Over the past week, Donald Trump has been on a fascist romp. At rallies in Colorado and California, he amped up his usual rants, and added a rancid grace note by suggesting that a woman heckler should “get the hell knocked out of her” by her mother after she gets back home.

Not so long ago, dogs were valued primarily for the jobs they performed. They hunted, herded livestock, and guarded property, which required them to have an active prey drive, boundless energy, and a wariness toward strangers. Even a few decades ago, many dogs were expected to guard the house and the people in it. Prey drive kept squirrels off the bird feeders and used up some of that boundless energy.
In just a generation, we humans have abruptly changed the rules on our dogs.

“Cancer,” Susan Sontag observed in Illness as Metaphor, “is a rare and still scandalous subject for poetry; and it seems unimaginable to aestheticize the disease.” Though she wrote this in the late 1970s, her point still stands. When it comes to descriptions of cancer, in real life or in books, many people struggle to stretch beyond the limited range of accepted, often military metaphors. You’re supposed to “battle” cancer, not prettify it.

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In today’s reading list, our editors have compiled a list of stories that explore the legacy and meaning of Columbus Day and Indigenous Peoples’ Day, and some other reads from recent weeks that are worth your time.

A year of conflict in the Middle East has destroyed the foreign-policy approach of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. His strategy was always implausible, but its collapse has led Iran to the brink of its first international war since 1988.
What I like to call the Khamenei Doctrine—those close to him have variously dubbed it “strategic patience” or, more to the point, “no peace, no war”—rests on a duality that has remained constant through Khamenei’s 35 years in power.