On January 13, 2020, a political scientist named Daniel Drezner tweeted a screenshot of a Washington Post article, along with a cheeky comment: “I’ll believe that Trump is growing into the presidency when his staff stops talking about him like a toddler.” The screenshot showed a quotation about handling the president from a former senior administration official: “He’d get spun up, and if you bought some time, you could get him calmed down, and then explain to him what his decision might do.”

Drezner’s tweet was part of a lengthy thread. A very lengthy thread. The tweet, in fact, was the 1,163rd entry in a thread that began back in April 2017, with the same comment appended to a screenshot from The Washington Post: “Trump turns on the television almost as soon as he wakes, then checks in periodically throughout the day in the small dining room off the Oval Office, and continues late into the evening when he’s back in his private residence. ‘Once he goes upstairs, there’s no managing him,’ said one adviser.” Drezner had highlighted the quotation from the adviser.

In Manhattan, the homeless shelters are full, and the luxury skyscrapers are vacant.

Such is the tale of two cities within America’s largest metro. Even as 80,000 people sleep in New York City’s shelters or on its streets, Manhattan residents have watched skinny condominium skyscrapers rise across the island. These colossal stalagmites initially transformed not only the city’s skyline but also the real-estate market for new homes. From 2011 to 2019, the average price of a newly listed condo in New York soared from $1.15 million to $3.77 million.

But the bust is upon us. Today, nearly half of the Manhattan luxury-condo units that have come onto the market in the past five years are still unsold, according to The New York Times.

Two of the world’s richest humans, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, were allegedly having a nice chat on WhatsApp in 2018 when the latter sent Bezos an infected file that exfiltrated data from the CEO’s phone. That’s according to a new report in The Guardian, which detailed the exchange according to anonymous sources.

In the shadow of the new report, there is an indication of the murky reality of the network of the uber rich. The Bezos phone data may or may not have sparked the National Enquirer’s look at Bezos’s romantic life. Bezos may or may not have been targeted because he is the owner of the Washington Post, which had run critical editorials by the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was later murdered.

Image above: Workers at the University of Nebraska Medical Center's biocontainment unit practicing safe procedure on a mannequin

At 6 o’clock in the morning, shortly after the sun spills over the horizon, the city of Kikwit doesn’t so much wake up as ignite. Loud music blares from car radios. Shops fly open along the main street. Dust-sprayed jeeps and motorcycles zoom eastward toward the town’s bustling markets or westward toward Kinshasa, the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s capital city. The air starts to heat up, its molecules vibrating with absorbed energy. So, too, the city.

By late morning, I am away from the bustle, on a quiet, exposed hilltop some five miles down a pothole-ridden road. As I walk, desiccated shrubs crunch underfoot and butterflies flit past. The only shade is cast by two lines of trees, which mark the edges of a site where more than 200 people are buried, their bodies piled into three mass graves, each about 15 feet wide and 70 feet long. Nearby, a large blue sign says in memory of the victims of the ebola epidemic in may 1995. The sign is partly obscured by overgrown grass, just as the memory itself has been occluded by time. The ordeal that Kikwit suffered has been crowded out by the continual eruption of deadly diseases elsewhere in the Congo, and around the globe.

The impeachment trial of the century had barely begun when word came down that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had softened his initial plan to make the House managers and President Donald Trump’s lawyers present their cases in marathon 12-hour sessions over four days. He’ll allow each team a more civilized eight hours over six days instead.

And a good thing, too—if the first afternoon’s deliberations were any sign. One hundred senators accustomed to talking at length were silenced by the trial rules, and by sundown they were visibly chafing, frustrated by the unbridgeable gap between the 18th-century gravity of the proceedings and the universal assumptions about its forgone conclusion.

In April 1963, King was jailed in Birmingham, Alabama, after he defied a state court’s injunction and led a march of black protesters without a permit, urging an Easter boycott of white-owned stores. A statement published in The Birmingham News, written by eight moderate white clergymen, criticized the march and other demonstrations.

This prompted King to write a lengthy response, begun in the margins of the newspaper. He smuggled it out with the help of his lawyer, and the nearly 7,000 words were transcribed. The eloquent call for “constructive, nonviolent tension” to force an end to unjust laws became a landmark document of the civil-rights movement. The letter was printed in part or in full by several publications, including the New York Post, Liberation magazine, The New Leader, and The Christian Century. The Atlantic published it in the August 1963 issue.

I’ve covered sports for 40 years, not politics. Maybe that’s why I’m so bamboozled by this impeachment case in the U.S. Senate. Republicans are going to try Donald Trump with no witnesses? Some jurors have already announced they’re voting not guilty? The guy who makes the rules—Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky—gets his marching orders from the accused himself?

Can you imagine if we did sports like this?

Kyle Shanahan, the coach of the San Francisco 49ers, walks to the middle of the field and shakes hands with Andy Reid, the coach of the Kansas City Chiefs. Fifty-seven cameras, 65,000 people in the stands, and 100 million people around the world eavesdrop.

Referee: Gentlemen, welcome to the Super Bowl. One thing I want to make clear before we start: The 49ers are going to win.

History, as a discipline, comes out of the archive. The archive is not the library, but something else entirely. Libraries spread knowledge that’s been compressed into books and other media. Archives are where collections of papers are stored, usually within a library’s inner sanctum: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s papers, say, at the New York Public Library. Or Record Group 31 at the National Archives—a set of Federal Housing Administration documents from the 1930s to the ’70s. Usually, an archive contains materials from the people and institutions near it. So, the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford contains everything from Atari’s business plans to HP co-founder William Hewlett’s correspondence.

While libraries have become central actors in the digitization of knowledge, archives have generally resisted this trend. They are still almost overwhelmingly paper. Traditionally, you’d go to a place like this and sit there, day after day, “turning every page,” as the master biographer Robert Caro put it. You might spend weeks, months, or, like Caro, years working through all the boxes, taking extensive notes and making some (relatively expensive) photo copies. Fewer and fewer people have the time, money, or patience to do that. (If they ever did.)

Many college-educated people think they are deeply engaged in politics. They follow the news—reading articles like this one—and debate the latest developments on social media. They might sign an online petition or throw a $5 online donation at a presidential candidate. Mostly, they consume political information as a way of satisfying their own emotional and intellectual needs. These people are political hobbyists. What they are doing is no closer to engaging in politics than watching SportsCenter is to playing football.

For Querys Matias, politics isn’t just a hobby. Matias is a 63-year-old immigrant from the Dominican Republic. She lives in Haverhill, Massachusetts, a small city on the New Hampshire border. In her day job, Matias is a bus monitor for a special-needs school. In her evenings, she amasses power.

What has made Ray Dalio, the billionaire who founded the biggest hedge fund in the world, so financially successful? Dalio himself has offered an explanation: In 2017, he summed up his accumulated wisdom in a book called Principles: Life & Work, which was purchased by more than 2 million people worldwide and received testimonials from a phalanx of other billionaires, including Bill Gates, Mark Cuban, and Michael Bloomberg.

Now, so that an even broader audience may access his insights, Dalio has condensed the nearly 600 pages of Principles down to 157, in the form of a picture book released late last year called Principles for Success. This simpler version—a mostly abstract blueprint for accomplishing one’s goals—is intended, Dalio told me, for readers ages 6 to 60, and beyond.