Last weekend, Chaya Raichik, the popular right-wing influencer who goes by Libs of TikTok, made an ominous claim to her nearly 5 million followers on X. “In Minnesota, the USPS offices are inside mosques,” she wrote. “The people who handle mail-in ballots.. What are we doing America.” She reshared a 28-minute-long video of a man circling a brick building in Plymouth, Minnesota, and accosting postal workers inside. “It’s the Islamification of the United States,” the man says.

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Tuesday’s midterm results could help determine what President Trump’s remaining two years in office will look like. On Washington Week With The Atlantic, panelists joined to discuss this and more.

Inside a podcast studio at Turning Point USA’s headquarters last month, a former witch sat in a pink velvet armchair, telling Alex Clark about the demon that stalked her house. Even though this self-described witch, known on TikTok as @yourspiritualbigsis, had only ever used her powers for good, she believed that practicing sorcery had made her vulnerable to satanic forces.

In Washington, D.C., voters are thinking more than they usually would about ducks. The most contentious question on the ballot in the nation’s capital this midterm-election cycle is a referendum on foie gras, the extra-fatty liver delicacy made by overfeeding ducks (and sometimes geese) through a tube stuck down their esophagus. Selling foie gras has been banned in New York City, Pittsburgh, California, India, and Brazil; Target won’t stock it. On Tuesday, D.C.

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Last night, hackers stole approximately $6.3 billion from Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange. The whole thing reportedly took about 20 minutes. It was the biggest theft in the history of the sector, and also probably the biggest financial heist of all time, topping the $1.

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Many a heavy-handed metaphor has been constructed on the claim that Washington, D.C., is built on a swamp. This hoary cliché is also, for the most part, untrue—but the neighborhood Foggy Bottom, home to the State Department, really is former marshland.
This is perhaps fitting.

The film Josephine opens with one of the most upsetting sequences in any movie this year. In it, the titular 8-year-old girl accidentally witnesses a woman being raped at a park near her home.

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AI hacking swarms are poking holes across the internet at such a rate that some cybersecurity professionals have dubbed this month “Black October.” The AI-cybersecurity professional Alex Stamos argues that it’s time to be proactive rather than reactive, and that might mean rewriting the code for the internet in newer programming languages that could make all of our online systems and personal information safer.

Weak scholarship was once easy to spot at a glance: The signs included bad writing, a lack of relevant citations, and little engagement with previous scholarship, such as a paper that promised a “novel” conceptual framework without acknowledging the many other papers making similar claims. As an associate editor of a bioethics journal, I’d make a quick “desk reject” decision and not send these articles for peer review, which effectively killed any hope of publication.