Professional runners have to endure extraordinary deprivation, pain, and pressure to reach the Olympics. Professional-running fans, meanwhile, have to endure the question of which athletes actually deserve to be there. This summer, before the U.S. trials for the Tokyo Olympics had even finished, fans were forced to digest the fact that two of America’s track-and-field athletes most likely to medal wouldn’t be headed to the Games.

And just like that, it’s Groundhog Day. The news from the CDC is bad. Yes, we have vaccines—and they are miraculously effective at preventing serious illness and death from COVID-19. Thank goodness for that. But the CDC now says that when vaccinated people are infected, they may spread the coronavirus just as easily as the unvaccinated do. On top of that, the Delta variant is tremendously contagious, much more so than the original strain of the virus.

For raw emotional content, Tuesday’s hearing of the new House select committee to investigate the January 6 insurrection was nonpareil. Four police officers who fought to hold back armed hordes seeking to disrupt Congress told stories of physical injury, racist abuse, and post-traumatic distress. Even for Americans who paid close attention to the crisis, these stories added new texture and horror.

First Canada overtook the United States in the vaccination race. Now the European Union has done so. Even poor European countries such as Greece, Lithuania, and Poland have surpassed vaccine-resistant U.S. states such as Ohio, Arkansas, and Missouri.Why is this happening? Facebook exists on the other side of the Atlantic as much as it does on ours. Europeans do not lack for far-right political parties swayed by Russian misinformation.

In 1983, the historian Benedict Anderson published his pioneering work Imagined Communities, which looks at the intangible factors that bond nations together. His analysis was prescient, thanks to the expansive lens it took in examining what unites people, and the book still helps deepen considerations of modern issues, such as the importance of a representative Pride flag.