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.Three Stories We’re FollowingMARK FELIX / AFP / GETTY1. The third coronavirus surge is here. A troubling bellwether: Hospitalizations are up in many states, according to data from our COVID Tracking Project.2. We’ve reached the final weeks of the Trump-Biden race.

The polls are grim for President Donald Trump. His campaign faces a big and worsening money disadvantage. His closing arguments appeal only to the most hyper-partisan Republicans.Many have worried about the transition after a Trump electoral defeat. Will Trump leave office quietly and peacefully? But there are other, less dramatic dangers to ponder, too—dangers that we would do well to anticipate and guard against.

Given the ongoing nature of the pandemic, it may seem senseless to make a two-hour film that looks back on how the coronavirus ran rampant in the U.S. And yet, Totally Under Control—from the Oscar-winning writer-director Alex Gibney and his co-directors, Ophelia Harutyunyan and Suzanne Hillinger—not only documents the chaos of 2020 with clear-eyed precision, but also successfully argues for its own existence.

Horror means something different to everyone. One of my most traumatic movie memories remains the . Karyn Kusama’s movie was a major comeback for a talented filmmaker who had toiled in so-called director jail for years; with a limited budget, she turned an awkward dinner party in the Hollywood Hills into an unbearably tense satire of modern self-help groups.

Before COVID-19 upended our lives, clinical vaccine trials typically made news only when they were done—when scientists could definitively say, Yes, this one works or No, it doesn’t.