The state of Connecticut has many nicknames. It is the Nutmeg State, the Constitution State, and America’s Country Club, while Hartford, its capital city, has been called the Nation’s Filing Cabinet. But as Connecticut grapples with a deep fiscal crisis, it might as well embrace another moniker: The Rorschach State. For the left and the right, it is the manifestation of each side’s greatest fears.

Despite being the richest state in the country, by per-capita income, Connecticut’s budget is a mess. Its pensions are woefully under-funded. Its deficit is projected to surpass $2 billion, or 12 percent of its total annual tax revenue. Hartford is approaching bankruptcy. Conservatives look at Connecticut and see a liberal dystopia, where high taxes have ruined the economy. Liberals, on the other hand, see a capitalist horror show, where the rich dwell in gilded mansions, ensconced in sylvan culs-de-sac, while nearby towns face rising poverty and bankruptcy. Why is America’s richest state floundering?

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Thirty minutes. That’s about how long it would take a nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) launched from North Korea to reach Los Angeles. With the powers in Pyongyang working doggedly toward making this possible—building an ICBM and shrinking a nuke to fit on it—analysts now predict that Kim Jong Un will have the capability before Donald Trump completes one four-year term.

About which the president has tweeted, simply, “It won’t happen!”

Though given to reckless oaths, Trump is not in this case saying anything that departs significantly from the past half century of futile American policy toward North Korea. Preventing the Kim dynasty from having a nuclear device was an American priority long before Pyongyang exploded its first nuke, in 2006, during the administration of George W. Bush. The Kim regime detonated four more while Barack Obama was in the White House. In the more than four decades since Richard Nixon held office, the U.S. has tried to control North Korea by issuing threats, conducting military exercises, ratcheting up diplomatic sanctions, leaning on China, and most recently, it seems likely, committing cybersabotage.

Take a quick glance at the box-office returns for June, and you could draw an easy conclusion: Hollywood has a franchise problem. Films like Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, Transformers: The Last Knight, The Mummy, and Cars 3 have all underperformed, each making hundreds of millions less than their immediate forebears (or, in the case of The Mummy, a Brendan Fraser film that came out in 1999). But to think that, you’d have to ignore some of the biggest hits of the year: Wonder Woman, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, The Fate of the Furious, and Logan, all new entries in long-running franchises.

As simple as it sounds, Hollywood has, instead, a bad-movie problem—one that’s exacerbated by how easily the industry serves up sequels to the increasingly important global market. The refrain is always the same: Who cares if the fifth Transformers is drawing little enthusiasm in the United States when it’s doing well in China? But that defense is becoming more specious, as international audiences are also seemingly growing tired of the endless assembly line of action films, while the biggest box-office story of 2017 is the success of smaller-budgeted original films.

Down the home stretch of the 2016 presidential campaign, one of Donald Trump’s most consistent talking points was a claim that America’s changing demographics and culture had brought the country to a precipice. He repeatedly cast himself as the last chance for Republicans and conservative white Christians to step back from the cliff, to preserve their power and way of life. In an interview on Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) in early September, Trump put the choice starkly for the channel’s conservative Christian viewers: “If we don’t win this election, you’ll never see another Republican and you’ll have a whole different church structure.” Asked to elaborate, Trump continued, “I think this will be the last election that the Republicans have a chance of winning because you’re going to have people flowing across the border, you’re going to have illegal immigrants coming in and they’re going to be legalized and they’re going to be able to vote, and once that all happens you can forget it.”

North Korea’s successful test earlier this week of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) has triggered all of the expected alarms.

Even if Kim Jong Un cannot yet mount one with a nuke, his arsenal of chemical and biological weapons now has a longer reach—even, most experts agree, Hawaii or Alaska. But apart from the psychological impact on Americans, the development doesn’t fundamentally alter the military standoff that has been in place for decades.

Kim and his father before him have long had the capability of inflicting mass casualties on South Korea and the nearly 30,000 American forces stationed there. In recent years, the range of Pyongyang’s missiles has included Guam and targets in Japan. If conflict broke out, these are weapons that could kill hundreds of thousands, if not millions, and could be delivered so rapidly there is little chance of preventing some from reaching their targets.

The U.S. and South Korea conducted a ballistic-missile drill Wednesday, a day after North Korea tested a missile that experts say could reach Alaska.

“Self restraint, which is a choice, is all that separates armistice and war,”  General Vincent Brooks, commander of U.S. forces Korea, said in a joint statement with  General Lee Sun Jin, the chairman of South Korea’s joint chiefs. “As this Alliance missile live fire shows, we are able to change our choice when so ordered by our Alliance national leaders. It would be a grave mistake for anyone to believe anything to the contrary.”

As we reported Tuesday, North Korea said it tested an intercontinental ballistic missile, making it, in the words of its state-run television, “a full-fledged nuclear power … capable of hitting any part of the world.” The announcement said the Hwasong-14 missile reached an altitude of 2,802 kilometers (1,731 miles) and traveled 933 kilometers (580 miles) for 39 minutes before hitting a target in the Sea of Japan. South Korean and Japanese officials said the missile traveled 578 miles (930 kilometers), “greatly exceeded” an altitude of 2,500 kilometers (1,500 miles), and flew for around 40 minutes.

Real-estate developers are not popular with most of the American public. A recent Stanford paper found that people like developers only slightly more than they like corporate executives. Many progressives object to developers’ business model, which depends on building new units and charging as much as possible for them, even if that makes them unaffordable for longtime residents.

But there are signs that this adversarial relationship is starting to give way to a more cooperative dynamic. In cities across the country, some residents that might once have protested new construction are welcoming developers, pushing governments to allow them to build more and more housing. “You can work to dismantle the system without demonizing developers,” Laura Loe, a Seattle housing advocate, told me. With more housing, the thinking goes, the cost of rent in thriving cities like San Francisco, Boston, and Portland will not rise so quickly, which will allow more people from different economic backgrounds to live there and share in the prosperity of the local economy.  

For much of her adult Christian life, Christina Edmondson has felt like “a unicorn”: At any given time, she told me, she might be the only black woman present at a professional meeting or worship session. She and her husband live in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she works as a dean at Calvin College, a small Christian liberal-arts school, and he pastors an Orthodox Presbyterian church plant. This spring, Edmondson and two friends, Ekemini Uwan and Michelle Higgins, started a podcast called Truth’s Table for other “unicorns” like them: Black women who often feel lonely navigating predominantly white Christian spaces, or who are generally looking for “a seat at the table,” as the women put it.

The strategy was simple. A demographic wave—long-building, still-building—would carry the party to victory, and liberalism to generational advantage. The wave was inevitable, unstoppable. It would not crest for many years, and in the meantime, there would be losses—losses in the midterms and in special elections; in statehouses and in districts and counties and municipalities outside major cities. Losses in places and elections where the white vote was especially strong.

But the presidency could offset these losses. Every four years the wave would swell, receding again thereafter but coming back in the next presidential cycle, higher, higher. The strategy was simple. The presidency was everything.

DENVER, Colorado—I had my first asthma attack in 10 years while working on this story about asthma.

The day had been a grind. I flew to Denver early on a March morning, hoping to give myself a full day to acclimate to the air before I did some jogging and hiking the next day. From the moment I touched down and took a Lyft away from the Denver airport, that unlucky hellhorse, the afternoon was a blur of reporting. At the end of the day, I found some comfort in a bar with some pretty good draught beers and ahi tuna guacamole. Only, the guacamole I ate turned out to be the version with crabmeat. I’m very allergic to crabmeat.

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