Every weekday evening, our editors guide you through the biggest stories of the day, help you discover new ideas, and surprise you with moments of delight. Subscribe to get this delivered to your inbox.OLIVER MUNDAYThis is an awkward moment to be celebrating America. The past few months showed a great power in decay, struggling to contain a deadly pandemic and reckoning anew with its racist systems.As such, many Americans may hesitate to drape themselves in red, white, and blue.

There is a lot of learned material written about nationalism—scholarly books and papers, histories of it, theories of it—but most of us understand that nationalism, at its heart, at its very deepest roots, is about a feeling of superiority: We are better than you. Our country is better than your country. Or even—and apologies, but this is the precise language deployed by the president of the United States: Your country is a shithole country. Ours isn’t.

In an ideal world, I’d expect a Disney+ edition of Hamilton to have some real Broadway flavor. Perhaps there’d be a filmed rendering of waiting in line to have your ticket ripped at the Richard Rodgers Theatre, or a re-creation of buying an overpriced drink before taking your seat. But the stage recording of the hit musical, which starts streaming today, offers no such thing.

Emily Dickinson wrote a letter to a stranger in 1870 in which she asked the recipient, the writer Thomas Wentworth Higginson, to read a few of her poems. The letter sparked an enduring correspondence between the two, who became friends before eventually meeting eight years later. The friendship was said to have changed Dickinson, giving her a new confidence, as Martha Ackmann chronicles in her book These Fevered Days.

About a week after Steven Mikac began taking antibiotics for the strange spot on his leg, the flesh around his ankle started to tighten and swell. The moist orifice of a wound opened up and took the form of a small bullet hole. A plug of tissue had gone missing—dissolved into pus and slime. Walking was excruciating. Working, unbearable. In early October of last year, Mikac showed his ankle to a colleague at the hospital where he works in Melbourne, in the Australian state of Victoria.

A new waterslide in the Czech Republic, a cat on the Algerian waterfront, scuffles in Taiwan’s legislature, a grotto reopening in Italy, a building collapse in Brooklyn, burying a coronavirus victim in Russia, a model village in England, a wildfire in Colorado, and much more.

The American pandemic is careening out of control. Yesterday, the United States reported more than 52,000 new cases of the coronavirus, setting a new all-time daily record, according to the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic. The surge has put the country’s supply of coronavirus tests under strain, especially in some of the worst-hit states, such as Arizona, Texas, Florida, and California.