“Just putrid.”
Biden and Trump’s first debate is a fiasco, where Trump, “nothing short of a horror show,” stood by white supremacists and sowed doubt about election integrity. / USA Today, The Washington Post, The New York Times
Not to forget: Trump emphasized his hunger for a rushed, election-eve vaccine approval. / STAT
“This is like a really bad Zoom meeting.” “I’d love to know how many people turned off this debate after the first 15 minutes.” “This isn't a debate. It's a DDOS attack happening in front of a human moderator.” / Twitter
“Just Putrid: GOP Insiders Texted Me Their Honest Feelings About the Debate.” / New York Magazine
If there was an upside, Biden and Trump offered genuinely different worldviews “of how to manage the coronavirus pandemic.” / POLITICO
If there was a downside, no matter how bad you thought the debate would be, “it was worse.” / The New Yorker
In summary: “Will you shut up, man?” / Vox
Research finds Fox News is up to five times more likely to use the word “hate” in its programming than its main competitors. / The Conversation
The Columbus Dispatch struggles to shed its history as “Ohio’s Whitest Home Newspaper.” / Columbia Journalism Review
Headline of the week? "Why you should get an autopsy if it’s the last thing you do." / Elemental
Heading into the fall and winter, signs indicate a third resurgence of COVID-19 is about to hit the United States. / TIME
In case you missed it: Helen Branswell’s four scenarios on how we might develop immunity to COVID-19. / STAT
Northern California faces fast-moving new fires. In wine country, it’s sparking memories of the 2017 Tubbs Fire. / The San Francisco Chronicle
Public shaming performed online is thriving. Victims can receive hundreds of hateful messages a second. / The New Yorker
Just one American in 16 is an entrepreneur, and yet “cult worship surrounding this tiny group drives rhetoric and policy.” / Lithub
Disney is laying off 28,000 people in the United States as the pandemic impacts its resorts. / CNN
The label behind K-Pop colossus BTS is about to go public, with demand 1,000 times higher than the available stock. / BBC News
In El Paso, work continues on James Magee's decades-long, large-scale masterwork "The Hill." / Texas Monthly
Ten years later, the film The Social Network feels ever more prescient of our present world. / The Morning News
A new AI can draw images to credibly accompany captions. / MIT Technology Review
Research finds that crows know what they know and can ponder the content of their own minds. / STAT
For your weekly wanderlust: Along the coastal fringes of Gujarat, India, camels take to the sea. / Hakai magazine
The author of a major 2018 article about the obstacles Black people face in the outdoors performs a reckoning two years later. / Outside
Stories and photographs from a series of bike rides on Alaska's islands. / The Radavist
See also: Animated sketches of la Plaça de la Virreina, a square in Barcelona; some Moleskine drawings of the Devon countryside; sketching wildlife with a pressure washer in an Alabama driveway. / The Morning News, Colossal, TKSST
The Super Rooster starts next week, and we’ve got new sweatshirts, coffee mugs and more. / TMN Store
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