july 1999

President Donald Trump has made one thing painfully clear: After he grudgingly leaves the White House, he will keep doing what he can to stay in the news. He will tweet insults and conspiracy theories. He may start his own television channel. And according to members of his inner circle, he may even run for president in 2024.

After half a decade under his spell, many pundits and political observers assume that Trump will succeed in keeping the nation’s attention. I can see why. A sizable minority of Americans believe that the election was stolen and remain deeply devoted to the outgoing president. Even now that Trump’s loss has liberated the GOP from its captor, elected Republicans seem to be suffering from a bad case of Stockholm syndrome. And the 45th president has proved, again and again, that he has a real talent for staying in the limelight.

In December of 1995, astronomers around the world were vying for a chance to use the hottest new tool in astronomy: the Hubble space telescope. Bob Williams didn’t have to worry about all that. As the director of the institution that managed Hubble, Williams could use the telescope to observe whatever he wanted. And he decided to point it at nothing in particular.

Williams’s colleagues told him, as politely as they could, that this was an awful idea. But Williams had a hunch that Hubble would see something worthwhile. The telescope had already captured the glow of faraway galaxies, and the longer Hubble gazed out in one direction, the more light it would detect.

So the Hubble telescope stared at the same bit of space, nonstop, for 10 days—precious time on a very expensive machine—snapping exposure after exposure as it circled Earth. The resulting image was astounding: Some 3,000 galaxies sparkled like gemstones in the darkness. The view stretched billions of years back in time, revealing other cosmic locales as they were when their light left them and began coasting across the universe.

This article contains spoilers through the series finale of The Undoing.

The Sunday finale of The Undoing was the most-watched episode of any HBO show since the last episode of Big Little Lies. The Undoing is a whodunit about the murder of a woman found, by her fourth-grade son, with her décolletage displayed and her face in pieces. Sex sells, according to the old advertising adage. Clearly violence does too. And the intermingling of sex and violence is a winning formula for HBO.

Art depicting intimate violence has found an audience since ancient times. Take the third-century-B.C. sculpture of Gaul killing his wife, or the two miniseries released in 2016 about O. J. Simpson’s role in the murder of his girlfriend. Despite the A-listers who star in it, The Undoing is no more than a costly, glossy, schlocky melodrama. But perhaps because of its cast, and the enviable lifestyle reproduced on camera, the show is attracting a lot of attention.

As the number of cases of COVID-19 worldwide nears 65 million, and the number of deaths attributed to the disease approaches 1.5 million, many countries are enduring a crushing surge in numbers. The toll on health-care workers, families, and the victims of the disease has been enormous. Gathered below are photographs from around the world of the current battle against COVID-19, taken over the past few weeks.

Updated on December 1, 2020, at 5:32 p.m. ET.

In his frenzied crusade to help President Donald Trump overturn the 2020 election result, Rudy Giuliani has displayed many of the characteristics that Trump has long demanded in his personal lawyers—albeit with more surreal and comedic elements.

Giuliani has shown unswerving loyalty, gleefully obfuscated facts, launched wild attacks on the media, hosted circus-style press conferences, and gone to court, all in a fruitless, evidence-free quest to persuade several states to block Joe Biden’s electoral victories.

But that might not be Giuliani’s only—or ultimate—goal.

The former New York mayor might just be trying to save himself, according to the Department of Justice veterans and legal experts I spoke with. Giuliani seems to be facing growing legal threats, and he may be angling for a presidential pardon, they told me in interviews over the past few weeks.