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Back in early spring, Khristan Yates worked as a quality assurance analyst at a marketing company and loved her job. "I had one of the best jobs of my career," recalls Yates, 31, a resident of Chicago.

Yates, who's a mother of two children, had moved into a bigger apartment just before the pandemic hit because she wanted to give her kids more space. At the time, she felt like she was "at the top of her world."

But as the economic effects of the pandemic hit the marketing industry among others, she lost her job in May.

This was maybe the worst presidential debate in American history.

If this was supposed to be a boxing match, it instead turned into President Trump jumping on the ropes, refusing to come down, the referee trying to coax him off, and Joe Biden standing in the middle of the ring with his gloves on and a confused look on his face.

Trump doesn't play by anyone's rules, even those he's agreed to beforehand. He's prided himself on that. But even by his standards, what Trump did Tuesday night crossed many lines.

Inspired, at least in part, by critic Stanley Kauffman's challenge to gay playwrights to ditch all the hinting and coding and veiled metaphor so as to honestly and openly depict the lives of homosexuals in their work, Mart Crowley's The Boys in the Band debuted off-Broadway in 1968.

The structure was simple and not, to any regular theatergoer, unfamiliar: Over the course of an evening, characters gather, get drunk and turn on one another. Things get said that cannot be unsaid. Secrets are revealed. Curtain, house lights up.

President Trump's hesitation, once again, to denounce white supremacy during Tuesday's presidential debate is drawing quick condemnation from anti-racism activists — as are his unusual comments directed at a white supremacist group called the Proud Boys.

During an exchange on the debate stage, moderator Chris Wallace repeatedly asked Trump if he would condemn white supremacists. Trump initially sidestepped that question, claiming that he mostly sees violence "from the left wing."

No one knows for sure when counting for the 2020 census is set to end.

A day after the Census Bureau fired off a one-sentence tweet announcing Oct. 5 as its new "target date" for ending all efforts to tally the country's residents, a federal judge said she thinks the new schedule is "a violation" of her court order.

Update: The first presidential debate has ended. The next debate, between the vice presidential candidates, is Oct. 7.

President Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden face off Tuesday night in Cleveland, in the first of three presidential debates.

Listen to NPR's live special coverage of the debate on this page, beginning at 9 p.m. ET. Follow updates and fact checks on NPR.org, too.

A version of this story was first published by Gothamist, a news site operated by NPR member station WNYC.

Miami-Dade County says it will not fully comply with a decision by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to lift most restrictions aimed at controlling the spread of coronavirus, saying it's too soon to safely reverse the precautions.

County Mayor Carlos Gimenez, speaking Tuesday with local medical advisors, and in a conference call with White House Coronavirus Task Force Coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx and the nation's leading infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said that the number of COVID-19 cases in the county has declined because it has reopened very slowly.

Updated at 4:47 p.m. ET

An attorney for former national security adviser Michael Flynn said she briefed President Trump and a lawyer working for him on the status of Flynn's criminal case in the past two weeks, according to statements in court on Tuesday.

The lawyer, Sidney Powell, initially told the judge she was wary of disclosing the contact because of so-called executive privilege, even though she does not work for Trump or the White House.

Tucker Carlson appears to be made of Teflon. Fox News' top-rated host has been repeatedly accused of anti-immigrant and racist comments, which have cost his political opinion show many of its major advertisers. Yet Carlson endures in his prime-time slot.

For the NHL, the bubble experiment paid off.

On Monday night, the Tampa Bay Lightning beat the Dallas Stars 2-0 to win the Stanley Cup.

The NHL carried out more than 33,000 coronavirus tests over the course of nine weeks — and says none of them have come back positive as of Sept. 26. The league is expected to release a final report soon.

For the Aldabaans, a Syrian refugee family, the path to the American Dream has begun with mortgage on a house in suburban Connecticut — one with a grassy backyard and room for bikes and birds.

Adeebah and Ibrahim, parents of five school-aged children, work while their kids — who now speak English — attend school. The oldest two, Naji, 19, and Ammal, 18, are seniors in high school and making plans for college.

Their travels to this reality, though, have not been easy ones.