Donald Trump has never feared another elected Republican. Over the course of five years, he has bullied and insulted, mocked and complained about nearly every GOP officeholder past and present, including George W. Bush and Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Jeff Flake. He knew that the Republicans who dared to stand up to him couldn’t hurt him (Bob Corker), and that the Republicans who could have hurt him wouldn’t dare stand up to him (Paul Ryan).

All of which has led Trump to believe that there is no possible danger of the Republican Party being pried from his grasp. But Trump may at last need to rethink that calculus.

Mitt Romney’s attempt to excise Trump from his party started early. In March 2016, he became the only former Republican presidential nominee to take a public position against Trump’s candidacy. This act of resistance didn’t work, however, because while Romney had moral authority, he had no real power.

The worst day in the history of life on Earth, so far, happened almost exactly 66 million years ago, when an asteroid roughly the size of Manhattan slammed into the Yucatán Peninsula.

You may know the story. The asteroid—which arrived, probably, in June or July—immediately drilled a 20-mile hole into the planet’s surface, vaporizing bedrock and spewing it halfway to the moon. The planet shuddered with magnitude-12 earthquakes, loosing tsunamis across the Gulf of Mexico. Some of the ejected debris condensed in orbit and plunged back to Earth as searing spheres of molten glass, which torched the land and turned forests into firestorms. Other debris remained high in space, where it blocked the sun’s rays and began to chill the surface of the planet.

Justin Trudeau didn’t lose the Canadian federal election outright, but he had about as bad an outcome as possible short of that. His Liberal Party lost 27 seats in the House of Commons. More ominously, his share of the popular vote dropped 6.5 points, from 39.5 percent in the 2015 election to 33 percent in this year’s. Canada’s Conservatives, who came second in the seat count, won the largest share of the popular vote, 34.4 percent.

Trudeau’s party suffered these losses despite a generally favorable economy in Ontario and Quebec, the heartland of the Liberal Party. This formerly bright, shining face of hope and change was weighted down by ethics scandals and an embarrassing sequence of personal missteps. Those missteps are famous around the world: Trudeau was captured on camera wearing blackface multiple times before his entry into politics. The scandals are not often remarked upon outside Canada, but they matter inside. Trudeau violated conflicts-of-interest rules to accept an expensive vacation and intervened in a criminal case to protect a business corporation with close ties to his party.

“Where’s the Whistleblower?” President Donald Trump asked in a tweet this morning. The answer that Trump just as surely doesn’t want to hear, however, is this: It’s not just one whistle-blower anymore.

The president now finds himself virtually surrounded by them, as one official after another treks to Capitol Hill to accuse Trump of putting his own political interests ahead of the nation’s. The clamor is powering the congressional impeachment investigation that Trump has failed to thwart, and that now threatens his presidency.

William Taylor, Trump’s own envoy to Ukraine, yesterday became the latest senior official to cry foul over wrongdoing at the highest levels of the president’s administration. In closed-door testimony to three congressional committees, the veteran diplomat detailed how a pressure campaign directed by the president sought to tie U.S. aid to Ukraine to the public announcement of a Ukrainian investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son. It was the most damaging account yet of a quid pro quo, that despite denials from Trump and his lieutenants, fits the very definition of the term.

It is easy to look at today’s crop of sinking IPOs—like Uber, Lyft, and Peloton—or scuttled public offerings, like WeWork, and see an eerie resemblance to the dot-com bubble that popped in 2000.

• Both then and now, consumer-tech companies spent lavishly on advertising and struggled to find a path to profit.

• Both then and now, companies that bragged about their ability to change the world admitted suddenly that they were running out of money.

• Both then and now, the valuations of once-heralded tech enterprises were halved in a matter of weeks.

• Both then and now, there was a widespread sense of euphoria curdling into soberness, washed down with the realization that thousands of workers in once-promising firms were poised to lose their jobs.

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.

Diplomats are known for their ability to phrase things delicately, but testimony today from William Taylor, the top American diplomat in Ukraine, is notable for its bluntness.

Although the Trump administration has denied that it was trying to extract a quid pro quo from Ukraine—investigations of both 2016 hacking and of the Biden family’s business there in exchange for military aid—Taylor’s opening statement shows that’s exactly what was happening.

In an astonishing 15-page prepared statement, Taylor laid out a detailed chronology, which fits closely with what is already known about the Ukraine scandal, but fills in valuable new details. Far from some disgruntled Obama-administration holdover, Taylor was dispatched to Kiev in June by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo after Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch was fired, reportedly at Rudy Giuliani’s behest. Taylor learned that Giuliani was in effect running a shadow foreign policy in Ukraine. In mid-July, Taylor realized that security assistance to Ukraine was being held up, though not the reasons for the delay. Taylor also came to understand that aides to newly elected President Volodymyr Zelensky felt that their country was at risk of being used as a pawn in the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

Like games, geese are notoriously annoying. They’re brusque, clumsy, and territorial. If you are a person and one appears on your country estate, the advice recommends avoiding engagement and then standing your ground if it charges. Show the goose who’s boss. A recent, hugely popular video game, Untitled Goose Game, stages this conflict. For some reason, it turns out to be familiar to everyone, even city slickers who have never seen a goose in person.

It’s fun! Being a goose for a while is diverting and surprising, and embodying one in a simulated, pastoral environment speaks to the flexible power of games as a medium. Games turn the world on its head, allowing you to become all the things you are not: a criminal, in Grand Theft Auto; an explorer of alien worlds, in No Man’s Sky; the universe itself, in Everything. You gain a new perspective, having had the opportunity to be something grander than—or just different from—yourself.

It’s hard to imagine how a person could be better at wearing jeans than Rihanna. While the pop star is practically worshiped in fashion circles for her wardrobe’s endless variety, the one thing she clothes herself in nearly constantly is denim. Her repertoire includes every permutation of jeans imaginable, but also extends to denim jackets, denim dresses, denim shorts, denim skirts, denim thigh-high boots, and, on at least one occasion, a carpet-dusting denim train.

Rihanna is one of the most photographed people alive, so her appreciation for denim has made her a walking billboard for the fabric—especially its abundance. Daily paparazzi photos of her entering airports or leaving hotels have proved that virtually every type of clothing, at every price, can now be made of denim. Jeans themselves have never been more varied: cropped, skinny, wide, straight, kick-flared, light, dark, distressed, embellished.

Two dramas are the focus of the nation at this moment: the constitutional crisis in Washington, and the World Series—less of a crisis, but still in Washington. These may seem totally unrelated, and yet, there is a striking symmetry between the worlds of American law and American baseball. Baseball is, of course, primarily a sport, but it is also something more than that: a wonderful example of a functioning legal system, one that teaches the millions of Americans who play or watch it fundamental principles of American law and constitutional theory.

Let’s begin with the sport’s legalistic nature: The entire game is regulated by a more elaborate set of rules than any other sport is. At the professional level, it requires a highly trained multi-judge panel of umpires to implement and interpret the rules. Every pitch that does not get hit requires a legal ruling: Was it a ball or a strike? Did the batter really swing? Those pitches that are hit must often be called fair or foul. As with the American legal system, each umpire has a jurisdiction. The home-plate umpire calls a hit ball fair or foul before it reaches a base; the first- and third-base umpires make the call after the ball is beyond their bag. In the World Series, extra umpires are on the field, creating a mini Supreme Court that provides new pairs of eyes to scrutinize plays in the outfield.