Welcome to “The Stakes,” where we’re coming to you from a terribly familiar position. Over the summer, we found ourselves on something of an editorial hamster wheel on more than one occasion, as we struggled to put together a weekly magazine show that couldn’t keep up with the sheer volume of shooting deaths in this country. We open our show this week by parsing that tension as best we can. Coming up: - Our political writer Jaime Fuller speaks with Carlos Watson, host of a new show on PBS called The Contenders: 16 for ’16, about the presidential campaigns in history that can help put even this shit show into context. - Podcast producer Mukta Mohan talks to Adi Rajkovic, one of the young artists featured in a virtual reality protest art show MTV is curating as part of its Elect This campaign. - Courtney Martin, author of a new book called The New Better Off: Reinventing the American Dream, tells MTV Founders’s deputy editor Julie Zeilinger what that reinvention looks like. - We end our time together down in Tennessee, with a piece by MTV News’s resident poet/journalist Marcus Ellsworth.