Aloha, labvakar, and welcome back to The Best & The Brightest: Impolitic, coming at you tonight as usual from Gotham City, where I spent the entirety of the long July Fourth holiday weekend not resting, not recreating, and certainly not staycationing—though when it comes to self-medicating, I’ll respectfully decline to comment—but instead engaged more or less 24/7 in the conversation that has consumed the political world for the past ten days across countless platforms yet focused on a single topic: Joe Biden’s survival as the Democratic nominee for president of the United States. Which is, not surprisingly, the subject of this week’s column, which takes the form of an extended colloquy with Puck’s irreplaceable, irrepressible, and occasionally irascible grand poobah, Jon Kelly.

But first…

🎧 Essential listening from the podcast prefecture: Last week on Impolitic With John Heilemann we dropped a pair of episodes worth paddling back for. On Tuesday, I was joined by political savants extraordinaire David Axelrod and Mike Murphy to discuss the fallout from the Biden debate debacle, from the incipient movement among Democrats to prod the president with enough force (but not so much that he’d bridle) to induce him to bow out of the race of his own volition to what might follow if he did. And on Friday, I sat down with legendary journalist, Yale-trained lawyer, and prolific author Steven Brill for a talk about the Supreme Court’s landmark decision on presidential immunity, as well as a deep dive into his new book, The Death of Truth, about how social media and the fake news ecosystem it has spawned is destroying, well, pretty much everything that matters. You can find both episodes—and, if you please, subscribe to the pod—here or here or here.