Alex Trebek at a book signing in New York City in 1990 (Ron Galella / Getty)When Alex Trebek began hosting Jeopardy, Ronald Reagan was in his first term, Ghostbusters was a recent box-office hit, and most Millennials hadn’t been born yet. Now, after nearly four decades, his time behind the podium is done. Trebek, a TV icon, died over the weekend from pancreatic cancer that he was diagnosed with a year and a half ago.

The waiting is over. Now comes … the waiting.The first stage of the presidential interregnum, from Tuesday night through Saturday, was the slow but inexorable march toward Joe Biden being declared the winner of the presidential race. No one knew quite when that would happen, but there was an objective end point: whenever enough votes were counted for the outcome to be clear.The second stage is stranger and more open-ended.

The screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz is an odd sight on a glamorous Old Hollywood movie set. As played by Gary Oldman in David Fincher’s new biographical film, Mank, he’s a disheveled figure on the sidelines, an acclaimed New York wordsmith brought to serve as a cog in a giant Los Angeles machine.

Latinos are not a uniform voting bloc. We are spread across the country and have wildly different backgrounds. Over the years, Latinos ourselves have struggled to articulate what unites and divides us. The first question I ask in my Latino History course at Northwestern University is “Who, or what, is a ‘Latino’ anyway?” The class never resolves the question, but the students go back to it over and over as they study the evolving conceptions of Latinos.