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Early voting begins in Texas on Monday, and the outcome of the Senate race could determine which party controls the chamber.

For the first time in her career, Cynthia Short let a folder of crime-scene photographs lie untouched on the corner of her desk, because she couldn’t bring herself to look at them. Short had been a criminal-defense attorney in Kansas City, Missouri, for 12 years, and on the payroll of the Missouri State Public Defender’s Office for the past decade. She had spent much of that time immersed in graphic records of the worst human conduct. Even so, the case of Richard DeLong had shocked her.

Several winters ago, a few weeks before Christmas, I went to confession. The parish close to work was hosting a reconciliation service, meant to prepare the faithful to celebrate the birth of Christ. A dozen or so priests were scattered across the cathedral. Penitents lined the aisles. Whispers of contrition and pardon filled the air.
The Catholic Church counsels believers to seek confession regularly—at the very least, once a year. I hadn’t been back in a few.

Elon Musk revealed, in a dramatic demonstration on Thursday night at SpaceX’s rocket-testing facility near Waco, Texas, a new “flying” Tesla Roadster prototype. The car hung upside down on a curved track, then performed aerial stunts—including jumping over a Tesla semi, Evel Knievel–style—using air-powered thrusters designed in collaboration with SpaceX. The demo was impressive despite Musk’s awkward manner, which in the context of a supposed literal flying car came off as nerdy charm.

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There’s a lot to love about fall: the changing leaves, the crisp air, the return of cozy sweaters, and, of course, pumpkin-spice everything. As the days grow shorter and the weather cools, the season offers plenty of reasons to slow down and indulge in life’s little comforts.

For the past 24 hours, Silicon Valley has been obsessed with a 26,000-word blog post by the AI researcher Nick Cammarata. The document has been called the “the most important essay,” “the most important result,” and “the single best piece of news” of the year, or in the history of AI research—or, perhaps, ever. Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman lauded it.

The world will little note, nor long remember, the Katie Zacharia era. Indeed, the tenure of the second White House press secretary of Donald Trump’s second term, which ended after five days and a single, 14-minute press conference, is already receding into memory.
Yet what matters more than her press-secretarial contributions, or the ideas she stood for, is the period Zacharia represents: the Trump administration’s reversion to the hapless chaos of the president’s first term.

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The botched execution of Christa Pike, who survived two injections of what was intended to be a lethal dose of pentobarbital on September 30, is—horrifically—not unique: As my colleague Elizabeth Bruenig wrote, it wasn’t even the first botched execution in Tennessee this year.

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Romantasy—the category of fiction in which the supernaturally gifted soar on the wings of love, and also sometimes of dragons—is incredibly successful. Its reigning queen, Sarah J. Maas, has sold about 75 million copies of her novels, my colleague Honor Jones reported in a recent Atlantic essay.