december 1985

His eyes fall to the floor when I ask him to describe it. We’ve been tiptoeing toward it for 45 minutes, and so far, every time he seems close, he backs away, or leads us in a new direction. There are competing theories in the press, but Joe Biden has kept mum on the subject. I want to hear him explain it. I ask him to walk me through the night he appeared to lose control of his words onstage.

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“I—um—I don’t remember,” Biden says. His voice has that familiar shake, the creak and the croak. “I’d have to see it. I-I-I don’t remember.”

We’re in Biden’s mostly vacant Washington, D.C., campaign office on an overcast Tuesday at the end of the summer. Since entering the Democratic presidential-primary race in April, Biden has largely avoided in-depth interviews. When I first reached out, in late June, his press person was polite but noncommittal: Was an interview really necessary for the story?

The bedroom can seem to contain the heart of a marriage. In the 2012 Judd Apatow movie This Is 40, the epicenter of marital tension is the bedroom of the onscreen couple, played by Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann. Pete and Debbie are as comely as their Los Angeles home, but the couple flirt with divorce fantasies more than with each other. Debbie mourns a loss of mystery; Pete craves independence. Of a kind, anyway. He’ll shed his boxers so that Debbie can weigh in on the progress of a hemorrhoid, but he also has a habit of sneaking off to hang with his buddies, an act his wife likens to infidelity. A scene in bed captures the riddle at the heart of this marriage—a parry, essentially, between forms of intimacy. Wander too far in search of privacy, and you nullify romance; get too close, and the same occurs. The couple lie under the sheets, Debbie on her laptop and Pete passing gas. “This is why we never have sex,” she says with desperation in her voice, as he grins. “You’re gross.”

Over the past two weeks, a parade of sober and coldly furious civil servants has come forward to testify before Congress about President Donald Trump’s decision to withhold congressionally approved aid to Ukraine.

Acting U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Bill Taylor emphasized that “the security assistance we provide is crucial to Ukraine’s defense,” invoking the sacrifice of Ukrainian soldiers fighting Russia. Kurt Volker, the former special envoy to Ukraine, testified that “the stakes for the United States in a successful Ukraine could not be higher.” The former National Security Council aide Tim Morrison emphasized that “Ukraine is on the front lines of a strategic competition between the West and Vladimir Putin’s revanchist Russia.” Former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch testified that a “secure, democratic, and free Ukraine serves not just the Ukrainian people, but the American people as well.”

Astronauts are more than cosmic travelers. They’re also research subjects in the careful study of what exactly outer space does to the human body. On the ground, researchers measure vitals, draw blood, swab cheeks, and more. In orbit around the Earth, the astronauts do the work themselves.

That’s how they found the blood clot.

An astronaut was carrying out an ultrasound on their own body as part of a new study, guided in real time by a specialist on the ground. A similar test before the astronaut launched to space had come back normal. But now the scan showed a clump of blood.

“We were not expecting this,” says Karina Marshall-Goebel, a senior scientist at NASA and the author of the study, published earlier this month. “This has never been reported before.”

The first sound that greeted me, rounding the corner outside the hearing room in the Longworth House Office Building, was the eerie echo of Representative Adam Schiff’s voice emanating from the several dozen cellphones blasting live-stream footage of the testimony going on inside.

With the public phase of the impeachment inquiry starting last week and continuing into this one, throngs of people—young and old, mostly Democrats—have waited outside the room every day to try to get a seat to see the hearings in person. Many of them had traveled very long distances to watch the California Democrat and other lawmakers on the House Intelligence Committee question a number of witnesses. Why were they there? Almost all of them used the phrase “democracy in action.”