When a new disease emerges, health organizations turn to a seemingly simple number to gauge whether the outbreak will spread. It’s called the basic reproduction number—R0, pronounced R-nought—and though useful for decision makers, it’s a nightmare for public communication. In brief, R0 is the average number of people who will catch the disease from a single infected person, in a population that’s never seen the disease before. If R0 is 3, then on average every case will create three new cases. But even though it seems incredibly straightforward, it’s hard to calculate and tricky to interpret.

R0 is important because if it’s greater than 1, the infection will probably keep spreading, and if it’s less than 1, the outbreak will likely peter out. So it offers vital information to organizations and nations as they consider how to respond to an outbreak—such as the one the world is currently experiencing.

What happened to us? The question haunts us in the Arab and Muslim world. We repeat it like a mantra. You will hear it from Iran to Syria, from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan, and in my own country, Lebanon. For us, the past is a different country, one not mired in the horrors of sectarian killings. It is a more vibrant place, without the crushing intolerance of religious zealots and seemingly endless, amorphous wars.

Though the past had coups and wars too, they were contained in time and space, and the future still held much promise. What happened to us? The question may not occur to those too young to remember a different world, whose parents did not tell them of a youth spent reciting poetry in Peshawar, debating Marxism in the bars of Beirut, or riding bicycles on the banks of the Tigris in Baghdad. The question may surprise those in the West who assume that the extremism and bloodletting of today have always been the norm.

Early in 2010, the year we moved to Hong Kong, our three boys were 11, eight, and six. When we sat them down to tell them we’d be moving there for a few years, we tried to sell it as a challenging adventure. Their responses were mixed. Jake was anxious. Alex, our baby, was excited. But Matthew, our middle son, was inconsolable. He was having none of it.

“What about my friends!” he cried.

We tried to reassure him.

“You’ll be back … you’ll have your family … you’ll make new friends.”

Matthew looked at us with anguish and said, “And then I’ll have to leave them, too.”

Posts kept coming from Black Matters US, from its accounts stationed at seemingly every corner of the internet in 2016. Twitter. Instagram. YouTube. Facebook. Tumblr. Google+. A news site. Google Ads. PayPal for donations. A podcast offering “strong Black voices.”

Black Matters US posted a steady diet of images, of sayings, of articles, of videos that made black people feel good about being black and feel angry about being black in America. As trust built, posts also whispered, “Our Votes Don’t Matter” and “Don’t Vote for Hillary Clinton” and “A Vote for Jill Stein Is Not a Wasted Vote.”

These whispers came from Russian operatives, screaming into history the true mission of Black Matters US accounts—to troll black people into not voting for Clinton in the 2016 election. Clinton already had a “problem with young black Americans,” especially those reeling from her video calling them “super-predators” in 1996. But her problem exploded into a crisis as Russian trolls relentlessly bonded her to racism and police brutality, the two most important problems facing the country, according to young black Americans in 2016. Russian operatives portrayed her as the devilish ward of the hell Donald Trump said black people were living and dying in. Weeks before the vote, a Black Matters US account posted doctored pictures of Clinton captioned “Satan’s daughter” and “The root of all evil.”

When Harvey Weinstein arrives at the Superior Court of New York each day, frail, aged, sometimes hobbling on a walker, he settles into a courtroom crowded with spectators and freighted with a legacy of distrust. On the prosecutor’s side sit two women alleging that the Hollywood producer sexually assaulted them; four others who would buttress their claims that he is a sexual predator; and, in spirit if not in fact, dozens other accusers and legions of people who see in Weinstein the original villain of the #MeToo movement. Across the aisle, supporting Weinstein and his attorneys, are the skeptics of this and other rape prosecutions, those who cite the false allegations against the lacrosse players at Duke and the fraternity brothers at the University of Virginia. And permeating every moment of the proceedings, every motion and witness testimony, every cross-examination and jury instruction, is the disturbing history of rape prosecution in America.

John Bolton, Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, announced the title of his forthcoming memoir last night: The Room Where It Happened, a reference to the Oval Office, the scene of some of the misdeeds he is likely to attribute to the president. (I had hoped for something jauntier, perhaps ’Stached in the Cabinet.) Accompanying that announcement was a story in The New York Times teasing readers with revelations. The most significant is that Trump allegedly conditioned his release of Ukrainian military aid not only on that country’s announcement of an investigation into Hunter and Joe Biden, but also on its release of evidence of the Biden family’s involvement in Robert Mueller’s probe. In fact, there is no such evidence, and the only people who believe that there is such evidence are wing-nut conspiracy theorists and, it seems, the president of the United States.

In June of 2018, Demi Lovato did something pop stars aren’t supposed to do: tell the difficult truth. The former Disney actor had struggled in the public eye with drug addiction, but she’d also built a narrative of overcoming that addiction, with lyrics and a documentary attesting to six years of sobriety. Then she changed the story. “We've been down this road before,” she sang on a new song, “Sober.” “I’m so sorry, I'm not sober anymore.” A month later, she was hospitalized for a near-fatal overdose.

Lovato has kept a low profile since that hospitalization, but she is back now, with a more complex message than ever before. At the Grammys on Sunday, she gave her first performance in a year and a half, and expectations might have been for a triumphant—or at least hopeful—spectacle. Lovato did deliver that, in a way. But she also did something more powerful. In the face of wrenching realities—scandalous accusations of corruption and sexual assault leveled by the former CEO of the Grammys, plus the breaking news of Kobe Bryant’s death—the awards show had wrapped itself in bland affirmations. Music is “the most healing thing in the world,” Alicia Keys said at the top of the night. But Lovato, in hugely moving style, ditched motivational pablum. She debuted a song that said that singing, in fact, would not fix everything.

Perhaps nothing can persuade Republican senators to convict President Donald Trump, but on Friday, as Representative Zoe Lofgren deftly explained why Trump’s blanket defiance of every House subpoena and request for witnesses was an impeachable obstruction of Congress, the mood in the room noticeably shifted. I had the good fortune to be sitting in the Senate gallery to witness this myself. Republican senators whose attention had wandered refocused one by one until—unusually for this trial—the entire Senate was listening intently to an argument and seemed to be considering it seriously.

The reason for the sudden attentiveness is not far to seek. Representative Lofgren was telling senators of both parties that Trump’s response to the House investigations that led to his impeachment was not merely a middle finger raised to Democrats, but an affront to Congress as a whole. She made clear that, left unrebuked, Trump’s defiance will gut the constitutional authority of both House and Senate not merely to check the personal excesses of any given president, but to oversee the entire executive branch. In short, Lofgren was forcefully reminding Republican senators that Trump is a threat to their own legitimate constitutional power.

On a sweltering July day, I follow Annise Dobson down an overgrown path into the heart of Seton Falls Park. It’s a splotch of unruly forest, surrounded by the clamoring streets and cramped rowhouses of the Bronx. Broken glass, food wrappers, and condoms litter the ground. But Dobson, bounding ahead in khaki hiking pants with her blond ponytail swinging, appears unfazed. As I quickly learn, neither trash nor oppressive humidity nor ecological catastrophe can dampen her ample enthusiasm.

At the bottom of the hill, Dobson veers off the trail and stops in a shady clearing. This seems like a promising spot. She kicks away the dead oak leaves and tosses a square frame made of PVC pipe onto the damp earth. Then she unscrews a milk jug. It holds a pale yellow slurry of mustard powder and water that’s completely benign—unless you’re a worm.

“Left but not woke” is the Bernie Sanders brand. If anybody failed to recognize it before, nobody can miss it now. Last week, the mega-podcaster Joe Rogan endorsed Sanders. The Sanders campaign tweeted a video of the Rogan endorsement from Sanders’s own account. That tweet then triggered an avalanche of disapproval from other voices in the Democratic coalition.

Rogan is not an ally to the cultural causes that have come to predominate on the contemporary left. He even mocks many of those causes, while also dancing around conspiratorial thinking of the left and right fringes: 9/11 denialism, Obama birtherism, and speculation about dark deeds concerning Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation.