Excerpt: And there, at a workbench, sat Mr. Montgomery.

He was small, frail, bent by osteoporosis enough that “he had a right angle,” Lundy says. But his hands moved across the typewriter before him with unconscious grace, removing screws without looking, adjusting linkages by feel alone.

“Welcome to the crazy house,” Mr. Montgomery said, his standard greeting.

Lundy had planned to stay 20 minutes. He stayed four hours. What captured him was not nostalgia. What captured him was watching Mr. Montgomery work, the old man dismantling a machine while carrying on a conversation, barely glancing at the complexity beneath his fingers.

Excerpt: “We had an hour. There were three options. One, someone signs. Two, we all resign. Three, we call their bluff, don’t do anything and see if they fire us. I recommended Option 3. I’m still thinking we have civil service protections. But someone said if you don’t sign, they could say you’re insubordinate, and that could affect your security clearance, which could affect getting hired for other jobs. I backed off.”

Excerpt: There were early concerns that fare-free travel would heap extra burdens on bus drivers, drawing homeless people or anything-goes behavior. Yet several drivers said that not having to ask passengers for payment or transfers has led to less friction with riders.

It also speeds up travel, they said, because no one was delaying things by rummaging for money. According to the city, on-time arrivals have increased by 13 percent. “There’s less dealing with the fare box and finagling over fares, but it’s definitely been busier,” said Justin Jones, who’s been driving city buses for Iowa City for 15 years, one recent morning just before starting his route.

Excerpt: Earlier this year, the United States deported 252 Venezuelans to El Salvador and paid its government to imprison them, despite clear evidence of human-rights abuses in the country’s prison system and forceful warnings that the men would suffer cruel and unusual treatment. Now two human-rights organizations, Human Rights Watch and the Central America–based Cristosal, have found that all of those men were physically abused.

Excerpt: When a group of Democratic military veterans who serve in Congress released an ad last week urging service members to refuse orders if they are illegal, the Trump administration could have deployed an obvious defense: What are you talking about? We’re not issuing or planning any illegal orders.

Instead, the administration has opted for a rebuttal that is considerably more self-incriminating. President Donald Trump swiftly took to social media to call out these lawmakers for “seditious behavior” that is “punishable by death.” “It is insurrection,” the White House adviser Stephen Miller charged. “It’s a general call for rebellion.”