“There were officers on the ground,” Caroline Edwards testified Thursday evening, during the first public hearing of the House Select Committee investigating the events of the January 6 insurrection. The Capitol Police officer was describing the violence she observed as she attempted to defend the building from the mob. She described her fellow officers, outnumbered and outmatched: “They were bleeding,” she said. “They were throwing up.

The demographer Diana Greene Foster was in Orlando last month, preparing for the end of Roe v. Wade, when Politico published a leaked draft of a majority Supreme Court opinion striking down the landmark ruling. The opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito, would revoke the constitutional right to abortion and thus give states the ability to ban the medical procedure.

In World War II, Franklin D. Roosevelt rallied what he dubbed the “United Nations,” among them Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union, to keep the Axis powers from eliminating whole countries across Europe and Asia. After the Cold War, George H. W. Bush likewise assembled a 35-nation coalition to beat back Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.

Four years and four months ago, a high-school student delivered a speech at a rally outside the Broward County Courthouse in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Three days earlier, a gunman had killed 17 of X González’s classmates and teachers at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland with an AR-15-style rifle. “We are going to be the last mass shooting,” González told the assembled crowd and cable-news cameras.It wasn’t, of course.

Yesterday evening, the leaders of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol opened their public hearings—hearings that will show, in the words of vice chair Liz Cheney, that “Donald Trump oversaw a sophisticated seven-part plan to overturn the presidential election and prevent the transfer of presidential power.”Or, as committee chair Bennie Thompson put it, “Donald Trump was at the center of this conspiracy.

This week, San Francisco voters recalled Chesa Boudin, the city’s district attorney and the face of the nationwide progressive-prosecutors movement. The election, widely described as a referendum on crime and disorder and a backlash against the Democratic Party’s leftmost edge, was a caustic local fight played out on a national stage. It was democracy at work, with the public ousting a leader they considered incompetent or unfitting.

In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, as Clarissa Dalloway runs errands throughout London, the narration takes note of the sensory feast that she encounters: “the swing, tramp, and trudge” of urban life; “the bellow and the uproar” of music, yelling, cars, buses, and an airplane overhead. Clarissa famously revels in “life; London; this moment of June.

UFOs? After years of avoiding any serious discussion of such things, NASA is on it.The space agency announced yesterday that it will form a team dedicated to studying unidentified aerial phenomena “that cannot be identified as aircraft or known natural phenomena.” Starting this fall, the team will examine existing data on these objects and brainstorm new ways to collect future data.