As the United States enters a pandemic summer, with more than 100,000 Americans already dead, and as tear gas engulfed Minneapolis last night, following protests after yet another killing of a black man by a police officer, the president tweeted that the “shooting starts” when the “looting starts.” The tweet echoed a historic line uttered by a police chief in Miami in 1967 during the civil-rights unrest that was also widely condemned at the time. Twitter hid that tweet behind a message saying that it was “glorifying violence”—a violation of the site’s terms of service—though users could still choose to view it by clicking through. All of this was an escalation of the seeming conflict between the president and Twitter: Just two days ago, the social-media company added a fact-check link to one of Donald Trump’s tweets for the first time. The president responded by issuing an executive order that is getting a lot of attention, but not the right kind.

You’d think Donald Trump would have more sympathy for looters, being a looter himself. The president has helped himself to money from the U.S. Treasury, using political power to direct public money to his personal businesses. It’s not as visual as a riot, but until 2017 it would have been regarded as equally criminal.

But no, he seems to think they deserve the death penalty: “These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen,” he said on Twitter about the protesters in Minneapolis. “Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

If you were an adherent, no one would be able to tell. You would look like any other American. You could be a mother, picking leftovers off your toddler’s plate. You could be the young man in headphones across the street. You could be a bookkeeper, a dentist, a grandmother icing cupcakes in her kitchen. You may well have an affiliation with an evangelical church. But you are hard to identify just from the way you look—which is good, because someday soon dark forces may try to track you down. You understand this sounds crazy, but you don’t care. You know that a small group of manipulators, operating in the shadows, pull the planet’s strings. You know that they are powerful enough to abuse children without fear of retribution. You know that the mainstream media are their handmaidens, in partnership with Hillary Clinton and the secretive denizens of the deep state. You know that only Donald Trump stands between you and a damned and ravaged world.

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “Uncharted,” a series about the world we’re leaving behind, and the one being remade by the pandemic.

It’s Day One of the reopened future, and as people have always done when it’s time for a new start, you head to the gym. Well, hold on. We should begin before Day One, because you’ll actually have booked this time slot the week before. It’s good for 90 minutes. Don’t be late.

You grab a door handle wrapped in germ-repelling vinyl and walk inside. A Bluetooth-enabled beacon at the front desk recognizes your phone and checks you in. The receptionist takes your temperature and hands you a towel, plus a colored wristband that’ll help the staff remind you when it’s time to go. Hopefully you brought some water with you, because touchless bottle fillers have replaced the drinking fountains.

Overnight, protests of the egregious police killing of George Floyd roiled several American cities, including Minneapolis, where riots and looting frightened locals and destroyed livelihoods.

A prudent president would have urged calm.

On Twitter, President Donald Trump instead aggressively insulted elected officials in Minneapolis. “A total lack of leadership,” he wrote. “Either the very weak Radical Left Mayor, Jacob Frey, get his act together and bring the City under control, or I will send in the National Guard & get the job done right.”

Adam Serwer: Trump’s warped definition of free speech

Then Trump threatened to unleash American carnage on looters. “These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen,” he declared in a second tweet. “Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

Six weeks ago, Ahmaud Arbery went out and never came home. Gregory and Travis McMichael, who saw Arbery running through their neighborhood just outside of Brunswick, Georgia, and who told authorities they thought he was a burglary suspect, armed themselves, pursued Arbery, and then shot him dead.

The word unique has to be one of the most overused descriptors in show business; if every movie that got touted as one-of-a-kind by its marketing team actually was, there’d be no further complaints about Hollywood creativity. But every once in a while, I’ll have a cinematic experience that feels genuinely unprecedented, when a work plays with the medium and its modes of storytelling in ways I didn’t think possible. The 30 movies I’ve gathered below—all of which are available to watch online—are singular, whether they’re experimental documentaries, visionary works of animation, or labyrinthine epics. Each is unforgettable, and a reminder of cinema’s potential to flout narrative convention, subvert visual traditions, and find new ways to express timeless themes.

A drum line taps out a charging beat: clip clap boppa BOOM. Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Amy Klobuchar lock arms. They’re leading a packed procession down Washington Avenue toward the Columbia, South Carolina, statehouse to commemorate Martin Luther King Jr. Day. At the end of the chain of Democratic household names is a less familiar face. Jaime Harrison is bundled up in a black overcoat and matching scarf. Hundreds of people pile onto the grass in front of the capitol steps, huddling together for warmth. Various A-list politicians take the stage, but it’s Harrison who gets the applause of a headliner.

“In a country that has never had two black senators from the same state serve at the same time, hope is right here standing before you,” he says with an Obama-esque flourish. “We need you. We need you to knock on doors. We need you to register voters. We need you to tell your friends and strangers and everybody in between that hope is coming!” When I meet him on the right side of the stage after his speech, the 44-year-old is riding a high. We shake hands, pack into the back of a blue sedan, and speed south to tour his hometown of Orangeburg.

During his life, Jeffrey Epstein was likened to Jay Gatsby and Tom Ripley, to a eugenicist supervillain and James Bond, and yet the rare glimpses provided of him in the new Netflix documentary series Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich showcase someone far more mundane. Choleric and bored, a hulked-up accountant type in a blue button-down and a plastic watch, he rolls his eyes through a taped deposition and pleads the Fifth to almost everything he’s asked, bar his full name and list of residences. “I would like to answer that question; I really would,” he tells an attorney who’s asked him whether a friend once sent him three 12-year-old girls as a birthday gift. But on the advice of his counsel, he’s limited to the same form response, the same generic non-denial denial, no matter how monstrous the charge. Withholding information might be his greatest trick of all.

The Vast of Night couldn’t be more explicit about its influences. Andrew Patterson’s debut film, streaming on Amazon Prime Video as of today, is presented as a spooky episode of a Twilight Zone–esque show called Paradox Theater broadcasting on a retro TV. The film is a cleverly paced, micro-budgeted sci-fi thriller set in the late ’50s, in the shadow of Sputnik. And thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, the only way to see it when it opened on the big screen two weeks ago was at the most 1950s of venues: the drive-in theater.

The national closure of movie theaters has sent the usual summer-film season into hibernation. Every blockbuster has been postponed for months, and there’s still no clear idea of when cinemas will reopen on a wide enough scale to welcome those movies back. Drive-ins have gone from antiquated gimmicks to the backbone of today’s (paltry) weekly box-office reports. So it’s fitting that cinema’s strange summer is being kicked off by a throwback like The Vast of Night—a story of amateur radio sleuths hunting an extraterrestrial audio signal that tells a familiar tale with eerie deftness.