Updated at 5:23 p.m. ET on March 18, 2019.

The first Facebook message arrived when Heather Woock was packing for vacation, in August 2017. It was from a stranger claiming to be her half sibling. She assumed the message was some kind of scam; her parents had never told her she might have siblings. But the message contained one detail that spooked her. The sender mentioned a doctor, Donald Cline. Woock knew that name; her mother had gone to Cline for fertility treatments before she was born. Had this person somehow gotten her mother’s medical history?

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Her mom said not to worry. So Woock, who is 33 and lives just outside Indianapolis, flew to the West Coast for her vacation. She got a couple more messages from other supposed half siblings while she was away. Their persistence was strange. But then her phone broke, and she spent the next week and a half outdoors in Seattle and Vancouver, blissfully disconnected.

Donald Trump is not well. Over the weekend, he continued his weird obsession with a dead war hero. This time, his attacks on John McCain came two days after the anniversary of McCain’s release from a North Vietnamese prison camp. He tweeted this:

Spreading the fake and totally discredited Dossier “is unfortunately a very dark stain against John McCain.” Ken Starr, Former Independent Counsel. He had far worse “stains” than this, including thumbs down on repeal and replace after years of campaigning to repeal and replace!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 16, 2019

And this:

So it was indeed (just proven in court papers) “last in his class” (Annapolis) John McCain that sent the Fake Dossier to the FBI and Media hoping to have it printed BEFORE the Election. He & the Dems, working together, failed (as usual). Even the Fake News refused this garbage!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 17, 2019

Last Tuesday, the Justice Department charged 50 people with involvement in an elaborate scheme to purchase spots in some of the country’s top schools. The tactics described in the indictment were complex and multipronged, requiring multiple steps of deception and bribery by parents and their co-conspirators to secure their children’s admission to the schools of their choice. The plot purportedly included faking learning disabilities, using Photoshopped images to make it seem as if students played sports that they did not actually play, and pretending that students were of different ethnicities in an effort to exploit affirmative-action programs. The alleged scheme was led by a man named William Singer, who called his business venture a “side door” into college. On Tuesday, Singer pleaded guilty to all charges.

In 1886, Clark Bell, the editor of the journal of the Medico-Legal Society of New York, relayed to a physician named Pliny Earle a query bound to be of interest to his journal’s readers: Exactly what mental illnesses can be said to exist? In his 50-year career as a psychiatrist, Earle had developed curricula to teach medical students about mental disorders, co-founded the first professional organization of psychiatrists, and opened one of the first private psychiatric practices in the country. He had also run a couple of asylums, where he instituted novel treatment strategies such as providing education to the mentally ill. If any American doctor was in a position to answer Bell’s query, it was Pliny Earle.

A coast-to-coast FBI probe alleges that a network of celebrities, business executives, and other powerful figures is at the center of a massive bribery scheme to secure admission into some of the country’s most elite colleges, according to court documents unsealed earlier today.

Among the defendants are nearly three dozen parents whom federal prosecutors are charging with conspiracy and other crimes for allegedly using hefty sums of money to get their children into schools such as Yale, Georgetown, and the University of Southern California. Specifically, the newly unsealed court documents contend that these high-rolling parents—some of them public figures such as the actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin, as well as Loughlin’s husband, the fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli—paid hundreds of thousands, and sometimes millions, of dollars per child to a fixer who would then use that money to allegedly bribe certain college officials or other conspirators to help secure the child’s admission.

In the opening sequence of Us, Jordan Peele gives the audience what it might be expecting after months of hype for his follow-up to Get Out: a perfectly taut piece of virtuoso horror filmmaking. A little girl (played by Madison Curry) frolics with her family at a seaside funfair, then wanders off as her dad plays a carnival game, eventually winding up alone in a haunted house. It’s a place for cheap scares, one that tries to jolt you by having things burst out of the wall. But Peele (who wrote, produced, and directed) has more unsettling sights in store, including something so disturbing that the camera takes in only the girl’s reaction, her eyes widening with shock.

It’s a thrilling sequence that feels as if Peele is laying down a marker after the success of his Oscar-winning debut film. Get Out was also a horror movie, but a wry, satirical one, the kind that could be nominated for comedy awards and still scar entire generations of viewers with its notion of “the sunken place.” In its dread-suffused opening moments, Us is utterly serious. But as the plot moves forward, the film becomes more complicated, more outrageous, and in a lot of ways, more daringly funny and topical than its predecessor. Us is a glorious symphony of fear, to be sure, but it’s also an ambitious sci-fi allegory and a pitch-black comedy of the haves and have-nots.

Robert Bowers wanted everyone to know why he did it.

“I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered,” he posted on the social-media network Gab shortly before allegedly entering the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh on October 27 and gunning down 11 worshippers. He “wanted all Jews to die,” he declared while he was being treated for his wounds. Invoking the specter of white Americans facing “genocide,” he singled out HIAS, a Jewish American refugee-support group, and accused it of bringing “invaders in that kill our people.” Then–Attorney General Jeff Sessions, announcing that Bowers would face federal charges, was unequivocal in his condemnation: “These alleged crimes are incomprehensibly evil and utterly repugnant to the values of this nation.”

Several weeks ago, John Boyd’s combine broke down. The machine is an absolute necessity for Boyd—he, like most commodity farmers, uses it to harvest the soybeans, corn, and wheat he grows each year in Baskerville, Virginia. What he really needs is a whole new combine, which would allow him to harvest his crops more efficiently, and which would last him much longer than fixing his current machine or buying a used one. But a new combine would cost him more than $480,000. With his farm income down and equipment prices up, “I haven’t been able to buy anything at all,” Boyd says.

Like farmers around the country, Boyd is in the crosshairs of the trade war, caught between the 25 percent tariffs that the United States has imposed on imported raw materials such as steel and aluminum and the retaliatory tariffs that China and other countries have imposed on major American agricultural exports, especially soybeans. Though the United States and China have been trying to negotiate a new trade deal, a resolution isn’t likely to come until at least April.

Suddenly, climate change is a high-profile national issue again.

It’s not just the Green New Deal. Around the country, the loose alliance of politicians, activists, and organizations concerned about climate change is mobilizing. They are deploying a new set of strategies aimed at changing the minds—or at least the behaviors—of a large swath of Americans, including utility managers, school principals, political donors, and rank-and-file voters.

They make a ragtag group: United by little more than common concern, they don’t agree on an ideal federal policy or even how to talk about the problem. They do not always coordinate or communicate with one another. And while their efforts are real, it remains far too early to say whether they will result in the kind of national legislative victories that have eluded the movement in the past.

LONDON—When Brexit-backing lawmakers voted twice to reject Theresa May’s negotiated deal on the terms of the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union, they did so largely out of distrust. Principally, they worried that the prime minister’s plan would risk binding the country to EU rules and regulations indefinitely, and that the EU, contrary to its many assurances, would act in bad faith to see that happen.

Distrust of Europe and its institutions here in Britain is hardly a new phenomenon. In fact, it was one of the central themes underlying the Brexit campaign. But this distrust, paradoxically, might pose a threat to that very project, raising the possibility that it will not happen at all.