“He hated America very deeply,” John le Carré wrote of his fictional Soviet mole, Bill Haydon, in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Haydon had just been unmasked as a double agent at the heart of Britain’s secret service, one whose treachery was motivated by animus, not so much to England but to America. “It’s an aesthetic judgment as much as anything,” Haydon explained, before hastily adding: “Partly a moral one, of course.

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.THE ATLANTICEconomic collapse is over. Recovery is starting. But the shape of the rebound—whether it looks more like a V or an elongated U—is still uncertain. Years of miserable aftershocks could still lead to a second Great Depression, Annie Lowrey argues in a new piece.

By the time Attorney General William Barr tried to fire Geoffrey Berman, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, over the weekend, the Department of Justice had become an extension of the financial and political interests of President Donald Trump. No act of politicization was too blatant for the country’s top law-enforcement officer.

The October 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake struck Northern California, where I then lived, shortly after I turned 11. It was not the biggest upheaval in my life that year—my parents’ marriage had just ended—but discovering that, on a random Tuesday afternoon, the ground could start shaking hard enough to knock you over was a pretty close second. In the days that followed, I was obsessed with news about the disaster, especially the deaths it had caused.

In March, A learned from the agency supervising her son’s court-mandated visitations with his father—her abusive ex-husband—that their visits would have to go virtual because of the coronavirus outbreak. She started preparing by taking out all her extra bed sheets and attempting to cover the windows. She couldn’t take any chances. Even a glimpse outside her New York City windows could be enough to help the man who’d violently abused her discover her address.