No state has haunted the Democratic Party’s imagination for the past four years like Wisconsin. While it was not the only state that killed Hillary Clinton’s presidential hopes in 2016, it was the one where the knife plunged deepest. Clinton was so confident about Wisconsin that she never even campaigned there. This year, it is one of the most fiercely contested states. The Democrats planned to hold their convention in Milwaukee, before the coronavirus pandemic forced its cancellation. Donald Trump is also making a strong play for Wisconsin.

Trump’s weaknesses with the electorate are familiar: Voters find him coarse, and they deplore his handling of race, the coronavirus, and protests. One recent YouGov poll found that just 42 percent of Americans approved of his performance as president, while 54 percent disapproved. But when the pollsters asked about Trump’s handling of the economy, those attitudes reversed: 48 percent approved and 44 percent disapproved, despite the havoc wreaked by the pandemic.

In the southern corner of Guatemala, outside the tiny mountain town of San Pedro Yepocapa, Elmer Gabriel’s coffee plants ought to be leafed-out and gleaming. It is a week before Christmas, the heart of the coffee-harvesting season, and if his bushes were healthy, they would look like holiday trees hung with ornaments, studded with bright-red coffee cherries. But in a long row that stretches down the side of his steeply sloped field, the plants are twiggy and withered. Most of their leaves are gone, and the ones that remain are drab olive and curling at the edges. There are yellow spots, brown in the center, on the leaves’ upper surfaces. On the underside they are pebbly, and coated with a fine orange dust.

I don’t blame you if you’re sick of gritty reboots. For years now, Hollywood has relied on a formula so successful that it’s become ubiquitous: Take a well-known character or franchise and reimagine it as darker, bloodier, and bleaker. Studios have done it so many times that when I heard HBO was rebooting Perry Mason, a show I used to sit down and watch with my grandma alongside Matlock and Murder She Wrote, I just rolled my eyes.

The Perry Mason reboot is certainly gritty. The season-long mystery involves the kidnapping and murder of a child. Its Depression-era Los Angeles is a gloomy place, populated by destitute World War I veterans, sensationalist reporters, street preachers ministering to the penniless, and heroin-addicted sex workers. The title character, played by Matthew Rhys, is an alcoholic divorcé who lives on a crumbling dairy farm and takes compromising photos of celebrities to make ends meet, until he is offered a gig as an investigator for a defense attorney. My colleague Sophie Gilbert found it too dark, “of a piece with other efforts to ‘update’ classic characters by amping up the edginess and the grotesquerie.”

Alexander Hamilton and his colleagues wrote 85 separate essays to make their case that Americans should take a risk and ratify the 1787 Constitution. Three sentences into the very first of those Federalist Papers, Hamilton made clear that he knew full well the stakes of the gamble he and his co-authors were proposing.

“Whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice” was, Hamilton wrote, entirely uncertain. People are prone to tribalism and irrationality, easy targets for leaders who traffic in demagoguery and corruption. Hamilton doubted that it was even “seriously to be expected” that “We the People” would be able to set aside existing passions and prejudices long enough to debate the ratification of the Constitution itself solely on its merits. How on earth could the Constitution’s Framers then have convinced themselves to expect the people to manage running an effective national government?

A girl sits alone on an ugly couch, stroking a plastic fish and mouthing the words to Jason Derulo’s “Ridin’ Solo.” Her eyes are bloodshot. She puts on sunglasses to cover them up, just as Derulo says he does in the song.

This video, uploaded to TikTok in July, has more than 11.4 million views. It was posted by @mooptopia, who emerged from nowhere at the beginning of July and has since become an unexpected star. She now has 2.5 million followers, despite the fact that nothing about her account is remarkable: She’s a teenager in what seems to be an average suburb, where she walks around and dances awkwardly and sometimes growls.

The most striking thing about this episode is how typical it is. Getting famous on TikTok can happen very quickly. In a matter of months, a highly driven teen can build an audience that translates into millions of dollars in endorsement deals; a bored weirdo can dress up as Waluigi and do the “WAP” dance, attracting more than 7 million views and starting a ridiculous new trend; a girl can take her first sip of kombucha and feel dramatically conflicted, becoming “Kombucha Girl.” Young people go viral on social-media platforms such as YouTube and Instagram too, but TikTok is unique in how its algorithm pulls oddities out of the blue and pushes them into a main feed seen by millions of people. And many of those millions of people are teens. More than 40 percent of TikTok users are ages 16 to 24, and the Federal Trade Commission has alleged that a “significant” portion of users are even younger than that. Now, because of the pandemic—says Shauna Pomerantz, a Brock University professor who has studied TikTok—they’re all spending more time on the app than they did before, which hadn’t even seemed possible.

We’re seeing a huge error, and a potential tragedy, unfold in real time.

That’s a sentence that could apply to countless aspects of economic, medical, governmental, and environmental life at the moment. What I have in mind, though, is the almost unbelievable failure of much of the press to respond to the realities of the Trump age.

Many of our most influential editors and reporters are acting as if the rules that prevailed under previous American presidents are still in effect. But this president is different; the rules are different; and if it doesn’t adapt, fast, the press will stand as yet another institution that failed in a moment of crucial pressure.

In some important ways, media outlets are repeating the mistake made by former Special Counsel Robert Mueller. In his book about the Mueller investigation, True Crimes and Misdemeanors (and in a New Yorker article), Jeffrey Toobin argues that Mueller’s tragic flaw was a kind of anachronistic idealism—which had the same effect as naivete. Mueller knew the ethical standards he would maintain for himself and insist on from his team. He didn’t understand that the people he was dealing with thought standards were for chumps. Mueller didn’t imagine that a sitting attorney general would intentionally misrepresent his report, which is of course what Bill Barr did. Mueller wanted to avoid an unseemly showdown, or the appearance of a “fishing expedition” inquiry, that would come from seeking a grand-jury subpoena for Donald Trump’s testimony, so he never spoke with Trump under oath, or at all. Trump, Barr, and their team viewed this decorousness as a sign of weakness, which they could exploit.

My obsession with ventilation began long before the pandemic. Five years ago, when I moved from central Tokyo to the coast of Japan, a blanket of humidity seemed to levitate out from the sea and the surrounding mountains, wrapping everything I owned in a moist haze. Combined with crushing summer heat, it cultivated a perfect recipe for mold.

That first summer, my ventilation game was weak. The tatami mats—traditional Japanese straw flooring—sprouted dark clumps. A yeasty smell took root in the entryway, and sure enough, on close inspection, a few pairs of my shoes were baking their own bread. Books placed near windows seemed to become sentient with ever-evolving tendrils of hyphae along their spines.

All happy families are alike; some unhappy families are unhappy because of Fox News.

You might have come across the articles (“I Lost My Dad to Fox News” / “Lost Someone to Fox News?” / “‘Fox News Brain’: Meet the Families Torn Apart by Toxic Cable News”), or the Reddit threads, or the support groups on Facebook, as people have sought ways to mourn loved ones who are still alive. The discussions consider a loss that Americans don’t have good language for, in part because the loss itself is a matter of language: They describe what it’s like to find yourself suddenly unable to speak with people you’ve known your whole life. They acknowledge how easily a national crisis can become a personal one. At this point, some Americans speak English; others speak Fox.

Updated at 5:28 p.m. ET on September 13, 2020.

Army ants will sometimes walk in circles until they die. The workers navigate by smelling the pheromone trails of workers in front of them, while laying down pheromones for others to follow. If these trails accidentally loop back on themselves, the ants are trapped. They become a thick, swirling vortex of bodies that resembles a hurricane as viewed from space. They march endlessly until they’re felled by exhaustion or dehydration. The ants can sense no picture bigger than what’s immediately ahead. They have no coordinating force to guide them to safety. They are imprisoned by a wall of their own instincts. This phenomenon is called the death spiral. I can think of no better metaphor for the United States of America’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

David Byrne has long been a master of perfectly designed worlds. The 1984 concert film Stop Making Sense, with his band Talking Heads, captured how carefully he stages his shows, bringing in band members one by one to emphasize how each contributes to the harmonies of a song. Byrne’s latest tour, “American Utopia,” was documented by Spike Lee in a film of the same name, due out October 17 on HBO. In it, Byrne again tries to construct a new musical universe, making jolly music and dancing in lockstep with shoeless artists in natty gray suits. But as the film’s title suggests, he wants to create a better world beyond the concert venue too.

American Utopia was the opening-night feature at this month’s Toronto International Film Festival, which kicks off the fall movie season every year with big premieres and awards-friendly projects. Thanks to the coronavirus and the general hibernation of the industry, TIFF screened just 50 new films this year (compared with more than 300 in 2019). But even in its compact form, the festival offered a preview of what moviegoers can expect in the next few months as Hollywood navigates the pandemic. Given that the United States is in the midst of a fraught election season, it’s unsurprising that some of the most compelling new films confront the idealistic notion of America—and how promises of progress and justice are so often blunted by the grim realities of racism, poverty, and polarization.