in particular the Elizabeth Warren campaign, pounced: What was Buttigieg doing at McKinsey for two and a half years? How many people had lost their jobs because of him? How shady was the work conveniently hidden behind a standard McKinsey nondisclosure agreement?

Walk down a barely marked stairway into a basement in New York’s East Village on a Sunday morning, and you may find yourself in a hub of Ukrainian American life. Members of the vast Ukrainian diaspora regularly gather here, at a church-run restaurant called Streecha, trading the latest on Ukrainian politics over plates of pierogis and bowls of borscht. As formal impeachment hearings against President Donald Trump were finally getting under way recently, several of the patrons here told me that America had lately been feeling more like home—and not in a good way.

The allegations involved in the impeachment inquiry embody a central tension of the Trump administration. Diplomats and officials as prominent as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have attempted to revive Ronald Reagan–style rhetoric about America’s role as the world’s foremost defender of liberty and freedom, including signaling support for Ukrainian self-determination. Meanwhile, the president and his associates appear to be more invested in courting power and personal gain, from Trump’s cozy press conferences with Russian President Vladimir Putin to his attempt to get the Ukrainian government to investigate the family of former Vice President Joe Biden.

This year, a graffiti slogan began to appear on walls across Wales. Typically spray-painted in white letters on a red background, it read Cofiwch Dryweryn—“Remember Tryweryn.”

The phrase first appeared half a century ago, on a wall in a Welsh seaside village, and the mural quickly became a local landmark. It commemorated the village of Capel Celyn in the Tryweryn Valley, which was flooded in 1965 to create a reservoir. The “drowned village” was Welsh, as were the 70 residents who were forced to leave their homes. The water supply was destined for the English city of Liverpool. Remember Tryweryn: Remember what England does to Wales.

The destruction of the village was a deep enough wound to feature on the most recent season of Netflix’s royal drama The Crown: Over dinner with his tutor Edward Millward, a Welsh nationalist, Prince Charles sees a photograph of Capel Celyn. “I have so many places to visit,” he says, wistfully. “You wouldn’t be able to visit anymore,” is Millward’s brisk reply.

The 80 percent of Americans who supported the war in Afghanistan back in 2001 were wrong. And the tiny anti-war faction that opposed the conflict was correct in warning that an invasion and occupation would turn into a bloody quagmire.

That was my thought as I read the long-suppressed war documents that The Washington Post published yesterday after a three-year fight to make them public. Officials under Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump “failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign,” the Post showed, “making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.”

Observers will differ on whether U.S. officials could have been more effective or honest, or whether their failures were foreordained by perverse incentives and hard choices. A shorter war that struck al-Qaeda members but eschewed occupation can be imagined.

If you are following mainstream news outlets, you know that in 2016, Donald Trump benefited from a Russian hacking and disinformation campaign designed to help him get elected, even as he sought permission from the Russian government to build a hotel in Moscow. You know that he deflected blame from Russia for that campaign, even as he sought to benefit from it politically. You know that shortly after the election, Trump told Russian officials in the Oval Office that he didn’t mind their efforts on his behalf, inviting further interference. And you know that while those acts may not have amounted to criminal conspiracy, the president’s insistence that there was “no collusion” flies in the face of established facts.

It was a pair of feather earrings that helped Ann Miceli get out from underneath strangers’ cars. For years, Miceli had worked as an auto mechanic and picked up shifts in her spare time at Indianapolis restaurants. One day, she came across those earrings, and “it kind of sparked something.” Miceli bought a pair, and then some supplies to make her own. She listed some of her creations in a shop on Etsy and named it PrettyVagrant.

That was in 2011. In the intervening years, Miceli has sold nearly 30,000 of her handmade earrings and feather hair extensions, all of which she assembles by hand at home. After a couple of years, Miceli quit her job as a mechanic. Etsy “has given me the opportunity to work from home and watch my grandkids,” she told me. Everything was humming along nicely until last summer, when the site began implementing a new search algorithm that gives priority to sellers who guarantee free shipping. Those who charged even a few dollars, like Miceli, were removed from their spots on the first page of search results. In August, Miceli’s revenue was down 40 percent from the previous year—a huge dip that she blames on the free-shipping finagling.

The United States is a fortress of gerontocracy besieged by a youth rebellion. America’s leaders are old—very old. The average age in Congress has never been higher, and our national leaders are all approaching 80. Nancy Pelosi was born in 1940, Mitch McConnell came along in 1942, and Donald Trump, the baby of this power trio, followed in 1946, making him several weeks older than his predecessors Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. The two leading candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, are 77 and 78 years old, respectively. Every individual in this paragraph came into the world before the International Monetary Fund and the CIA; before the invention of the transistor and the Polaroid camera; before the Roswell UFO incident and the independence of India.

In the latest turn in a long, ugly saga, George Zimmerman, the volunteer neighborhood watchman who was acquitted of second-degree murder after shooting Trayvon Martin in Florida in 2012, recently filed a lawsuit in which he presents himself as the victim of injustice and seeks recompense for his losses. The killing of Trayvon, who was 17, led to a national outpouring of anger—over Florida’s “stand your ground” law, which offers legal protections to those who use lethal force instead of retreating from confrontations, and over a broader pattern in which African Americans die at the hands of shooters who claim to have feared for their own lives.

Zimmerman’s lawsuit reflects a different kind of indignation. Six years after his trial, he is now accusing Trayvon’s parents; their attorney, Benjamin Crump; the state of Florida; and others of colluding in what the suit portrays as an unfair prosecution. His lawsuit seeks an eye-popping $100 million in damages for the personal losses he claims to have sustained. “Plaintiff Zimmerman,” his complaint says, “has suffered severe loss of reputation, goodwill, and past, present, and future loss of income, earning, and other financial damage.”

Last week, the Trump administration approved a new rule that is estimated to cut off nearly 700,000 unemployed people from food assistance provided by the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP (formerly known as food stamps). The rule, which makes it harder for states to waive the federal program’s work requirements in areas of high unemployment, targets a group of people known, in the bureaucratic language of public-assistance programs, as ABAWDs—“able-bodied adults without dependents.”

Congress rejected similar cuts to SNAP in the 2018 Farm Bill, but this time the Trump administration is going around the legislative process by cutting unemployed people from the rolls through administrative rule changes. (The rule is set to go into effect on April 1.) The administration paints ABAWDs as a group of people who can justifiably be cut off from assistance because they ought to be working. Announcing the rule change, Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said in a press release, “We need everyone who can work, to work.” A representative of the USDA assured reporters that vulnerable groups such as children, the elderly, and people who are disabled would not be affected.

It is an astonishing statistic: Some 87 percent of British Jews believe that Jeremy Corbyn—one of two men who could be prime minister in a few days’ time—is anti-Semitic.

How did we get here? Corbyn’s party, Labour, has strong connections with the Jewish community, dating back to its earliest days. Yet a deep distrust has developed between the two since he became Labour leader in 2015, and the issue has dogged Corbyn throughout this election campaign.

The litany of alarming incidents is well rehearsed: Corbyn’s support for an artist who drew a mural depicting hook-nosed bankers getting rich on the backs of the poor. (He said he had not looked properly at the mural.) His assertion in 2013 that British Zionists “don’t understand English irony.” (He said he would now be more careful about using the word Zionist, because it had been “hijacked by antisemites as code for Jews.”) Labour’s refusal to adopt in full an internationally recognized description of anti-Semitism. Each of these individual incidents was made more toxic by the party’s slow handling of complaints filed by Jewish members. During the campaign, Corbyn refused four times to apologize for the distress caused to the Jewish community when questioned on camera by the BBC’s Andrew Neil—a particularly odd decision, because he has done so previously. The party is currently being investigated over allegations of institutional anti-Semitism by Britain’s Equality and Human Rights Commission.