Reflecting on a career spent making movies and plays that have featured exploding cats, surprise decapitations, and other inventive acts of destruction, Martin McDonagh let out a rueful laugh. “I don’t think I ever set out to shock,” he told me. “Every single one of them just came out that way.

A few weeks ago, I was on a flight from Washington, D.C., to Charlotte, North Carolina. Amid an airline ecosystem rife with cancellations, delays, and overbookings, I was relieved to find the trip relatively uneventful. The crew was on time, the pilots were accounted for, and the weather was clear—the sky a vast and uninterrupted blanket of blue.

“Deeds, not words,” is the motto of the 22nd Infantry Regiment, a credo that befits a fighting unit that has seen service from the Civil War to Iraq. But wars are won by words as well as deeds, which is one of the reasons why President John F. Kennedy said of Winston Churchill that he “mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.

On October 14, the mutilated body of a blond-haired 12-year-old named Lola was found folded up in a plastic suitcase in the courtyard of her family’s housing project in Paris’s 19th arrondissement. The official cause of Lola’s death was asphyxiation, but investigators also found signs of torture, including cuts on her neck and face, and the numbers 1 and 0 scrawled, inexplicably, on the soles of her feet. She may have been sexually abused.

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.With the midterms less than three weeks away, the “Latino voter” is back in the national spotlight. But Democrats and Republicans alike still don’t seem to understand this crucial—and heterogeneous—group of voters.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

In 1962, the rhythm-and-blues singer and piano player Ray Charles attempted something new, unexpected, and potentially hazardous to his career. For his 17th album, Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, he recorded standards by such titans as Hank Williams and Don Gibson. But instead of pedal steel guitars and fiddles, Charles opted for big-band orchestration and opulent strings. His record label and colleagues at first disapproved of the concept.

The famously logorrheic Steve Bannon finally found a reason to shut up, and it’s going to get him locked up.Bannon, the former éminence grise (and grease) to Donald Trump, was sentenced today to four months in prison for contempt of Congress, stemming from his refusal to testify to the House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection and Trump’s attempts to steal the 2020 presidential election. He’ll also be fined $6,500.

Sam Bankman-Fried, a 30-year-old co-founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, is a $15 billion enigma. As one of the richest and most powerful men in crypto, “SBF” is already a political megadonor in the vein of Peter Thiel and George Soros: He spent millions in support of Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, and was one of the biggest Democratic donors in the country in the lead-up to this year’s midterm elections.

What do you get the contrarian billionaire who has everything? Try a social network to call their own.It certainly seems like the hot new thing. Almost one year ago, Donald Trump, freshly banned from mainstream platforms, ginned up a Twitter clone called Truth Social, which he claimed would constitute the first “non-cancellable” global community. Elon Musk appears to be going through with his acquisition of Twitter.