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A couple of days ago, the account u/whitehouse posted on Reddit for the first time. Since it kicked things off with a photo of President Joe Biden leading a briefing on Hurricane Milton and Hurricane Helene, the account has appeared on various pages related to the storms.

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Hurricane Milton’s wind and rain lashed Florida overnight—flooding streets, spawning tornadoes, and sending sheets of a fiberglass stadium roof billowing like tissue paper. As they did just weeks before, people in the Southeast have cycled through another round of evacuations, storm surges, and waking up to survey the damage.

Lore Segal, who died on Monday, spent the last four months of her life looking out the window. Her world had been shrinking for some time, as a hip replacement, a pacemaker, deteriorating vision, and other encroachments of old age had made it difficult to leave her New York City apartment, even with the aid of the walker she referred to as “my chariot.” But now, after a minor heart attack in June, she was confined to a hospital bed at home.

As the Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, veers into open xenophobia, Vice President Kamala Harris faces a crucial decision about how to respond when she appears today on Univision, the giant Spanish-language television network. Trump’s attacks on immigrants in the past few weeks have grown both sweeping and vitriolic: He is blaming migrants for a lengthening list of problems, even as he describes them in more dehumanizing and openly racist language.

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Recently, I was rereading Livy’s History of Rome (I am obligated, contractually, to write sentences like this), in order to better understand the story of Cincinnatus, the soldier and statesman who desired only to look after his farm.

Updated at 9:27 p.m. on October 9, 2024
After several days of whirling across the Gulf of Mexico, blowing at up to 180 miles per hour, Hurricane Milton made landfall on Florida’s Gulf Coast tonight as the terrible embodiment of a historically destructive season. Milton inflated at a near-record pace, growing from a Category 1 storm into a Category 5 behemoth in half a day, to become one of the most intense hurricanes in recorded history.

Watching a film in a theater, free of smartphones, sunlight, and other distractions, can be a hypnotic experience. When the lights go down and the smell of popcorn fills your nose; when the sound roars from the back and an imagined universe is literally projected before you; when multiple sensory inputs braid themselves together to create a potent whole, you might lose yourself in the best possible way.

Last week, Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia posted a map on X to show Hurricane Helene’s path overlapping with majority-Republican areas in the South. She followed it up with an explanation: “Yes they can control the weather.”
Greene was using they as a choose-your-own-adventure word, allowing her followers to replace the pronoun with their own despised group: the federal government, perhaps, or liberal elites, or Democrats.