Editor’s note: this is the full PW members’ edition, featuring your weekly horoscopes, the Create feature, and more.

Dear Friend and Reader:

With so much going on in the news that stirs up fear, trauma and a sense of powerlessness, it’s especially gratifying and surprising when something actually goes right: on Tuesday, the citizens of Alabama voted in a special election to put Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate Doug Jones into the seat vacated by current U.S. Secretary of State Jeff Sessions. The loser? Republican Roy Moore: a man who has been accused by several women of harassing them — and in some cases sexually assaulting them — when they were only teenagers and he was a District Attorney.

Doug Jones and his wife Louise celebrate his win Tuesday night in Alabama. Photo by Dina Litovsky / Redux for The New Yorker.

What does it say about us as a society that most people seemed to assume Moore would win despite the allegations, which come on top of his well-known history of racism, homophobia, misogyny and extremism?

For one, it’s a barometer of the political gaslighting spearheaded by Trump. Even though we’ve seen famous, powerful men dropping like flies from their positions of status for the last couple months, the Pussy-Grabber-in-Chief remains in office, spouting irrational tirades via Twitter as though the planet itself depends on it.

If Trump seems untouchable regarding the sexual assault accusations he faces, why wouldn’t a man he publicly endorsed (at the urging of Stephen Bannon) prove the same? Especially in a state where, up until 2003, a 14-year-old child could get married with the consent of the parents.

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Dear Friend and Reader:

I’m on horoscope-writing duty today, so I only have time for a brief hello — though I want to check in and share a few thoughts. First, though, welcome or welcome back to the many people who are responding to our membership drive. If you’re a new or returning subscriber — thank you SO much for actively participating and getting the benefits of what we do.

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NGC100, a barred spiral galaxy with some similar properties to the Milky Way, our home galaxy. The Milky Way has many more spirals, however, and probably looks something like this.

Dear Friend and Reader:

If you’ve been following the news, you’ve probably noticed things getting exponentially more insane by the day. Everything seems to be out of control. And if you follow astrology, you may be wondering what the holy heck is going on. I’m here with some information for you.

We’re about to experience what may be the most interesting Mercury retrograde I’ve ever seen. I’ve seen a few, and studied them all. There’s always some interesting twist, though the one that spans from Sunday, Dec. 3 through Friday, Dec. 22 has many unusual properties. This retrograde process has the distinction of being the fanfare connected to Saturn’s ingress into Capricorn, a sign that it rules.

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Grace Within Dance. Illustrations by Lucinda Abra.

Dear Friend and Reader:

(And every time that wheel goes ’round, you’re bound to cover just a little more ground.) Last month at this time, I introduced the idea that late 2017 through 2018 brings a new era astrologically. While things are constantly changing in the sky (no two days are alike, and one day to the next can be distinctly different), what happens over the next year or so happens only rarely. This is when a series of slow-moving planets change signs around the same time.

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“Swarm” by Charlie Lemay.

Dear Friend and Reader:

When I went onto the Daily News website and saw a photo of Al Franken groping Leeann Tweeden, wearing a big grin on his face, first I felt disgusted, then I thought: the emotional plague.

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Editor’s note: this is the full PW members’ edition, featuring your weekly horoscopes, the Create feature, and more.

Dear Friend and Reader:

I wrote today’s column on Wednesday aware of a curious mix of emotions, and maybe you can relate: buoyed by some of this week’s Election Day results; numbed and exhausted by news of yet another preventable mass shooting here in the U.S. But let’s consider some of Tuesday’s good news for a moment, since it represents a direct response to everything that has unfolded in the wake of You-Know-Who’s election to the Presidency one year ago:

Danica Roem, center, is greeted by supporters as she prepares to give her victory speech on Tuesday. Roem is the first openly transgender state legislator to be seated in U.S. history. Although she discussed her gender identity, her core platform issues included jobs, schools and traffic congestion. Photo by Jahi Chikwendiu / The Washington Post.

Democratic candidates for governor in both New Jersey and Virginia beat out their Republican rivals (remember Chris Christie?), and Dems also won control of the Virginia General Assembly, in a direct backlash to the Trump Effect.

And New York City’s progressive mayor, who’d campaigned for Bernie Sanders — Bill de Blasio — handily won a second term. Mainers defied the state’s bully of a governor to overwhelmingly approve expanding Medicare for low-income adults (of course, Gov. LePage now says he won’t enact the will of the people).

And in Philadelphia, civil rights lawyer Larry Krasner — a longtime opponent of capital punishment who opposes police stop-and-frisk policies, and who has represented protesters with Black Lives Matter, ACT UP, Occupy Philadelphia and other progressive groups — has been elected District Attorney of the City of Brotherly Love.

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Dear Friend and Reader:

News got out last Friday night that the Special Counsel’s office would be making arrests Monday morning in the matter of the Trump campaign’s collaboration with the Kremlin to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election. When we learned Monday morning that Paul Manafort, the former campaign chairman, and his deputy Rick Gates, had turned themselves in to the federal district court, I knew that was the start of something big.

After enduring Donald Trump’s antics for two years, his lies and brazenly criminal conduct and, worst, his obnoxious and swaggering narcissism, finally something had actually happened in response. Two top campaign officials were charged with a long list of financial crimes and conspiracy, most of which involved relationships to Russia and Ukraine.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump gives a thumbs up as his campaign manager Paul Manafort and daughter Ivanka look on during Trump’s walk-through at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, in July, 2016. Photo by Rick Wilking.

While Trump was busy tweeting that Manafort’s and Gates’ 12-count indictments did not directly involve the campaign, news broke that a third defendant, George Papadopoulos, age 30, who was a “foreign policy advisor” during the campaign, had already entered a guilty plea and had been cooperating with prosecutors since July. That was the more interesting news: that the efforts of Robert Mueller III, the Special Counsel, had already flipped a key witness and obtained a conviction.

In what must have been the most stealth arrest in history, FBI agents working for Mueller’s office picked up Papadopoulos at Dulles International Airport on July 27 and made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. As a young man of 30, he had nothing to lose and only to gain by working with prosecutors.

He pleaded guilty to one count of lying to an FBI agent (which happened just a week after the inauguration), with no jail time recommended. He earned that privilege.

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Dear Friend and Reader:

So, it’s been a year since we heard, and experienced, the fell news about the supposed election of an insane person to the United States presidency. And as that year has gone on, day by day, the news in the public sphere has been of disaster and disorder, injury and insult, seemingly with no bounds and to no end.

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