Headlines Edition

Saturday Headlines: Falling apart.

There have been 262 mass shootings in America in the first 263 days of 2018.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley says Dr. Christine Blasey Ford has until 2:30 p.m. ET today to decide whether to testify before Congress, or the vote to confirm Kavanaugh will proceed on Monday.

If it happened (although it did not happen), it would not have been wrong. If it happened (it may have happened; he did not do it, but it may have happened), it was only to be expected. These things happen. (He did not do it.) Alexandra Petri on the verbal gymnastics politicians are employing to preemptively excuse Kavanaugh.

It's not a surprise, but there's evidence to show grade inflation happens more often at wealthier schools.

How to look like you're trying to end sexual harassment.

For a moment, I thought of storming out, but I didn’t have the courage, just a mountain of student loan bills. Instead I wrote some gibberish about the long and storied presumption of innocence. A former Senator’s speechwriter regrets crafting a defense of her boss’s “yes” vote on Clarence Thomas.

According to the New York Times, after Comey was fired last year, Rosenstein allegedly suggested secretly recording Trump and finding a way to invoke the 25th Amendment. Rosenstein refutes the Times story, and some sources say he was being sarcastic when he originally floated the idea.

The remnants of Hurricane Florence appear to be feeding a "zombie" storm that could head back to the Carolinas.

At least 13 different Twitter accounts are telling stories of abuse as a means of selling diet pills.

Drug overdose deaths in the US are on pace to double in eight years.

Pet stores likely sickened customers by giving healthy puppies antibiotics, fostering antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

After years of stoking vaccine skepticism, Italy's new populist government, has loosened vaccine requirements for schoolchildren.

Three years after a ban on tobacco displays, the number of children in England buying cigarettes has dropped by 17%.

“What my life has been about is in showing the potential for human beings, to not be the victims of their biographies—not their biological biographies, not their social biographies.” The psychologist behind the marshmallow test later corrected people on what it shows—and mostly, what it doesn’t.

Non-binary individuals find gendered languages, like German, the hardest to use to express themselves.

An appreciation of kidney stones: "a minute-by-minute, layered history of the kidney’s physiology."

Researchers found giving an octopus MDMA made it more social—but haven't answered why they think this is ethical.

See also: How the octopus got its smarts.

British museums face steep competition from hedge funds to buy up Titanic artifacts.

Your odds of being hit by a meteorite are low, but your chances improve if you live in the United States.

Unlike mass and distance, time cannot be perceived by our physical senses. We don’t see, hear, smell, touch, or taste time. And yet we somehow measure it. Humans experience time in a certain way, but what is a minute to the universe?

How to write a the perfect sentence.

The best national parks to visit in the fall.