We've reached that point in our journey as a nation that when an evil-but-not-dumb person professes to believe something that's too dumb for words, the logical conclusion is that he's preparing to run for office.

Tucker Carlson is telling his own ghost story for Halloween this year ... claiming a demon attacked him while he slept in bed -- and left visible marks on his body.

If you had your druthers, what economic indicator would you want to be the gold standard to measure the health of the economy? Would you concern yourself with using a metric that was tethered to the median person's experience or would you use one of these "But the engine is chugging with much force! Inequality is a political problem!" type metrics?

Idk. I guess we can talk about Halloween, because otherwise it's the Supreme Court opening the floodgate for purging voters in the final week before the election.

I stayed up late last night, finishing Rascal's Koraidon costume. It's passable and I'm pleased with my efforts.

I had a few friends who came of age, career-wise, alongside Emily Oster, and thus I mildly enjoyed this dry takedown of her books. (She's the one that has made a career out of applying the Freakonomics-style shtick to pregnancy and parenthood.)

Channel that anxiety here.

The Atlantic asks, "Why Does Elon Musk Still Have a Security Clearance?" and it's a very good point. (I don't actually have a subscription to The Atlantic, but at least a chunk of the article appeared in their daily newsletter.)

I assume the real answer is that we need him - and access to the Starlink network - more than he needs us. The part that I don't know is why he was granted clearance in the first place. Maybe he required it as part of letting us use Starlink?

Does he have any international role besides Starlink and chatting up Putin? Is this really just all about Starlink and how this billionaire is functioning like an independent nation-state that happens to be located in the US? (I mean, not the kind of nation-state with people in it. The kind with satellites.)

I feel like the joy I derived from the photo of Musk leaping on stage behind Trump does not outweigh the destruction that this asshat can wield.

Mossy sends in: They had never seen the ocean. Then climate change made them fishermen.

Gazing out over the harbor in Port of Tanit, Mauritania, Sidna Ali Ould Ahmed remembers the first time he went fishing 13 years ago.

"That night, I thought I would die," he says. He was in a large wooden canoe called a pirogue. As the team began to pull up its fishing nets, the pirogue pitched sharply. Mr. Ahmed's stomach did the same.

Did you want a feel-good distraction or a feel-bad distraction? This is definitely at least one of those.