Editor’s Note: The Atlantic is making vital coverage of the coronavirus available to all readers. Find the collection here. Even in a year of horrendous suffering, what is unfolding in Brazil stands out. In the rainforest city of Manaus, home to 2 million people, bodies are reportedly being dropped into mass graves as quickly as they can be dug. Hospitals have run out of oxygen, and people with potentially treatable cases of COVID-19 are dying of asphyxia.

For a second weekend, tens of thousands of people in cities across Russia protested the jailing of the opposition leader, Alexei Navalny. An outspoken critic of President Vladimir Putin, Navalny was detained on January 17, after returning from Germany, where he had been recovering from a near-fatal poisoning that he blames on the Kremlin. According to the Associated Press, more than 5,100 protesters were arrested yesterday—1,000 more than had been detained the previous week.

AMC’s newest British import, the four-part drama The Salisbury Poisonings, is a dystopia with a bucolic English setting, and the disconnect between the two is where the show’s slow creep of horror begins. On an ordinary street, a man and a woman quietly convulse on a park bench. Later, workers in ghostly white hazmat suits swab hastily abandoned cups of tea for signs of contamination. Swans, one police officer reports, are “behaving strangely.

It feels as if the world is on fire—and it is. In the last days of the Trump administration, U.S. government scientists announced that 2020 was one of the two hottest years in recorded history. The other hottest year was 2016: fittingly, the year that the United States elected Donald Trump president, a disaster for the environment as well as democratic norms.

Editor’s Note: With Lori Gottlieb on book leave, Rebecca J. Rosen, the editor of Dear Therapist, begins another month as The Atlantic’s resident “Dear Therapist” archivist, pointing readers to some of Lori’s most beloved columns. Lori Gottlieb continues to work on her book, and I continue to bring you some “Dear Therapist” wisdom in her stead.