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This is the time for closing arguments from Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. But Trump’s closing argument is not a closing argument at all: It’s an invitation. He and his campaign are acting in hopes of provoking Harris, pushing her to muddle her final message.

Elon Musk didn’t just get a social network—he got a political weapon.
It’s easy to forget that Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter was so rash and ill-advised that the centibillionaire actually tried to back out of it. Only after he was sued and forced into legal discovery did Musk go through with the acquisition, which has been a financial disaster. He’s alienated advertisers and turned the app, now called X, into his personal playground, where he’s the perpetual main character.

(for Jan)
The mind is a prison, portcullis-
hidden, surrounded by a moat. Rituals
inside designed for correction.
The dangerous belong in the dungeon. The year
my father died, I went to the mind.
The year after, I went about my business.
My marriage existed. We painted
the house, raised the child inside it, changed
the path of the rose trellis
to avoid the lemon tree. Survived.
For the rest of my life, I travelled
across the earth. I brought to the mountain
what belonged to the mountain.

The latest salvo in the decades-long conflict between Iran and Israel lit up the predawn sky over Tehran on Saturday. Israeli aircraft encountered little resistance as they struck military targets in retaliation for an Iranian attack earlier this month. Although Iran appeared to downplay its impact, the strike was Israel’s largest ever against the Islamic Republic.

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.
The phrase election integrity sounds noble on its face. But in recent years, election deniers have used it to lay the groundwork for challenging the results of the 2024 election.

The World Series is the most important thing that can happen to a baseball player, and it is happening now to a bunch of them. You may have noticed that many have been conspicuously chewing things the entire time, including Yankees left fielder Alex Verdugo, who was blowing a bubble while misplaying a ball in the very first inning of Game 1.
The constant chewing is one of the weird things about baseball. Casual viewers respond to it by saying, “That’s weird.

The writer Gary Indiana, who died last week at the age of 74, wrote about his obsessions with the calculated grace of a man who found them slightly embarrassing.

The Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov was a zealous defender of all human rights, but there was one he spoke about as a first among equals: the right to emigrate. This was, he wrote, “an essential condition of spiritual freedom.” The power to vote with your feet, to exit if you so choose, gave the individual a veto over the state.

Sunday was supposed to be one of the greatest days of Dwyane Wade’s life. Back in January, Pat Riley, the longtime president of the Miami Heat, announced the team’s plans to honor Wade with a statue, and now it was finally to be unveiled. This would not be like the comically small statue of Philadelphia 76ers legend Allen Iverson that had been erected outside that team’s training complex in April.