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.

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.

The hypothetical couple were making $350,000 a year and just getting by, their income “barely” qualifying them as middle-class. Their budget, posted in September, showed how they “survived” in a city like San Francisco, spending more than $50,000 a year on child care and preschool, nearly $50,000 a year on their mortgage, and hefty amounts on vacations, entertainment, and a weekly date night—even as they saved for retirement and college in tax-advantaged accounts.

The internet, being the internet, responded with some combination of howling, baying, pitchfork-jostling, and scoffing. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York quipped that the thing the family was struggling with was math. Gabriel Zucman, a leading scholar of wealth and inequality, described the budget as laughable, while noting that it showed how much money consumption taxes could raise.

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.

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.

On September 22, 2001, 11 days after the worst terrorist attack on American soil, then–New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani looked squarely into the Saturday Night Live camera and told a shaken nation, “We will not let our decisions be made out of fear.” Flanked by a somber phalanx of uniformed police officers and firefighters, Giuliani offered stirring and patriotic words: “We choose to live our lives in freedom.”

Paul Simon performed a searing rendition of “The Boxer,” his folkie ode to a battered fighter’s gritty resilience. It was a total tonal shift for television’s longest-running comedy show, in line with the total tonal shift taking place across the country at the time. And then, Lorne Michaels, SNL’s creator and showrunner, appeared and asked Giuliani a sober question: “Can we be funny?” With a Borscht Belt comic’s perfect deadpan timing, “America’s Mayor” replied, “Why start now?”—and in one small, quiet, moving way, life reverted to normal.

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.

Every morning of my Joe Rogan experience began the same way Joe Rogan begins his: with the mushroom coffee.

It’s a pour-and-stir powder made from lion’s mane and chaga—“two rock-star mushrooms,” according to Joe—and it’s made by a company called Four Sigmatic, a regular advertiser on Joe Rogan’s wildly popular podcast. As a coffee lover, the mere existence of mushroom coffee offends me. (“I’ll have your most delicious thing, made from your least delicious things, please,” a friend said, scornfully.) But it tastes fine, and even better after another cup of actual coffee.

Next, I took several vitamin supplements from a company called Onnit, whose core philosophy is “total human optimization” and whose website sells all kinds of wicked-cool fitness gear—a Darth Vader kettlebell ($199.95); a 50-foot roll of two-and-a-half-inch-thick battle rope ($249.95); a 25-pound quad mace ($147.95), which according to one fitness-equipment site is a weapon dating back to 11th-century Persia. I stuck to the health products, though, because you know how it goes—you buy one quad mace and soon your apartment is filled with them. I stirred a packet of Onnit Gut Health powder into my mushroom coffee, then downed an enormous pair of Alpha Brain pills, filled with nootropics to help with “memory and focus.”

Where in the pantheon of American commercial titans does Jeffrey Bezos belong? Andrew Carnegie’s hearths forged the steel that became the skeleton of the railroad and the city. John D. Rockefeller refined 90 percent of American oil, which supplied the pre-electric nation with light. Bill Gates created a program that was considered a prerequisite for turning on a computer.

At 55, Bezos has never dominated a major market as thoroughly as any of these forebears, and while he is presently the richest man on the planet, he has less wealth than Gates did at his zenith. Yet Rockefeller largely contented himself with oil wells, pump stations, and railcars; Gates’s fortune depended on an operating system. The scope of the empire the founder and CEO of Amazon has built is wider. Indeed, it is without precedent in the long history of American capitalism.

“Who you with?”

“I’m a science journalist,” I said, jolted from my reverie on the shoulder of I-68 in Maryland, where a crowd of geologists had gathered on a field trip to poke at some rocks revealed by the highway department’s dynamite. The rocks, slate gray and studded with pebbles from a punishing ice age, spoke to a mysterious global die-off at the end of the Devonian period, hundreds of millions of years ago.

“I’m researching a book on mass extinctions,” I said.

“Cool, I work on the end-Permian boundary in Wyoming.”

My ears perked up. He was talking about a line in the rocks that recorded the greatest catastrophe the Earth has endured in its entire history.

“I didn’t really realize there was a—”