Roger Stone’s best trick was always his upper-class-twit wardrobe. He seemed such a farcical character, such a Klaxon-alarm-from-a-mile-away goofball—who could take him seriously?

Aldrich Ames, Robert Hanssen: They had tradecraft. They didn’t troll people on Instagram or blab to reporters. They behaved in the way you would expect of people betraying their country: conscious of the magnitude of their acts, determined to avoid the limelight.

Stone could not have been more different. He clowned, he cavorted, he demanded limelight—which made it in some ways impossible to imagine that he could have done anything seriously amiss. Bank robbers don’t go on Twitter to announce, “Hey, I’m going to rob a bank, sorry not sorry.” Or so you’d expect.

The closest thing social conservatives and evangelical supporters of President Donald Trump had to a conversation stopper, when pressed about their support for a president who is so manifestly corrupt, cruel, mendacious, and psychologically unwell, was a simple phrase: “But Gorsuch.”

Those two words were shorthand for their belief that their reverential devotion to Trump would result in great advances for their priorities and their policy agenda, and no priority was more important than the Supreme Court.

Donald Trump may be a flawed character, they argued, but at least he appointed Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.

And then came Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia.

That is the case decided in mid-June in which the majority opinion, written by Justice Gorsuch, protected gay and transgender individuals from workplace discrimination, handing the LGBTQ movement a historic victory.

Updated at 1:40 p.m. ET on July 9, 2020.

For the past few weeks, I have been obsessed with a mystery emerging in the national COVID-19 data.

Cases have soared to terrifying levels since June. Yesterday, the U.S. had 62,000 confirmed cases, an all-time high—and about five times more than the entire continent of Europe. Several U.S. states, including Arizona and Florida, currently have more confirmed cases per capita than any other country in the world.

But average daily deaths are down 75 percent from their April peak. Despite higher death counts on Tuesday and Wednesday, the weekly average has largely plateaued in the past two weeks.

The gap between spiking cases and falling-then-flatlining deaths has become the latest partisan flashpoint. President Donald Trump has brushed off the coronavirus surge by emphasizing the lower death rate, saying that “99 percent of [COVID-19 cases] are totally harmless.” On Tuesday, Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, warned Americans against “[taking] comfort in the lower rate of death” just hours before Trump tweeted triumphantly: “Death Rate from Coronavirus is down tenfold!”

Forget Bernie Kerik, Scooter Libby, Michael Milken—even Sheriff Joe Arpaio. This was the presidential reprieve President Donald Trump’s critics feared most.

Trump’s move tonight to commute the sentence of his longtime associate Roger Stone, nearly five months after a federal judge sentenced him to more than three years in prison, was surely the least surprising of his many high-profile acts of executive clemency. The president, after all, had been complaining about Stone’s prosecution from the start; had telegraphed by tweet his displeasure with the Department of Justice’s sentencing recommendation; and had tried to browbeat Judge Amy Berman Jackson into granting Stone a new trial.

But the seeming inevitability of Trump’s decision made it no less brazen. Stone was more than a political ally of the president, like Arpaio. He was not just a friend of a friend, like Kerik, Libby, and Milken—whose pardons were encouraged privately by Trump’s buddies or via public endorsements from the president’s fans on Fox News. Stone was a longtime confidant of Trump, but he was more than that. To the president’s critics, he was an accomplice to Trump’s crimes, convicted of lying to Congress and threatening a witness in the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, which directly involved Trump and his campaign. As Jackson noted in explaining her sentence, Stone “was not prosecuted for standing up for the president; he was prosecuted for covering up for the president.”

In any other July, millions of American schoolchildren, their families, and their teachers would be eagerly anticipating, or perhaps dreading, the start of a new school year. This year is different. With coronavirus case counts increasing rapidly in many states, it’s natural to wonder whether there will be school at all.

Education is an essential foundation of society. The disruptions caused by the pandemic this spring cost millions of students precious school time and slowed or stalled their educational progress, worsening an already unequal system: The poorest children are the ones falling furthest behind. What’s more, going to school benefits the social, physical, and mental health of children.

Join Ed Yong for a conversation about COVID-19 at Pulse, The Atlantic's virtual summit on health care on July 15. Register here.

Saskia Popescu’s phone buzzes throughout the night, waking her up. It had already buzzed 99 times before I interviewed her at 9:15 a.m. ET last Monday. It buzzed three times during the first 15 minutes of our call. Whenever a COVID-19 case is confirmed at her hospital system, Popescu gets an email, and her phone buzzes. She cannot silence it. An epidemiologist at the University of Arizona, Popescu works to prepare hospitals for outbreaks of emerging diseases. Her phone is now a miserable metronome, ticking out the rhythm of the pandemic ever more rapidly as Arizona’s cases climb. “It has almost become white noise,” she told me.

Food, at its essence, is sustenance; that much is simple. Where things get complicated is in all the manifold ways it sustains us. Consider the burrito. In the first episode of Padma Lakshmi’s new Hulu show, Taste the Nation, the food writer and longtime Top Chef host travels to El Paso, Texas, where she attempts to isolate all the different ingredients in one of America’s favorite dishes. At the Jalisco Cafe, a chef griddling oozy eggs with beans on a stovetop tells her that the perfect burrito comes down to an attention to detail. The dish, another interviewee tells Lakshmi, is pure practical convenience: It’s quick to assemble and eat on the way to work. It can also signify a mother’s love, a whole meal swaddled in a pillowy tortilla and tucked into a child’s pocket before the day begins. And, in a city where the hum of helicopters surveying the border adds ambient foreboding to every interaction, burritos also represent the essence of American food: cuisine from one culture cloaked in the imposed ingredients of another (in this case, wheat flour). “A burrito,” Lakshmi observes, “is tradition wrapped in colonization.”

Seven Supreme Court justices ruled yesterday morning that Donald Trump is not a king.

But Trump still got what he wanted.

Since Trump announced his candidacy for president in 2015, he has vowed to release his tax returns, and has also refused to release his tax returns. After the 2018 midterms, Democrats in the House sought to subpoena financial institutions for Trump’s records, and Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance sought Trump’s financial records for a grand-jury investigation into whether Trump broke the law when he concealed hush-money payments to hide past affairs during the 2016 election. In one opinion, Trump v. Mazars, the Court affirmed Congress’s subpoena power but sent the case back to lower courts for further litigation; in Trump v, Vance, it affirmed Vance’s authority to seek the records but sent the case back to the lower courts for further litigation.

Palm Springs is set during a never-ending day. Sorry to give away the big plot point, which comes some 15 minutes into Max Barbakow’s wonderful new comedy, but that premise feels pertinent today in a way that it didn’t when the movie premiered at Sundance six months ago. The film belongs to the growing canon of time-loop stories, which ensnare their characters in a repeating cycle from which there’s no discernible escape. Life proceeds normally enough, but its rhythms are unchanged; the monotony is comical and then unbearable. It’s not hard to view all art through the focus of the pandemic right now, but in Palm Springs, the subtext is practically text: We are all trapped.

That may sound terrifying, but what’s most impressive about the movie (out today on Hulu) is how charming and genuinely funny it is. It keeps all the beats of a salty-sweet romantic comedy without ignoring the crushing implications of having to wake up to the same morning over and over again. Where other time-loop movies (Groundhog Day, Edge of Tomorrow, Happy Death Day) were about their characters gaining some karmic sense of self-improvement, Palm Springs is about how reality can feel endless, and how being an adult involves cherishing the truth that a lot of things will never change.

On March 1, California seemed destined to be pummeled by the coronavirus. America’s most populous state has large, crowded cities and a diverse population, and travel between it and Asia and Europe is prodigious. Seattle, another West Coast hub, had just become the first U.S. city to be hit by the virus, and a cruise ship crawling with COVID-19 was about to enter San Francisco Bay.

Three months later, California had weathered the virus’s first storm. By June 1, the state had experienced a total of 115,000 cases and 4,200 deaths. In contrast, New York State, its population half that of California, had seen 372,000 cases and 29,900 deaths, not counting thousands more who died at home. Had California’s per capita mortality rate equaled New York’s, 55,000 more people would have died.