When someone attacks the messenger rather than the message, they’re usually revealing something.
Friday night in Austin, Texas, the Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, fiercely criticized The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, over a recent report about Trump’s troubling attitude toward the military, which he believes should be loyal to him personally.

We sat in a semicircle
at the strip club, me between
my six male friends, all of us
damp from rain and bathed
in blue light. As dancers dipped
into the laps of my companions,
I rearranged my face, took sips
of whiskey, thought, I’m Tony Soprano.
I felt far from everyone,
not man enough to drool, not naked
enough to dance. Having assumed
myself a coolly unbothered woman,
I was surprised my friends wouldn’t
look me in the eye.

The trees have a job: to blush their leaves orange or red and then drop them to the lawns and pavements below. If you are one of the many millions of Americans who own their homes, you may soon be faced with the question of what to do with all that foliage. Maybe you will rake your leaves into piles. Maybe you will let them decay into the ground. And maybe—just maybe—you will risk your hard-earned reputation by gusting them away with a leaf blower.

If you’re interested in modern beauty standards, the social value of femininity, and the fetishization of mothers in American culture, Hulu’s recent reality show The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is a rich, chaotic product. I watched the entire series in a couple of days, gasping and Googling, shriveling inwardly every time I caught a glimpse of my haggard self in the mirror compared with these lustrous, bronzed, cosmetically enhanced women.

Barack Obama was barely three minutes into his speech inside a Madison, Wisconsin, arena on Tuesday when he delivered his call to action—“I am asking you to vote”—a plea so eagerly anticipated by the thousands in attendance that they erupted in cheers before he could finish the line.
Kamala Harris’s campaign had dispatched its most valuable surrogate to Wisconsin’s heavily Democratic capital on the swing state’s first day of early voting, with just two weeks to go until the election.

The biggest story in months about media and democracy wasn’t an article—it was the absence of one. The news broke yesterday afternoon: For the first time in almost 50 years, The Washington Post would not be endorsing a presidential candidate. In fact, it would be ending the practice altogether. An endorsement—of Kamala Harris—had been drafted by “editorial page staffers,” a Post article reported, but then came the decision not to publish it.

Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings or watch full episodes here.
With Election Day just over a week away, Kamala Harris is calling Donald Trump a fascist following reports revealing the former president’s deepening dictatorial obsession, including that he expressed admiration for the way that Hitler ran his army.

It took 25 days, but in the early hours today, Israel responded to Iran’s salvo of missiles earlier this month. The operation, named “Days of Repentance,” was the most significant attack on Iran by any country since the 1980s. The Iranian regime’s years of waging a shadow war on Israel have finally brought the violence home, something the regime had repeatedly promised its people it would avoid.
The attacks were significant, and likely to cause considerable damage.

Her father is back in the ER. His second time this month. The first was a short stay. After an overnight in emergency and two days in the ward, he was discharged. The doctors told her (and she translated) that her father’s abdominal pains were caused by an acute GI infection, possibly from an earlier viral infection, a diet change, or age. The second time is for the same problem, but much worse. The pain and infection returned tenfold. The emergency doctor is perplexed.