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In 1971, the United States came within a pen stroke of having a functional child-care system. With bipartisan support, Congress passed the Comprehensive Child Development Act—which would have created a publicly funded, state-run program with parent payments on a sliding scale of affordability—but President Richard Nixon vetoed it. Almost exactly 50 years later, the nation once again stands on the precipice of revolutionizing its child-care system.

Donald Trump is trying to hang on as the doddering boss of the Republican Party. Earlier this month, he threatened that his supporters may stay home in 2022 and 2024 unless others in the GOP validate his delusion that he beat Joe Biden.Were the GOP base less easily duped, it would move on, as when George H. W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney lost White House bids. As president, Trump failed to build his border wall or bring home the troops.

Every weekday evening, our editors guide you through the biggest stories of the day, help you discover new ideas, and surprise you with moments of delight. Subscribe to get this delivered to your inbox.The scariest weekend of the year is here. I asked our critic David Sims to select a few movies to get you in the Halloween mood.David’s five picks span the universe of spook to fulfill the needs of wannabe witches, little pumpkins, and hard-core-horror fans alike.

Frances Haugen, a former Facebook data scientist, copied thousands of pages of internal documents and webpages before she left the company. Then she shared those materials with The Wall Street Journal, which began publishing stories about them last month under the heading “The Facebook Files.” Weeks later, she began to parcel the materials out to a consortium of news organizations, including The Atlantic.

With the finish line in sight (if still stubbornly out of reach) for the Democrats’ massive social-programs and economic development bill, the party now faces the challenge of focusing the attention of its key constituencies and the public on what remains in the package, not on what was cut in the exhausting legislative maneuvering.

NAGOYA, Japan—Vegetables, vegetables, vegetables. I am sitting in a cardboard cubicle at a counter inside a ramen shop, rehearsing my order in my head over and over again. My sister is in the next cubicle over—all I can see is the top of her head—and later I will learn that she is doing the exact same thing.

The overarching takeaway from the Facebook Papers is that Facebook knows. The company monitors just about everything, as the whistleblower Frances Haugen revealed by providing 17 news organizations with documents about the social-media company’s internal research and discussions. Facebook and its tech-industry peers employ armies of exceptional research scientists who evaluate how the platform shapes social behavior.