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Who will defend the federal government against itself? Donald Trump’s administration is waging an aggressive campaign against the executive branch as it has long existed.

For most of the past century, the United States’ track record on infectious disease has been quite good. Thanks to major investments in public health, diseases such as smallpox, polio, yellow fever, malaria, measles, rubella, mumps, diphtheria, and tuberculosis have either been obliterated or become vanishingly rare. America “led the charge,” Aniruddha Hazra, an infectious-disease physician at UChicago Medicine, told me.

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
At a moment when just asking questions can feel synonymous with bad-faith arguments or conspiratorial thinking, one of the hardest things to hold on to might be an open mind.

Othello has long been understood as a play about race, love, and jealousy. But it is also a play about soldiers experiencing what we now call post-traumatic stress. In March 1947, Judge Harry Stackell, of the Bronx County Court, thought as much when he sentenced Victor Vigotsky to a relatively brief prison term. Vigotsky, a 23-year-old combat veteran who had returned from the Second World War after fighting for four years in Europe, was convinced that his young wife, Gloria, had been unfaithful.

Twenty years ago, President George W. Bush’s second-term honeymoon was ending, and Social Security was to blame. Voters rebelled against his plan to partially privatize the popular retirement program and, the following year, stripped the GOP of its majorities in Congress. The events of 2005 cemented Social Security’s reputation as the “third rail of American politics.” For the next two decades, Republicans didn’t touch it.
Perhaps Elon Musk wasn’t paying attention.