Reading archive 2024-10-04

Anderson, Vindman trade vitriol at debate for Spanberger’s Virginia seat: The hour-long event between the candidates for the commonwealth’s battleground 7th District was short on policy details and heavy on partisan attacks.

Mother shot holding baby as domestic violence rises in Prince George’s: “She was not letting him go,” said Tequia Nails’s niece, who witnessed the fatal shooting. - "The killing underscores a national trend in which Black women are more frequently abused or killed by their romantic partners than other groups, research on domestic violence cases shows."

The Uptown Theater, Cleveland Park’s historic art house, lives: The couple behind Artechouse aims to undertake an ambitious effort to blend old-school Hollywood with 21st-century technology.

Informant in Trayon White case bribed another D.C. official, records say: A judge unsealed the plea deal of the man alleged to have handed Trayon White envelopes of cash to help his company secure city contracts.

How Biden helped end a strike that threatened Democrats in November: With early morning Zoom calls and a surprising ultimatum, the White House brain trust averted a potential economic disaster weeks before the election. - "'To get in one raise what it took you in the past six years to achieve is monumental,' [Kenneth Riley, an ILA vice president based in Charleston, S.C.] said. 'The administration played a key role here in bringing the parties together and defending American workers and the union workers against foreign giants.'"

Employers added 254,000 jobs in September, reflecting strong gains as election nears: The U.S. unemployment rate ticked down to 4.1 percent. - "Strong upward revisions to job gains in July and August data also suggest that the labor market is healthier than previously thought."

Plastic-eating bacteria could combat pollution problems, scientists hope: A bacteria commonly found in wastewater can break down plastic to turn it into a food source, a new study finds. Scientists hope it is a pollution solution.

The reasons people say they leave Donald Trump’s rallies early: The Republican nominee consistently draws large, enthusiastic and rowdy crowds to his rallies and other campaign events, and at nearly all of them, another trend is clear: Scores of people head out before the end.

Opinion Calamity in a keystroke: How the FBI copes with mounting threats: Christopher A. Wray: Cyberthreats are ‘diverse and constantly evolving.’

Opinion Who put these oddballs on the ballot? Could it be … Satan?: GOP conspiracy theorist Michele Morrow is in a dead heat to become North Carolina’s top educator.

JD Vance’s family politics are incoherent: What does his vision of an ideal family have to do with the rest of us? - "There is a chasm between the idyllic family portrait that Vance says he would like to see play out in America — one where abortions are unnecessary and grandmas are child care — and the messy realities he has described encountering in his own life. There is a disconnect between the derivative cruelty he seems to now spout (see: 'childless cat ladies') and in the human experiences that apparently led him to these beliefs. It’s incoherent.

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"When I listen to the fantasy narratives Vance tells about family in America — how he thinks they should live, who he thinks they should be composed of, how he thinks they should come to be — this is what so often comes to mind: a brokenhearted child. A boy who grew up in chaos, abandonment, violence and poverty and who spent it all dreaming of the opposite. 

"And then, somehow, through determination, luck and natural intelligence clawed his way into the sort of Norman Rockwell existence he’d always wanted. A happy marriage. A lucrative career. Beautiful children. 'For both of my kids, they didn’t grow up with a positive family unit,' Vance’s mother, Beverly Aikins, recently told the New York Times. 'I know that they seemed to gravitate towards that in their adulthood.'

"Analyzing 'Hillbilly Elegy' for the New Yorker, Jessica Winter unpacked Vance’s preoccupation with 'traditional' family — mom, dad, kids, every child exclusively cared for by loving mothers rather than 'crap daycare' — and describes it as such: 'It is clear, on a primal, emotional level, why Vance sees this as the better deal than what he got. But what results is a blinkered, grotesquely narcissistic vision of the social contract — an identity politics of one grown child.' Is Vance, in other words, trying to legislate the country into the family dynamic he wished he’d been born into?"

Ta-Nehisi Coates and Tony Dokoupil sharpen morning TV with Israel debate: The conversation on “CBS Mornings” over Coates’s new book, “The Message,” was unusually gripping for a promotional segment.