The Atlantic

Well, that was more like it. Sunday night’s Game of Thrones finale, “The Winds of Winter,” was the best episode of the season—the best, perhaps, in a few seasons. It was packed full of major developments—bye, bye, Baelor; hello, Dany’s fleet—but still found the time for some quieter moments, such as Tyrion’s touching acceptance of the role of Hand of the Queen. I was out of town last week and thus unable to take my usual seat at our Game of Thrones roundtable. But I did have some closing thoughts about what the episode—and season six in general—told us about how the show has evolved.

Last season, viewers got a limited taste—principally in the storylines in the North—of how the show would be different once showrunners Benioff and Weiss ran out of material from George R.R. Martin’s novels and had to set out on their own. But it was this season in which that exception truly became the norm. Though Martin long ago supplied Benioff and Weiss with a general narrative blueprint of the major arcs of the story, they can no longer rely on the books scene by scene. Game of Thrones is truly their show now. And thanks to changes in pacing, character development, and plot streamlining, it’s also a markedly different show from the one we watched in seasons one through four—for the worse and, to some degree, for the better.

Prompted by Emma Green’s note on the Supreme Court case Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt, for which a group of lawyers filed a document openly describing their abortions, readers share their own stories in an ongoing collection edited by Chris Bodenner. We are posting a wide range of experiences—from pro-choice and pro-life readers, women and men alike—so if you have an experience not represented so far, please send us a note: hello@theatlantic.com.

It’s 2020, four years from now. The campaign is under way to succeed the president, who is retiring after a single wretched term. Voters are angrier than ever—at politicians, at compromisers, at the establishment. Congress and the White House seem incapable of working together on anything, even when their interests align. With lawmaking at a standstill, the president’s use of executive orders and regulatory discretion has reached a level that Congress views as dictatorial—not that Congress can do anything about it, except file lawsuits that the divided Supreme Court, its three vacancies unfilled, has been unable to resolve.

On Capitol Hill, Speaker Paul Ryan resigned after proving unable to pass a budget, or much else. The House burned through two more speakers and one “acting” speaker, a job invented following four speakerless months. The Senate, meanwhile, is tied in knots by wannabe presidents and aspiring talk-show hosts, who use the chamber as a social-media platform to build their brands by obstructing—well, everything. The Defense Department is among hundreds of agencies that have not been reauthorized, the government has shut down three times, and, yes, it finally happened: The United States briefly defaulted on the national debt, precipitating a market collapse and an economic downturn. No one wanted that outcome, but no one was able to prevent it.

When Jon Stewart announced he was leaving The Daily Show last year, many fans lobbied for Jessica Williams to replace him, pushing one of the show’s standout performers into a limelight she deemed herself not quite ready for. “Thank you, but I am extremely under-qualified for the job!” Williams tweeted. Comedy Central eventually picked Trevor Noah for the gig, and in the following months, Williams’s star has only risen higher. It’s no huge surprise, then, that on Wednesday she told Entertainment Weekly she was moving on from The Daily Show to develop her own scripted series for Comedy Central. It’s great news for Williams, but a huge loss for the show she’s leaving behind.

The discussion over Williams becoming The Daily Show host in 2015 turned into a minor political maelstrom. Williams publicly pushed back against the idea that she had “impostor syndrome,” as suggested by one writer, for calling herself “under-qualified” and pointing to her young age (25 at the time) as a reason for her disinterest in the position. Indeed, there are a thousand reasons to not want the daily grind of a TV hosting gig, and the heightened scrutiny and criticism Noah has received in his year on the job is among them. But as Williams’s popularity and talents have grown, and as The Daily Show has struggled to retain its critical cachet after Stewart’s departure, it’s been hard not to mourn a different outcome in which Williams took the host job and steered the series in a fresher, more relevant direction.

NEWS BRIEF Wednesday’s energy summit in Ottawa began awkwardly enough when Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau rather clumsily tried to finagle a three-way handshake with United States President Barack Obama and President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico. It only got more awkward when reporters began peppering the North American leaders with questions about Donald Trump.

All three men have harshly criticized the presumptive Republican nominee over the last several months in their home countries. Peña Nieto has compared him to Hitler and Mussolini, Trudeau has said he practices the politics of fear and division, and Obama has denounced his rhetoric on immigration, national security, and just about everything else over the course of the presidential campaign.

Britain’s Brexit vote has shocked the political elites of both the U.S. and Europe. The vote wasn’t just about the EU; in fact, polls before the referendum consistently showed that Europe wasn’t top on voters’ lists of concerns. But on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, large numbers of people feel that the fundamental contracts of capitalism and democracy have been broken. In a capitalist economy, citizens tolerate rich people if they share in the wealth, and in a democracy, they give their consent to be governed if those governing do so in their interest. The Brexit vote was an opportunity for people to tell elites that both promises have been broken. The most effective line of the Leave campaign was “take back control.” It is also Donald Trump’s line.

Before the 1964 Presidential election, Governor George Romney was part of an effort to stop Senator Barry Goldwater from winning the Republican Party’s nomination.

Today, his son Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor and 2012 nominee for the presidency, has emerged as a leading establishment critic of Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee. On Wednesday, he reiterated that he will not vote Trump due to defects in Trump’s character and a belief that Trump is destroying the GOP’s future with women, Hispanics, African Americans, Asian Americans, and millenials. Neither will Romney vote for Hillary Clinton.

“It’s a matter of personal conscience,” he said. “I can’t vote for either of those two people.” He suggested that he would write in his wife’s name––she would be “an ideal president,” he said––or he would cast his ballot for a third-party candidate.

Just as fish presumably don’t know they’re wet, many English speakers don’t know that the way their language works is just one of endless ways it could have come out. It’s easy to think that what one’s native language puts words to, and how, reflects the fundamentals of reality.

But languages are strikingly different in the level of detail they require a speaker to provide in order to put a sentence together. In English, for example, here’s a simple sentence that comes to my mind for rather specific reasons related to having small children: “The father said ‘Come here!’” This statement specifies that there is a father, that he conducted the action of speaking in the past, and that he indicated the child should approach him at the location “here.” What else would a language need to do?

American undergraduates are flocking to business programs, and finding plenty of entry-level opportunities. But when businesses go hunting for CEOs or managers, “they will say, a couple of decades out, that I’m looking for a liberal arts grad,” said Judy Samuelson, executive director of the Aspen Institute’s Business and Society Program.

That presents a growing challenge to colleges and universities. Students are clamoring for degrees that will help them secure jobs in a shifting economy, but to succeed in the long term, they’ll require an education that allows them to grow, adapt, and contribute as citizens—and to build successful careers. And it’s why many schools are shaking up their curricula to ensure that undergraduate business majors receive something they may not even know they need—a rigorous liberal-arts education.

NEWS BRIEF There are two simple ways to cut through the bluster and the spin to see how a presidential campaign is really feeling about its prospects at any given moment: You can follow the money, and you can follow the plane.

Is a candidate retrenching by spending more time and ad dollars in states their party has won in the past and must hold onto in November? Or is he or she being more aggressive—and aspirational—by trying to expand the map and add states that are more difficult, and potentially less crucial, to capture the White House?

On Wednesday, the Hillary Clinton campaign offered up a clue to its level of confidence when it announced that it had rescheduled a joint event with President Obama—the first since he endorsed his former secretary of state—for July 5. The rally was originally scheduled for mid-June, but was canceled following the Orlando shooting. What was notable about the announcement, however, is that the Clinton-Obama road show is launching in a different state than the campaign first planned. The postponed rally was to occur in Wisconsin, a state that Democrats haven’t lost in a presidential year since 1984 but which had been seen as a potential pickup for Donald Trump. Clinton and Obama will instead appear in North Carolina, which the president won narrowly in 2008 but lost four years ago.