The United States is, yet again, facing an unnecessary crisis of its own making. On October 6, Donald Trump decided, during a phone call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, to withdraw U.S. military forces from northern Syria. And not for the first time. Erdoğan persuaded Trump to withdraw U.S. forces during a phone call back in mid-December 2018. In response, then–Secretary of Defense James Mattis resigned in protest. Under bipartisan pressure, Trump agreed to keep a reduced number of troops in the region.

But this time was different. Instead of reversing course in the face of bipartisan criticism, Trump doubled down. The same day that he publicly announced his decision, Trump tweeted that an American troop presence was unnecessary to protect the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) or prevent Islamic State fighters from escaping confinement, because “if Turkey does anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits, I will totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey (I’ve done before!).”

Donald Trump came into the office without much experience in diplomacy—literal or figurative—but it doesn’t take a career Foreign Service officer to realize that if you spend enough time saying someone is your enemy, that person might begin to feel the same way about you.

From the start of his administration, the president demonized government employees, especially in foreign policy and intelligence. He attacked career officers as part of the “deep state,” discarded their advice, and appointed Cabinet secretaries who alienated them. Now, as an impeachment inquiry rolls forward, Trump is harvesting wind from the ice he sowed. The White House’s attempt at full obstruction of the inquiry has cracked because unlike Trump’s loyalists, career officials and experts have been willing to defy invocations of executive privilege and testify to Congress.

Just under a century ago, the Soviet Union embarked on one of the strangest attempts to reshape the common calendar that has ever been undertaken. As Joseph Stalin raced to turn an agricultural backwater into an industrialized nation, his government downsized the week from seven to five days. Saturday and Sunday were abolished.

In place of the weekend, a new system of respite was introduced in 1929. The government divided workers into five groups, and assigned each to a different day off. On any given day, four-fifths of the proletariat would show up to their factories and work while the other fifth rested. Each laborer received a colored slip of paper—yellow, orange, red, purple, or green—that signified his or her group. The staggered schedule was known as nepreryvka, or the “continuous workweek,” since production never stopped.

Senator Elizabeth Warren’s refusal to answer repeated questions at last night’s debate about how she would fund Medicare for All underscores the challenge she faces finding a politically acceptable means to meet the idea’s huge price tag—a challenge that only intensified today with the release of an eye-popping new study.

The Urban Institute, a center-left think tank highly respected among Democrats, is projecting that a plan similar to what Warren and Senator Bernie Sanders are pushing would require $34 trillion in additional federal spending over its first decade in operation. That’s more than the federal government’s total cost over the coming decade for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid combined, according to the most recent Congressional Budget Office projections.

The Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition, founded in 1965, is an annual international showcase of the best in nature photography. This year, the contest attracted more than 48,000 entries from 100 countries. Wildlife Photographer of the Year is developed and produced by the Natural History Museum, London. The owners and sponsors have once again been kind enough to share the following 15 winning images from this year’s competition. The museum’s website has images from previous years and more information about the current contest and exhibition. Captions are provided by the photographers and WPY organizers, and are lightly edited for style.

Several weeks ago, I met up with a friend in New York who suggested we grab a bite at a Scottish bar in the West Village. He had booked the table through something called Seated, a restaurant app that pays users who make reservations on the platform. We ordered two cocktails each, along with some food. And in exchange for the hard labor of drinking whiskey, the app awarded us $30 in credits redeemable at a variety of retailers.

I am never offended by freebies. But this arrangement seemed almost obscenely generous. To throw cash at people every time they walk into a restaurant does not sound like a business. It sounds like a plot to lose money as fast as possible—or to provide New Yorkers, who are constantly dining out, with a kind of minimum basic income.

LONDON—Just before lunchtime on October 17, 2019, Britain and the European Union announced a deal on a smooth British exit from the EU. This is the second such deal in less than a year. The previous deal was rejected by Parliament and capsized the career of former Prime Minister Theresa May. Will this new deal come to a happier conclusion? And what is happiness in this context anyway?

The new agreement is reportedly 500 pages long, recapitulating most of the elements of the rejected 2018 agreement. There is, again reportedly, one big difference between May’s deal and Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s: Ireland. (The word reportedly is doing a lot of work here, because I write only a few minutes after the agreement was announced and before the release of the full text.)

Where in the pantheon of American commercial titans does Jeffrey Bezos belong? Andrew Carnegie’s hearths forged the steel that became the skeleton of the railroad and the city. John D. Rockefeller refined 90 percent of American oil, which supplied the pre-electric nation with light. Bill Gates created a program that was considered a prerequisite for turning on a computer.

At 55, Bezos has never dominated a major market as thoroughly as any of these forebears, and while he is presently the richest man on the planet, he has less wealth than Gates did at his zenith. Yet Rockefeller largely contented himself with oil wells, pump stations, and railcars; Gates’s fortune depended on an operating system. The scope of the empire the founder and CEO of Amazon has built is wider. Indeed, it is without precedent in the long history of American capitalism.

In Toronto this spring, Andrew Scheer, the man seeking to replace Justin Trudeau as prime minister of Canada, made what is perhaps the most important speech of his career. While Scheer, the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC), is no Trudeau—he’s younger, dorkier, and less foppish—his speech, about immigration, sounded at times like something Trudeau would say. Scheer spoke of Canada as a generous, diverse country and denounced “intolerance, racism, and extremism of any kind.” If anybody disagreed, he added, “there’s the door.”

But if Scheer was aligning himself, in some ways, with his electoral rival, he was also setting himself apart. He quoted scripture, something politicians in Trudeau’s Liberal Party are less likely to do. He praised the entrepreneurial spirit that impels immigrants to leave their home. And he spoke darkly about “Mexican drug-cartel members” and “individuals flagged as threats to national security,” who exploit weaknesses in the immigration system at the expense of lawful applicants who wait their turn. The speech was shot through with conservative themes: free enterprise, law and order, self-reliance, and faith.

Last Tuesday morning, my first unread email was from Influencer Intelligence, an analytics company that works with  people who want to hire influencers and celebrities to advertise things.

“Authenticity is the most critical attribute to building influence,” the company’s website reads. The email was about, as emails often are, a recently compiled report about the business of selling things on Instagram, which promised to “tackle the concept of what authenticity really means today.” The PDF’s cover was an image of a beautiful white woman wearing pink eye shadow and putting her hand to her mouth—which was, needless to say, open.

Inside, I found advice on how to determine the authenticity of an influencer: Request Google Analytics information from her (to prove that her numbers “add up”), ask for quantitative results of previous “brand campaigns,” map her audience demographics—all told, fairly standard stuff. The report also suggested the use of “soft metrics,” which apparently entails looking at a person’s Instagram profile and taking note of the tone and frequency of her responses to her “audience,” judging how “natural and authentic the content feels,” and deciding whether the influencer really “lives and breathes what they are presenting.”