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.This holiday season, there is reason for hope: The development of vaccines means the end of this pandemic is in sight. But in the meantime, travel and social gatherings remain ill-advised, and many Americans are spending the final days of 2020 without the comfort of loved ones.

As he accepted the Republican nomination for president in summer 2016, Donald Trump promised, “We will make America safe again.”“The most basic duty of government is to defend the lives of its citizens,” he said. “Any government that fails to do so is a government unworthy to lead.

In the 2008 comedy Tropic Thunder, Tom Cruise stole scenes by mocking Hollywood’s entitlement. As the cocksure, foulmouthed studio exec Les Grossman, Cruise put on a fat suit, wore heavy prosthetics, and peppered his lines with profanity. When a gang holding his cast hostage demands ransom, he doesn’t bother to listen to the specifics. Instead, he threatens the kidnappers by promising to “rain down an ungodly fucking firestorm.”Cruise’s outburst on the U.K.

Countless writers, with varying degrees of success, have reimagined the life of Jesus Christ. As my colleague Cullen Murphy wrote in a 1986 essay, “It is hard to think of any other figure who, over the years, has been claimed by so many and in so many different ways and for so many different purposes, who yet has never been identified exclusively with any single cause, and who has remained perpetually available for use.

Images from the past two weeks, including a robot assistant in an Indian hospital, Santa in a snow globe in Seattle, an orangutan returned to Indonesia, Fashion Week in Senegal, a snowstorm in the northeastern U.S., a gingerbread town in Norway, a health-care worker in a nativity scene in Italy, and much more.