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.

For most of the past two decades, American troops have been deployed all over the world—to about 150 countries. During that time, hundreds of thousands of young men and women have experienced combat, and a generation of officers have come of age dealing with the practical realities of war. They possess a deep well of knowledge and experience. For the past three years, these highly trained professionals have been commanded by Donald Trump.

To get a sense of what serving Trump has been like, I interviewed officers up and down the ranks, as well as several present and former civilian Pentagon employees. Among the officers I spoke with were four of the highest ranks—three or four stars—all recently retired. All but one served Trump directly; the other left the service shortly before Trump was inaugurated.

Several weeks ago, I met up with a friend in New York who suggested we grab a bite at a Scottish bar in the West Village. He had booked the table through something called Seated, a restaurant app that pays users who make reservations on the platform. We ordered two cocktails each, along with some food. And in exchange for the hard labor of drinking whiskey, the app awarded us $30 in credits redeemable at a variety of retailers.

I am never offended by freebies. But this arrangement seemed almost obscenely generous. To throw cash at people every time they walk into a restaurant does not sound like a business. It sounds like a plot to lose money as fast as possible—or to provide New Yorkers, who are constantly dining out, with a kind of minimum basic income.

The Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition, founded in 1965, is an annual international showcase of the best in nature photography. This year, the contest attracted more than 48,000 entries from 100 countries. Wildlife Photographer of the Year is developed and produced by the Natural History Museum, London. The owners and sponsors have once again been kind enough to share the following 15 winning images from this year’s competition. The museum’s website has images from previous years and more information about the current contest and exhibition. Captions are provided by the photographers and WPY organizers, and are lightly edited for style.

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.

Last Tuesday morning, my first unread email was from Influencer Intelligence, an analytics company that works with  people who want to hire influencers and celebrities to advertise things.

“Authenticity is the most critical attribute to building influence,” the company’s website reads. The email was about, as emails often are, a recently compiled report about the business of selling things on Instagram, which promised to “tackle the concept of what authenticity really means today.” The PDF’s cover was an image of a beautiful white woman wearing pink eye shadow and putting her hand to her mouth—which was, needless to say, open.

Inside, I found advice on how to determine the authenticity of an influencer: Request Google Analytics information from her (to prove that her numbers “add up”), ask for quantitative results of previous “brand campaigns,” map her audience demographics—all told, fairly standard stuff. The report also suggested the use of “soft metrics,” which apparently entails looking at a person’s Instagram profile and taking note of the tone and frequency of her responses to her “audience,” judging how “natural and authentic the content feels,” and deciding whether the influencer really “lives and breathes what they are presenting.”

The city-government worker was just getting the hang of his job when a new hire upended everything. She became his mentee, and she asked him if he could put together a manual on how to do her work. He told her okay, but begrudgingly. The manual was a good idea in theory, but he was busy, and he wished she could just learn through observation, as he had.

Over the next months, as he dealt with more immediate deadlines, the worker kept pushing the manual off. His new colleague grew frustrated. “All day, morning and evening, she kept asking me, ‘When will the manual be ready? When will the manual be ready?’” the worker told me through an interpreter.

The manual was a mundane request, but it made him feel confused and powerless. He didn’t know how to communicate to the new colleague that he didn’t have the time and the job was difficult. Repeated over and over, her request caused his anxiety to ratchet up to extreme levels. He hesitated to delegate work to her, which meant that he took on even more. He started having problems sleeping and eating.

Less than two years ago, the Fox News host Laura Ingraham infamously said that LeBron James should “shut up and dribble,” after the NBA superstar criticized President Donald Trump. Now everyone—especially on the right—is on the Los Angeles Lakers forward’s case for disheartening comments he made about the explosive political situation between the NBA and China. Not even pro basketball’s biggest star can get the league out of the bind it’s in. If anything, James is reinforcing it.

On Monday, James weighed in for the first time on the international firestorm swirling around the NBA. The controversy began after the Houston Rockets general manager, Daryl Morey, tweeted his support of the Hong Kong protesters on October 4, right before the Lakers and the Brooklyn Nets were scheduled to play exhibition games in China. Morey’s tweet was quickly taken down, but the fallout from the tweet—which included lost sponsorships for the Rockets and China’s refusal to allow the broadcast of two preseason games—has continued and even intensified after James voiced his opinion.

From the late 19th century up to World War II, Americans were seized by the idea of transforming China into a Christian, capitalist America on the other side of the Pacific Ocean.

The word plastic pops up again and again in American statements about China from that era. China is “plastic” in the hands of “strong and capable Westerners,” announced President Woodrow Wilson in 1914. “China has become plastic after centuries of rigid conventionalism,”declared Selskar M. Gunn, a vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation, in May 1933.

But from the beginning, Americans were also afraid that China—or the Chinese—would change them, too. In 1870, following the Civil War, Congress limited naturalization to white people and black people. Later, the United States tried to inoculate itself against the influence of the Chinese by banning many of them from America’s shores. Starting with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the U.S. Congress passed a series of racist immigration laws which would not be significantly modified until World War II, when China was an ally in America’s fight against Japan. It looked bad for the U.S. to deny Chinese the right to travel in America while Chinese under American command were dying on Asian battlefields.

Updated at 2:15 p.m. ET on October 13, 2019.

Early yesterday morning, in a misty park in Vienna, Eliud Kipchoge ran a marathon in less than two hours. His time, 1:59:40, is the fastest any runner has ever covered 26.2 miles. Kipchoge carved two minutes off his own world record and became the first marathoner to break the two-hour barrier.

At the event, branded the INEOS 1:59 Challenge, the performance was heralded as a radical, historic leap, his “Neil Armstrong moment,” as one announcer said. Indeed, Kipchoge himself—a soft-spoken 34-year-old Kenyan who dulls the pain of distance running by smiling mid-competition—has repeatedly equated his feat to reaching the moon. That comparison is audacious on the scale of human achievement, but in the galaxy of running, it might actually be an understatement. Running’s original moon landing, the sub-four-minute mile, took place back in 1954. Yesterday, Kipchoge launched running to Mars.