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They don’t make Washington scandals like they used to. Consider the tale of Representative Wilbur Mills and Fanne Foxe. In October 1974, Mills, a powerful Arkansas Democrat who led the Ways and Means Committee, was pulled over in D.C. while driving with his lights off.

When he is not sharing memes of himself as a conquering Roman centurion or shrieking while brandishing a chain saw onstage at a CPAC conference, Elon Musk occasionally adopts the pose of a reasonable moderate offering an open hand of compromise that Democrats slap away.
“What @DOGE is doing is similar to Clinton/Gore Dem policies of the 1990s,” he wrote on X last week.

Editor’s Note: Is anything ailing, torturing, or nagging at you? Are you beset by existential worries? Every Tuesday, James Parker tackles readers’ questions. Tell him about your lifelong or in-the-moment problems at dearjames@theatlantic.com.
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Dear James,
I’ve been reading a lot lately about the long-term effects, mental and physical, of regular alcohol use.

Elon Musk has allegedly fathered his 13th child with a fourth woman, the conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair. Judging by St. Clair’s public remarks on Musk’s platform, X, theirs was not necessarily a love connection: In asking that Musk acknowledge his paternity, St. Clair did not issue an emotional appeal but rather, through her spokesperson, a request that Musk “finish” an unspecified “agreement” with her.

The woman and her sister had been out jogging by the river when they saw the bird fall from the sky. At first, they mistook it for a falling leaf, but the angle and speed of descent suggested a weightier object. They squatted down like children to inspect the body. A pale-green bird with a cream-colored breast, too delicate for a city bird. They saw nothing above them. No trees or obstructions, just a red fog of diffuse and muddled light.
Poor bird.