At the start of the second session of today’s doubleheader impeachment hearings, Chairman Adam Schiff noted an important distinction about the two witnesses appearing before the House Intelligence Committee: Both Kurt Volker, the former special envoy to Ukraine, and Timothy Morrison, a senior director on the National Security Council, were “requested by the minority.”

In other words, the Republicans on the committee wanted them there. And, presumably, they wanted Volker and Morrison because they thought their testimony would help President Donald Trump and hurt the case for his impeachment.

That’s not exactly what happened.

In his opening statement, Volker made a point of defending the potential political opponent Trump wanted Ukraine to investigate, former Vice President Joe Biden, calling him “an honorable man” whom he holds in “the highest regard.” Volker referred to allegations about Biden’s involvement with Ukraine during the waning months of the Obama administration as “conspiracy theories” and said the suggestion that Biden had acted corruptly was “not credible.” Volker insisted that he did not make a connection at the time between Biden and Trump’s desire for Ukraine to investigate both possible interference in the 2016 election and the energy company Burisma, on whose board Biden’s son once sat. But Volker testified that he now understood that the president’s demands of Ukraine went beyond a generalized crackdown on corruption—that he wanted a probe of the Bidens, something Volker said this afternoon was “unacceptable.”

That old sinking feeling is back.

There have occasionally been stretches of time that are good for the Trump administration. There have more often been stretches that are bad, though there is a baseline of chaos that has come to feel almost normal. And occasionally, there have been truly hellacious stretches: May 2017, when Donald Trump fired then–FBI Director James Comey; August 2017, around the white-supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia; January 2018, around the release of Fire and Fury; December 2018–January 2019, when Defense Secretary James Mattis quit and Trump forced and then blinked on a government shutdown.

Now the administration is experiencing another one of those stretches. Even by the strained standards of the Trump presidency, the past couple of weeks have brought an astonishing raft of bad news for the White House.

The bedroom can seem to contain the heart of a marriage. In the 2012 Judd Apatow movie This Is 40, the epicenter of marital tension is the bedroom of the onscreen couple, played by Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann. Pete and Debbie are as comely as their Los Angeles home, but the couple flirt with divorce fantasies more than with each other. Debbie mourns a loss of mystery; Pete craves independence. Of a kind, anyway. He’ll shed his boxers so that Debbie can weigh in on the progress of a hemorrhoid, but he also has a habit of sneaking off to hang with his buddies, an act his wife likens to infidelity. A scene in bed captures the riddle at the heart of this marriage—a parry, essentially, between forms of intimacy. Wander too far in search of privacy, and you nullify romance; get too close, and the same occurs. The couple lie under the sheets, Debbie on her laptop and Pete passing gas. “This is why we never have sex,” she says with desperation in her voice, as he grins. “You’re gross.”

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This is a good day, Samantha tells me: 10 on a scale of 10. We’re sitting in a conference room at the San Marcos Treatment Center, just south of Austin, Texas, a space that has witnessed countless difficult conversations between troubled children, their worried parents, and clinical therapists. But today promises unalloyed joy. Samantha’s mother is visiting from Idaho, as she does every six weeks, which means lunch off campus and an excursion to Target. The girl needs supplies: new jeans, yoga pants, nail polish.

At 11, Samantha is just over 5 feet tall and has wavy black hair and a steady gaze. She flashes a smile when I ask about her favorite subject (history), and grimaces when I ask about her least favorite (math). She seems poised and cheerful, a normal preteen. But when we steer into uncomfortable territory—the events that led her to this juvenile-treatment facility nearly 2,000 miles from her family—Samantha hesitates and looks down at her hands. “I wanted the whole world to myself,” she says. “So I made a whole entire book about how to hurt people.”

Chris Geremia was surprised. After considerable effort, and substantial risk to life and limb, he and his colleagues finally had the results from their decade-long experiment, and those results were both clear and unexpected: Bison do not surf.

Specifically, bison (or buffalo) don’t follow the waves of new shoots that burst from the ground every spring. This phenomenon, known as surfing the green wave, allows animals to eat plants at their most nutritious, when they’re full of nitrogen and proteins and low in indigestible matter. Such freshness is fleeting, and so grazers undertake large migrations to track the new greenery as it crests across the landscape. Over the past decade, scientists have shown that mule deer, barnacle geese, elk, elephants, Mongolian gazelles, and a dozen other species all do this. Geremia wanted to see whether bison, which once formed the largest grazing herds in North America, follow the same pattern.

Stephen Miller’s liberal critics were right after all. The influential White House aide and immigration hard-liner has long been a liberal target. Prominent conservatives such as the National Review editor Rich Lowry have defended Miller as a “wunderkind” and praised his “knowledge, energy, and doggedness.” But liberals have maintained for years that Miller is pushing an agenda far more sinister than straightforward immigration restriction.

A cache of Miller’s emails, provided by the former Breitbart News staffer Katie McHugh to the Southern Poverty Law Center, draws a straight line between the Trump administration’s immigration policies and previous, explicitly racist immigration laws. The emails show Miller praising racist immigration restrictions from a century ago, while bitterly lamenting the law that repealed them.

It’s hard to turn on cable news or scroll through Twitter these days without catching the name “Giuliani.” Rudy Giuliani, President Donald Trump’s personal attorney, is a central character in the House’s impeachment inquiry. Meanwhile, Rudy’s third wife, Judith Giuliani, has commanded her own headlines as she’s aired details of the couple’s contentious, ongoing divorce proceedings. Scarcely mentioned, however, is Andrew Giuliani—the former New York mayor’s 31-year-old son—who works in the White House.

Rudy Giuliani told me his son’s hire “wasn’t the usual ‘hire my kid’ situation.” “He’s known the president since he was a baby,” Rudy said. “Now, did he know him in the first place because he was the mayor’s son? Sure, but they also had a relationship independent of me.”

The dead girl had perfect teeth.

That’s what so many of the strangers who obsessed over her case online noticed, and one of the few things that could even be noticed. Her body was burned so badly as to be unrecognizable when she was found in the early hours of October 29, 2006, near Longview, Texas.

The two men who saw her thought, at first, that they had stumbled across a mannequin set on fire, perhaps as an early Halloween prank. It was the smell that alerted them to something more sinister in the woods—a smell like charred hot dogs. When they stepped closer, they realized the awful and obvious truth. A human being had been killed, then doused in gasoline and set on fire, and probably only minutes before: Her body was still ablaze.

Is a color-blind political system possible under our Constitution? If it is, the Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act in 2013 did little to help matters. While black people in America today are not experiencing 1950s levels of voter suppression, efforts to keep them and other citizens from participating in elections began within 24 hours of the Shelby County v. Holder ruling and have only increased since then.

In Shelby County’s oral argument, Justice Antonin Scalia cautioned, “Whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get them out through the normal political processes.” Ironically enough, there is some truth to an otherwise frighteningly numb claim. American elections have an acute history of racial entitlements—only they don’t privilege black Americans.

“A leader is best when people barely know he exists,” Lao Tzu, the ancient Chinese philosopher and founder of Taoism, is thought to have said. “When his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: ‘We did it ourselves.’’’

But what if a leader doesn’t exist at all? Around the world, leaderless protest movements have emerged, drawing tens of thousands (and, in some cases, millions) of people to the streets. Though their catalysts vary, the protests have largely looked the same: From Hong Kong and Chile to Iraq and Lebanon, people have utilized social media to whip up spontaneous, mostly nonviolent grassroots demonstrations against their respective governments—efforts they have vowed to sustain until all their demands are met.