Today, somewhere over Saudi Arabia, the co-pilot of an Israel-bound Flydubai Boeing 737 stabbed the other pilot and pitched the nose of the plane toward the desert below. The jet descended 17,000 feet in two minutes, at an acceleration violent enough to make your phone and in-flight snack jump off your tray and be pinned to the ceiling. Other crew members and at least one Israeli passenger broke into the cockpit and subdued the assailant.

The Make America Healthy Again movement has always had a split personality. Many of the movement’s leaders are fervent anti-vaccine activists whose views are at odds with scientific evidence and out of step with most Americans. At the same time, MAHA’s tenets include eating more vegetables and getting enough sleep, which is perfectly reasonable advice; it’s just hard to take seriously from people who, like Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., wax nostalgic about catching measles.

The supersize black Sharpie is what gives it away. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s order to stop awarding tenure to civilian professors at the military academies ends with a huge, jagged signature—an homage, perhaps, to that of the president—the size of two of the paragraphs above. With the same instrument, he also underlined, word by word, two key sentences that are as blunt as the message they are intended to deliver and the mind that conceived them.

Updated at 4:27 p.m. ET on September 30, 2026
“What was your most embarrassing day at work?” is a staple question of internet forums, and the answers tend to converge around the accidental reply-all, the mortifying shared-bathroom incident, or congratulating a colleague on their pregnancy, only to discover the bump was instead the result of a large lunch.

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In this week’s episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with his thoughts about the recent state visit by the Chinese president Xi Jinping to the United States. David discusses President Trump’s embarrassing behavior at the dinner and how he has isolated the United States in its rivalry with China.

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When President Trump returned to office last year, the administration had revenge on the agenda. First, the FBI purged agents who’d been involved in investigations into Trump while he was out of office.

Many of the most beloved robots in pop culture are celebrated precisely because they are so, well, robotic. Think back to Star Trek’s Data or HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that,” HAL intones in a measured baritone. These robots and AI systems sound serious, sober, calm—and, most important, authoritative.
So it’s jarring to look under the hood of the most powerful AI systems, and discover that they sound like petulant teenagers.

Noom, the popular weight-loss app, prompts its users not only to log their meals and exercise but also to gaze at paintings. The “Mindful Art Break” feature includes images of such works as Claude Monet’s Woman With a Parasol—Madame Monet and Her Son and Franz Marc’s The Bewitched Mill, neither of which seems to have anything to do with body fat. Breath work, meditation, and lessons in cognitive-behavioral-therapy techniques are also available on the app.

This past weekend, a deplorable minute-long video appeared on my X feed. In it, the instantly recognizable actor and playwright Wallace Shawn, most famous for his role as Vizzini in the classic 1987 film The Princess Bride, delivers a hateful rant belied by his grandfatherly demeanor and dulcet tones. He says,
The Israelis invaded somebody else’s territory, they took people’s homes, and they did many of the things that the Nazis did to the Jews. You can’t be more evil than what they’re doing.