COVID-19 has produced some of the greatest social convulsions in living memory. For our Summer 2020 issue titled Work, Politics, and the Plague, we asked writers to help us think through what’s been going on, as well as what’s in store for the election. What has this pandemic changed? What has it revealed, or clarified? What assumptions do we need to revisit, and where could all of this be heading? The short essays in our special coronavirus section offer some ways to orient our political thinking in disorienting times.