Aloha, habari za jioni, and welcome back to the Sunday edition of The Best & The Brightest, coming at you tonight per usual from Gotham City, where the Impolitic HQ hi-fi has been pumping out The Stranger, 52nd Street, and Glass Houses pretty much nonstop since Thursday night, when I was lucky enough to be among the nearly 19,000 fans to witness the 104th and final show of William Martin Joel’s epic, decade-long monthly residency (and his 150th show overall) at Madison Square Garden.

I’ll freely admit that, though I liked him fine, Billy wasn’t hard or loud or novel enough to be in my musical strike zone when I was coming up. But I’ll also say that, at this point, the guy is a definitive New York artist and a bona fide national treasure—and he absolutely stuck the landing the other night. And while the MSG residency is over, Billy’s not retiring; he’s got a handful of stadium gigs across the country this fall, and if you have a chance to catch one, here’s my advice: do it. You’ll thank me later.

By sheer coincidence, Billy’s grand finale at MSG took place four weeks to the day after a rather less bravura performance, on an even bigger stage, with far greater consequences: the debate debacle that triggered a cascading series of aftershocks that ultimately caused President Biden to exit the presidential election last Sunday and hand the baton to his understudy, Kamala Harris, to run the rest of the race against Donald Trump. With Democrats suddenly, deliriously reveling in their party’s rapid-fire and turmoil-free coalescence around the V.P.—and the unexpected outbreak of Momala Mania that came with it—tonight’s column turns away from the eye-popping, jaw-dropping, head-snapping past four weeks and looks ahead to the next four: specifically, to the pressing questions and titanic challenges facing Team K between now and the end of the Democratic convention on August 22.

But first…

🎧 Essential listening: In the wake of Biden’s stunning announcement that he was standing down, we scrambled the jets at Impolitic With John Heilemann and secured a pair of world-class guests to make sense of the decision and tease out its political implications: presidential historian Michael Beschloss and CBS News’s chief election and campaign correspondent, Robert Costa. If you haven’t already, you’re gonna want to listen here or here.

Then, in our Friday episode, we went deep on Kamala’s moment (including, yes, the 🥥 craze) with civil rights leader and former N.Y.C. mayoral candidate Maya Wiley, and took the measure of Biden’s decision to bow out and his Oval Office address with Tim Ryan, the former 10-term Ohio congressman, 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, and 2022 Buckeye State Senate candidate (where he overperformed but fell short in his underfunded race against J.D. Vance). Check out that one out here or here—I’ve heard on the grapevine that Charli XCX thinks this episode, too, is brat.

🤯 Meet the new Trump, same as the old Trump: The former president held two campaign rallies last week—the first in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Thursday, and the second in St. Cloud, Minnesota, on Saturday—in which he made it abundantly clear that his brush with death in Pennsylvania two weeks ago hasn’t...