Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings or watch full episodes here.  
With a month left until the presidential election, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have turned to issues of foreign policy on the campaign trail as tensions in the Middle East rise.

Donald Trump and J. D. Vance support a national ban on abortion. They are just calling it something else.
Since the justices Trump appointed to the Supreme Court provided the conservative majority necessary to overturn the constitutional right to an abortion, women in Republican-controlled states have been forced to flee their homes in order to receive lifesaving care. Some women have died or were treated only at the brink of death.

The United States is trapped in a cycle of disasters bigger than the ones our systems were built for. Before Hurricane Helene made landfall late last month, FEMA was already running short on funds; now, Alejandro Mayorkas, the Homeland Security secretary, told reporters on Wednesday, if another hurricane hits, it will run out altogether.

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.
This time last year, I revisited an 1862 Atlantic article in which Henry David Thoreau argued that autumn wasn’t getting enough attention. At the time, I noted that fall didn’t exactly seem to be slipping from public consciousness—a trip to Starbucks makes that clear enough.

The first person who taught me something about death and defiance was the mother of a family friend, an older woman who had moved from Punjab to the United States to be closer to her son. I remember her as delicate and draped always in pastel salwar kameezes. After she was diagnosed with breast cancer, which moved quickly to claim her bones and her brain, her desire to return to Punjab intensified.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
In our scattered social-media age, a strange little problem has emerged: It is hard to figure out how to invite people to a party. A slew of digital tools is available—Paperless Post, Instagram stories, Partiful, a simple group text—that should theoretically make it easier to reach people.

President Joe Biden’s actions over many months suggest that Israel can determine when and where the United States goes to war in the Middle East. That is unacceptable, and the next American president must change this dynamic.
In one framing, the past 12 months have witnessed a remarkable display of America’s might and resolve in the Middle East—especially relative to our principal adversary in the region, Iran.

This is Atlantic Intelligence, a newsletter in which our writers help you wrap your mind around artificial intelligence and a new machine age. Sign up here.
Shortly after Facebook became popular, the company launched an ad network that would allow businesses to gather data on people and target them with marketing. So many issues with the web’s social-media era stemmed from this original sin. It was from this technology that Facebook, now Meta, would make its fortune and become dominant.