For anyone who isn’t angling for a job in the Trump administration, “Who won the 2020 presidential election?” should be an easy question. But when I asked Google’s AI Mode—the AI function built into its search bar—about the race earlier today, the bot clammed up.

Modern political history offers few examples of closing arguments that appear more out of touch, self-defeating, or downright bizarre than what Donald Trump has offered his fellow Republicans ahead of next week’s midterm elections. In 1980, when Ronald Reagan told voters to consider Jimmy Carter’s presidency and ask themselves, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?,” it helped turn a tight race into a Reagan landslide.

Sign up for Over/Under, a newsletter on the latest in prediction markets, gambling, and the evolution of everyday risk.
Brazil’s incumbent president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, was reelected on Sunday night. Not everyone saw it coming.
For weeks, many U.S. pundits had been suggesting that he would lose, thanks to the growing power of the South American right and the lingering curse of incumbency.

On October 11, a confidential memo went out to military officers across Ukraine, urging them to brace for a catastrophe. Donald Trump had decided earlier that week to ease U.S. sanctions on Russia and to begin buying its diesel fuel. Based on that shift in White House policy, the memo foresaw another act of American betrayal: the loss of access to the Starlink satellite network, which Ukraine uses to operate its drone fleet.

Last year, the conservative evangelical blogger Samuel Sey published an article on his blog, Slow to Write, defending the Trump administration’s plan for mass deportations from a Christian perspective. “Christian ethics do not denounce deportations,” he wrote. “They demand it.” Born in Ghana and a resident of Canada before he moved to the United States, Sey went on to write that “America doesn’t owe anything to people born outside of the country—including me.

Photographs and videos by Dana Golan
Since the beginning of the Gaza war, a record number of Israelis have left the country. More than 10 percent of the electorate now lives abroad, and the country generally does not allow absentee ballots: Those who want to vote in today’s election, the first since October 7, need to be there in person.
An estimated 67,000 Israeli expats have traveled thousands of miles—and spent thousands of dollars—to return home.

Late last year, Marissa Mayer was struggling with what felt like an impossible task. Her daughter Marielle was turning 10, and Marielle’s teacher wanted three bullet points summarizing what made her special. Mayer—the former chief executive of Yahoo and a pioneer at Google, where she was the first female engineer—likes cracking a hard problem. But she felt overwhelmed by the range and complexity of potential answers.
So Mayer asked her personal A.I. assistant, Dazzle.

For the first time in modern American history, a sitting president is seeking to wield the force of the state to secure an electoral victory for his party.

One of the curiosities of Donald Trump’s enduring (if perhaps weakening) grip on his supporters is how they praise him as someone who “tells it like it is.” Trump’s gatekeepers have similarly declared this to be “the most transparent administration in history,” pointing to, among other things, Trump’s willingness to open his sycophantic Cabinet meetings to live media coverage as proof that nothing is being obscured.