Updated at 2:30 p.m. ET on March 11, 2020.

BRADDOCK, Pa.—John Fetterman didn’t grow up with anyone who had a biker-bar bouncer’s chin beard or who wore work shirts and shorts in February. He didn’t grow up committed to LGBTQ rights and legalizing marijuana and a living wage. The Pennsylvania lieutenant governor and Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate didn’t grow up dreaming of being a senator, or expecting to fail an exercise at Harvard’s Kennedy School because he refused to present a solution for how best to cut Social Security. He certainly didn’t anticipate serving as a stand-in for the Big Show when the wrestler made an appearance here (though at 6 foot 8, Fetterman is actually a few inches taller than he is). Fetterman has a weird life. He chose it because of the very different life he was born into.

A few minutes before midnight on March 4, 2020, the two of us emailed every U.S. state and the District of Columbia with a simple question: How many people have been tested in your state, total, for the coronavirus?

By then, about 150 people had been diagnosed with COVID-19 in the United States, and 11 had died of the disease. Yet the CDC had stopped publicly reporting the number of Americans tested for the virus. Without that piece of data, the tally of cases was impossible to interpret—were only a handful of people sick? Or had only a handful of people been tested? To our shock, we learned that very few Americans had been tested.

The consequences of this testing shortage, we realized, could be cataclysmic. A few days later, we founded the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic with Erin Kissane, an editor, and Jeff Hammerbacher, a data scientist. Every day last spring, the project’s volunteers collected coronavirus data for every U.S. state and territory. We assumed that the government had these data, and we hoped a small amount of reporting might prod it into publishing them.

One year into fussing with Zoom backgrounds, who can’t relate to Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B twerking in front of a digital wallpaper of purses, diamonds, big-rig trucks, and the rappers’ own faces? At last night’s Grammys, two of hip-hop’s top talents put on a digital-meets-physical hallucination that turned out to be the best entertainment of the night. A stiletto heel doubled as a stripper pole. Cardi and Megan cavorted in a bed as big as a house. Their backup dancers had blue skin. In disrupting the self-seriousness of a major awards show, the trippy performance was kind of like the most wonderful pandemic meme, courtroom cat, but with a lot more choreography.

Over the past few months, conservative commentators have singled out “WAP,” the No. 1 hit that was the centerpiece of Megan and Cardi’s medley, as unacceptably raunchy. So placing the song and some other sex-positive singles (including Megan’s “Body” and “Savage Remix”) in an outrageous televised dreamscape sent a message: Pop is fantasy, and fantasy feels good. This is the message that many memorable Grammy performances—Pink swinging from rafters, Rick James shimmying in sparkles—impart. Megan Thee Stallion, the 26-year-old Houstonian who just won Best New Artist and ended up as the defining figure of this year’s Grammys, knows that the secret to popular entertainment involves exuberance, viscerality, and charm. She is unfailingly exciting—a virtue that the Grammys appreciates but also often, unfortunately, seems afraid of.

The rest of America sprang forward yesterday, but Tali and Scott Richards have been here all along.

Standard time has mired most of the U.S. in winter darkness for months. In November, Americans willed the sun, which otherwise would have set by 6 p.m. or so in the northern part of the U.S., to set earlier, at 5 or even 4. Those who still have analog clocks and watches cranked them back one hour; otherwise, iPhones and other devices automatically thrust the country backward.

In their cold town in Connecticut, the Richards family thought,What if we didn’t?

The Richardses have always been night owls, going to bed later and sleeping in. During standard time, which runs from November to March, they’d sleep through much of the morning’s sunlight, only to sit through a long, dark evening. They didn’t like messing with their young kids’ sleep schedules, either. So this year, Tali decided not to change the clocks, and to set all of their devices to the Atlantic time zone—the time zone an hour ahead of eastern time, used by Puerto Rico and Nova Scotia. The family would remain on daylight saving time, even as the world proceeded to “fall back.”

Photo illustrations by Oliver Munday and Arsh Raziuddin; renderings by Justin Metz

This article was published online on March 11, 2021.

Dalton is one of the most selective private schools in Manhattan, in part because it knows the answer to an important question: What do hedge-funders want?

They want what no one else has. At Dalton, that means an “archaeologist in residence,” a teaching kitchen, a rooftop greenhouse, and a theater proscenium lovingly restored after it was “destroyed by a previous renovation.”

“Next it’ll be a heliport,” said a member of the local land-use committee after the school’s most recent remodel, which added two floors—and 12,000 square feet—to one of its four buildings, in order to better prepare students “for the exciting world they will inherit.” Today Dalton; tomorrow the world itself.

Some people believe the most extraordinary things. Earth is flat, and airplane GPS is rigged to fool pilots into thinking otherwise. COVID-19 vaccines are a pretext to inject thought-controlling microchips into us all. The true president of the United States is Donald Trump; his inauguration will happen on January 20, make that March 4, make that a date to be arranged very soon.

The question “How could anybody believe this stuff?” comes naturally enough. That may not be the most helpful question, however. Conspiracy theorists believe strange ideas, yes. But these outlandish beliefs rest on a solid foundation of disbelief.

To think that Trump is actually still the president, as some in the QAnon movement do, you first have to doubt. You have to doubt the journalism practiced by any mainstream media outlet of any political persuasion; you have to doubt all the experts and the political elites; you have to doubt the judiciary, the military, and every other American institution. Once you have thoroughly disbelieved all of them, only then can you start to believe in Trump’s ascension being just around the corner—or in lizard overlords or alien prophets.

All pandemic long, I’ve been hunting for a way—please, literally any way—to bludgeon myself into exercising with some kind of regularity. The quarantine life has turned me into an Indian Gollum. My arms, never quite jacked but at least semi-toned, currently have about as much bulk as overcooked linguini. Whatever seedlings of abs I had last March are now buried deep beneath a permafrost of flab.

In the spring, I tried an online fitness class studded with motivational mantras so cheesy, you could put them on a Hallmark card. Nope. Over the summer, I briefly got back into running, but then my creaky knees decided they’d had enough of that. I narrowed my ambitions in the fall and forced myself to do some morning push-ups and planks. Soon enough, I was back to sleeping in.

The Biden administration has gotten off to a fast start. President Joe Biden has signed a gigantic coronavirus-relief bill into law. Cabinet nominations are being approved by the Senate rapidly, many by lopsided margins. The United States has already returned to the Paris Agreement; green-energy ideas are being drafted into law.

But there is a hole in the hull, and the boat is taking on water. Biden’s people should see the danger. If not, they have certainly had ample warning. In the latest CBS/YouGov poll, 62 percent of respondents approve of the way Biden is handling his job as president, 60 percent of his handling of the economy, and 67 percent of handling of the coronavirus. Only 52 percent, though, approve of the way he is handling immigration—yet the Biden administration seems too paralyzed to act.

No one knows where it came from, but it’s here now. And the chase is on.

Astronomers around the world are monitoring an interstellar comet hurtling through the solar system, known for the moment as C/2019 Q4. It’s the second time in less than two years that they’ve seen an object from another star swing through our cosmic neighborhood. The first time around, the discovery kicked off a worldwide sprint to inspect the object before it got away. It was mysterious enough that some astronomers even began to consider whether it was dispatched by an advanced alien civilization.

This second interstellar object was spotted in late August by Gennady Borisov, an amateur astronomer in Crimea. Borisov has a reputation for catching never-before-seen comets with his telescopes, but they’re from around here; like everything else in the solar system—the planets, the moons, a sea of asteroids—they trace an orbit around the sun. And over the past few weeks, it’s become very clear that this comet does not.

Photographs by Daniel Shea

In 2014, at age 19, Eric Mendoza left his farming village outside Mexico City and crossed the Rio Grande. Once in the United States, he worked construction jobs to pay his way across the country. From Texas, Mendoza traveled to rural North Carolina, where he built homes. At a Metro PCS store, he bought a cellphone for $100 so he could call his mother, Elizabeth, who had come to the U.S. when Eric was 8.

On his new phone, Eric told his mother that he had finally arrived. He said North Carolina’s open fields reminded him of home. “He told me, ‘Mom, why can’t you come to me here?’” Elizabeth recalled recently, speaking through a translator. Her life was in New York, she replied. So Eric traveled to Florida, where more construction jobs helped him save for the $700 journey to New York in a raitero, a long-distance taxi filled with strangers. He arrived in the city on a Monday, at six in the morning, and saw his mother for the first time in more than 10 years. He held her thin frame and said, “You have to eat.”