In the list of campaign promises from Donald Trump, the one about the war in Ukraine stood out for the number of times he repeated it—“I’ll have that thing ended in 24 hours”—and for the undeniable way he failed to deliver. His self-imposed deadline, of course, passed in January, and the president has since admitted that the belligerents proved much harder to reconcile than he had expected. Still he continues to try.

This afternoon, blocks from the White House, a man sneaked up on two West Virginia National Guardsmen and shot them in the head with a handgun. Both soldiers are reportedly in critical condition. A motive has not been determined, but a recent Afghan immigrant named Rahmanullah Lakanwal is in custody, according to CBS News. Early photos of the suspect show a burly, bearded man being wheeled almost naked into an ambulance.

In a recent article for The Atlantic, W. David Marx argued that culture as we know it today is a hoarder’s paradise, a hopelessly cluttered landscape of rubbish. “Everyday life has never contained more stuff—an endless reel of words, ideas, games, songs, videos, memes, outrageous statements, celebrity meltdowns, life hacks, extremely talented animals,” he writes. My 5-year-old’s favorite song is a version of “Golden,” the standout hit from Netflix’s KPop Demon Hunters, meowed by fake cats.

Pay attention to the dates, because the timing matters. Steve Witkoff spoke with Yuri Ushakov, a Russian official, on October 14. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky held a meeting with President Donald Trump in Washington, D.C., on October 17. Trump had been hinting that he would offer to sell Tomahawks, long-range cruise missiles, to the Ukrainian army. But he did not.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy wants us to return to the golden age of air travel, when nobody got into a punching match for reclining a seat into someone else’s lap. He says this golden age starts with us, and he has a whole campaign prepared! I assume it will involve more humane accommodations for travelers—or less harrowing working conditions for the flight attendants charged with both crowd control and safety. Or modernizing air-traffic control to make it safer and more efficient.