Instead of leaving the office, we pour a round of drinks and dissect the spectacle we just witnessed. Michael Barbaro is joined by Mark Leibovich, chief national correspondent for The New York Times Magazine, and Carolyn Ryan, senior editor for politics at The Times. Michael Grynbaum, a Times media reporter, parses the performance of Lester Holt, the moderator.

Debate night is coming. Tony Schwartz, the man who channeled Donald Trump to write “The Art of the Deal” and has lived to regret it, explains why he is turning his intimate knowledge of how Mr. Trump thinks and behaves into advice for how Hillary Clinton should conduct herself in Monday night’s highly anticipated presidential debate. We also talk about what to expect on Monday with Frank Bruni, a New York Times opinion columnist, and Amy Chozick, a New York Times reporter who has covered Mrs. Clinton for the last two years.

Is deliberate dishonesty an official campaign strategy for Donald J. Trump? We posed that question to two top presidential campaign strategists from both parties: Mike Murphy, who advised Jeb Bush this year and John McCain in 2000, and Paul Begala, a political strategist for Bill Clinton in 1992. We’re also joined by Maggie Haberman, who has covered Mr. Trump and Hillary Clinton for The New York Times.

Long before Hillary Clinton’s pneumonia or Donald J. Trump’s bizarre doctor’s note, there was a history of voters demanding candidates’ medical records. We get some perspective from John Dickerson, a history buff, columnist at Slate and moderator of Moderator of CBS’s “Face the Nation,” and Lawrence K. Altman, a former reporter at The New York Times who was the first to interview candidates about their medical histories.

“Basket of deplorables.” A public roasting at the White House Correspondents Dinner. The Khan family. So many gaffes and stumbles in a presidential race can feel at the time like major turning points. But it often takes months of hindsight to know at which point the whole campaign actually turned. We speak with six Times campaign reporters about the moments — often subtle, often off-camera — that struck them as pivotal in this election.

What just-right combination of factors is required for a country to embrace a woman as its leader for the first time, and was it inevitable that Hillary Clinton, or someone like her, would be the first in America to make it this far? We explore with Claire McCaskill, the senior United States Senator from Missouri, and Gail Collins, a New York Times columnist who has written several books on women’s history.

Whose ads are breaking through this year, and why? We dissect this season’s campaign ads with Wesley Morris, the chief culture critic for The New York Times, and Russ Schriefer, a longtime Republican ad maker who has created some of the most memorable campaign commercials of the past decade.

Donald J. Trump and Anthony D. Weiner have ridden impulsiveness and narcissism to dizzying political highs but have also found that they take a toll, raising doubts about their judgment and fitness for public office. We discuss with Frank Bruni, a columnist and former political reporter at The Times, and Maggie Haberman, a national political reporter.

Does Hillary Clinton deserve 91 percent of the black vote? Is Donald J. Trump even trying with black voters? We discuss with two New York Times journalists who have been covering this election and its racial dynamics: Charles Blow and Yamiche Alcindor. We also hear from Tara Wall, a campaign operative who helped President George W. Bush and Mitt Romney court black voters.

She is a quiet but devoted Methodist. He subscribes to a theology of positive thinking. The two leading presidential candidates have been molded by religion — even if they don’t often talk about it. We hear from Gwenda Blair, the author of “The Trumps”; Burns Strider, Mrs. Clinton’s religious adviser during her first presidential campaign; and Jonathan Martin, a national political correspondent at The Times.