Roger Stone’s best trick was always his upper-class-twit wardrobe. He seemed such a farcical character, such a Klaxon-alarm-from-a-mile-away goofball—who could take him seriously?Aldrich Ames, Robert Hanssen: They had tradecraft. They didn’t troll people on Instagram or blab to reporters. They behaved in the way you would expect of people betraying their country: conscious of the magnitude of their acts, determined to avoid the limelight.

When Doug Jones invokes the civil-rights movement of the early 1960s, he knows the stakes. Forty years before his upset win in a 2017 special election to represent Alabama in the Senate, Jones, a U.S. attorney, prosecuted Klansmen for the Birmingham church bombing—and insisted that the guilty verdict not be seen as the end of the movement’s story.Jones understands why Americans might be cynical about the current civil-rights protests.

The Supreme Court knows how to go out with a bang. On Thursday, the justices closed the (virtual) courthouse doors for the summer after finally releasing two long-awaited rulings on President Trump’s efforts to block the release of his financial information to prosecutors and Congress.

For years, when I was giving talks or discussing my reporting on China’s one-child policy, well-meaning audience members would inevitably ask a question that I had come to expect: “Of course forced abortions and sterilizations are bad,” they would say, “but isn’t the one-child policy good, in some ways? Doesn’t it help lift millions of people out of poverty?”This has always been the Chinese Communist Party’s narrative.

Forget Bernie Kerik, Scooter Libby, Michael Milken—even Sheriff Joe Arpaio. This was the presidential reprieve President Donald Trump’s critics feared most.Trump’s move tonight to commute the sentence of his longtime associate Roger Stone, nearly five months after a federal judge sentenced him to more than three years in prison, was surely the least surprising of his many high-profile acts of executive clemency.