A full four-day programme of events is coming to a close with a parade and fireworks display.

Monae went for a classic 1980s film look, while Lizzo was inspired by Ozempic and South Park.

As the last trick-or-treaters head home and Halloween night comes to a close, one might wonder: What happens to Halloween stores when the costumes and candy vanish?

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The victim was in costume at an event dubbed online "north Wales ultimate scare fest".

The witching hour approaches, and Halloween is nearly here... If you’re planning a movie night but can’t figure out what to watch - or want to discover a gem that may have passed you by - we’ve got you covered.

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Yesterday, The New York Times reported that people around Donald Trump are trying to figure out how “to quickly install loyalists in major positions without subjecting them to the risk of long-running and intrusive F.B.I. background checks.” Trump’s people, unsurprisingly, are worried about whether they’d pass a background check: As Atlantic contributor Peter Wehner wrote in September, the MAGA-dominated GOP “is a moral freak show, and freak shows attract freaks”—who tend to have a hard time getting security clearances. The first Trump administration was rife with people (including his son-in-law, Jared Kushner) who were walking national-security risks, none worse than Trump himself. A second term, in which Trump would be free of adult supervision, would be even worse.

By the way, elected government leaders (even if they are convicted felons) do not go through background checks or have actual security clearances. Their access to classified information is granted by virtue of the trust placed in them by the voters; the president, as the chief executive, has access at will to information produced by the military, the intelligence community, and other executive-branch organizations.

For many other federal workers, however, security clearances are a necessary component of government service. Over the course of some 35 years, I held relatively ordinary secret and top-secret clearances while in various jobs, including my work for a defense contractor, my time as an adviser to a U.S. senator, and then in my position as a professor at a war college.

All of these, even at the lowest levels, involve allowing the government to do some uncomfortable peeping into your life—your finances, your family, even your romantic attachments. Clearances are meant to mitigate the risk that you will compromise important information, so the goal is to ensure that you aren’t emotionally unstable, or exploitable through blackmail, or vulnerable to offers of money. (Want to get a really thorough investigation? See if you can get cleared for CNDWI, or “Critical nuclear weapons design information.”)

You screw around with this process at your own professional and legal peril. Don’t want to admit that you cheated on your wife? Too bad. After all, if you’ll lie to her and then lie to the government about lying to her, what else will you lie about? Are you a bit too loose at the poker table, or are you a casual drug user but don’t think either is a big deal? That’s not for you to decide: Better fess up anyway. (And of course, you have to promise not to do it anymore.)

Once you have a clearance, you’ll be subjected to refresher courses on how to keep it, and you’ll have to submit to regular reinvestigations. You must also sit through “insider threat” training, during which you are taught how to recognize who among your co-workers might be a security risk—and how to report them. Red flags include not only signs of money issues, emotional problems, or substance abuse but also extreme political views or foreign loyalties.

Which brings me to Elon Musk, who runs SpaceX, America’s private space contractor and an organization presumably full of people with clearances. (I emailed SpaceX to ask how many of its workers have clearances. I have not gotten an answer.) Trump is surrounded by people who shouldn’t be given a clearance to open a checking account, much less set foot in a highly classified environment. But Musk has held a clearance for years, despite ringing the insider-threat bells louder than a percussion maestro hammering a giant glockenspiel.

Leave aside Musk smoking marijuana on Joe Rogan’s show back in 2018, a stunt done with such casual smugness that it would have cost almost anyone else their clearance. (The feds, including the U.S. military, don’t care about state laws about pot; they still demand that clearance holders treat weed as a prohibited substance.) But sharing a joint with bro-king Rogan is nothing. Six years later, The Wall Street Journal reported much more concerning drug use:

The world’s wealthiest person has used LSD, cocaine, ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms, often at private parties around the world, where attendees sign nondisclosure agreements or give up their phones to enter, according to people who have witnessed his drug use and others with knowledge of it.

An attorney for Musk denied the report, but even the rumor of this kind of drug use would be a five-alarm fire for most holders of a high clearance. But fine, even if the report is true, maybe all it means is that Musk is just a patriotic, if somewhat reckless, pharmaceutical cowboy. It’s not like he’s canoodling with the Russians or anything, is it?

Bad news. Musk (according to another bombshell story from The Wall Street Journal) has reportedly been in touch multiple times with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The discussions, confirmed by several current and former U.S., European and Russian officials, touch on personal topics, business and geopolitical tensions. At one point, Putin asked the billionaire to avoid activating his Starlink satellite internet service over Taiwan as a favor to Chinese leader Xi Jinping, said two people briefed on the request.

Now, it’s not inherently a problem to have friends in Russia—I had some even when I was a government employee—but if you’re the guy at the desk next to me with access to highly classified technical information, and you’re chewing the fat now and then with the president of Russia, I’m pretty certain I’m required to at least raise an alert about a possible insider threat.

So why hasn’t that kind of report happened? Apparently, it has: Last week, the NASA administrator Bill Nelson said that Musk’s alleged contacts with Russia “should be investigated.” But the United States government seems to think that Musk is too big to fail and too important to fire. As an opinion piece in Government Executive put it this past winter:

In the case of Musk, it is clear the government has decided the benefits of his maintaining eligibility are worth the risks. It’s an easier case to make when you’re creating groundbreaking technology and helping get humans to Mars. It may be a harder case for you to make if your name is Joe and your job is to get a truck to the naval yard … That may seem like a double standard, but that’s if you forget that there is no universal standard.

If Trump is reelected, Musk likely won’t have anything to worry about. But at what point does Musk’s erratic behavior—including allegations of drug use, accusations of some two years of regular discussions with the leader of Russia, and his obvious, intense devotion to one party and its candidate—become too much of a risk for any other U.S. administration to tolerate?

It’s bad enough that Musk could be careless with classified data or expose himself to blackmail; it’s even more unsettling to imagine him undermining American security because of poor judgment, political grudges, and unwise foreign associations. Remember, this is a man who had to pay a $20 million fine for blabbing about taking Tesla private and had to agree to have some of his social-media posts overseen by a Tesla lawyer—and that’s not even close to classified information.

As a former clearance holder, I also worry that indulging Musk (and allowing future Trump appointees to bypass the clearance process) would be a toxic signal to the conscientious public servants who have protected America’s secrets. They have allowed the government to intrude deeply into their personal lives; they have worked to keep their finances tidy; they have avoided the use of prohibited substances and the abuse of legal ones.

If only they were more important; they could get away with almost anything.

Related:

What Elon Musk really wants Elon Musk has reached a new low.

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

This is Trump’s message. The truth about polling Why major newspapers won’t endorse Kamala Harris Anne Applebaum: Trump wants you to accept all of this as normal.

Today’s News

Two ballot boxes were set on fire in Oregon and Washington. Hundreds of ballots were burned in Washington, and the police said that they believe the fires were connected. Philadelphia’s district attorney sued Elon Musk and his America PAC for “running an illegal lottery” scheme by promising to pay $1 million a day to registered voters who signed America PAC’s petition defending the First and Second Amendments. The Pentagon announced that if North Korea joins the war in Ukraine, the U.S. will not set any new limits on Ukraine’s use of American-supplied weapons. In an updated estimate, the Pentagon said that roughly 10,000 North Korean troops have entered Russia.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: We’ve strayed from the spirit of Halloween, Stephanie Bai writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic. Source: Pamela Littky / Disney / Hulu.

MomTok Is the Apotheosis of 21st-Century Womanhood

By Sophie Gilbert

If you’re interested in modern beauty standards, the social value of femininity, and the fetishization of mothers in American culture, Hulu’s recent reality show The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is a rich, chaotic product. I watched the entire series in a couple of days, gasping and Googling, shriveling inwardly every time I caught a glimpse of my haggard self in the mirror compared with these lustrous, bronzed, cosmetically enhanced women. The stars of the show are young wives and mothers in Utah who have become notable in a corner of the internet called MomTok; their online side hustles include performing 20-second group dances and lip-synching to clips from old movies, the financial success of which has helped them eclipse their husbands as earners. As an encapsulation of 21st-century womanhood, it’s almost too on the nose: a discordant jumble of feminist ideals, branded domesticity, and lip filler.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

“Dear Therapist”: I’m worried about my brother. Don’t cancel The Washington Post, Ellen Cushing argues. Cancel Amazon Prime. Mitch McConnell’s worst political miscalculation Donald Trump’s dog whistles are unmistakable.

Culture Break

Neon

Watch. The director of Anora (out now in some theaters) wants to wake his audience from the American dream, Shirley Li writes.

Heed this advice. Middle schoolers can be maddening, but they are also delightful, Russell Shaw writes. In this survival guide, he shares 10 practical tips for the parents of middle schoolers.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Halloween was once a time of both tricks and treats. Lately, Halloween has become one big treat for businesses, with consumers spending an estimated $11.6 billion on this one-night holiday. That’s roughly the same amount of money as Americans spend on children’s books each year.

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This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Among the most tangible and immediate effects of the generative-AI boom has been a total upending of English classes. On November 30, 2022, the release of ChatGPT offered a tool that could write at least reasonably well for students—and by all accounts, the plagiarism began the next day and hasn’t stopped since.

But there are at least two American colleges that ChatGPT hasn’t ruined, according to a new article for The Atlantic by Tyler Austin Harper: Haverford College (Harper’s alma mater) and nearby Bryn Mawr. Both are small, private liberal-arts colleges governed by the honor code—students are trusted to take unproctored exams or even bring tests home. At Haverford, none of the dozens of students Harper spoke with “thought AI cheating was a substantial problem at the school,” he wrote. “These interviews were so repetitive, they almost became boring.”

Both Haverford and Bryn Mawr are relatively wealthy and small, meaning students have access to office hours, therapists, a writing center, and other resources when they struggle with writing—not the case for, say, students at many state universities or parents squeezing in online classes between work shifts. Even so, money can’t substitute for culture: A spike in cheating recently led Stanford to end a century of unproctored exams, for instance. “The decisive factor” for schools in the age of ChatGPT “seems to be whether a university’s honor code is deeply woven into the fabric of campus life,” Harper writes, “or is little more than a policy slapped on a website.”

Illustration by Jackie Carlise

ChatGPT Doesn’t Have to Ruin College

By Tyler Austin Harper

Two of them were sprawled out on a long concrete bench in front of the main Haverford College library, one scribbling in a battered spiral-ring notebook, the other making annotations in the white margins of a novel. Three more sat on the ground beneath them, crisscross-applesauce, chatting about classes. A little hip, a little nerdy, a little tattooed; unmistakably English majors. The scene had the trappings of a campus-movie set piece: blue skies, green greens, kids both working and not working, at once anxious and carefree.

I said I was sorry to interrupt them, and they were kind enough to pretend that I hadn’t. I explained that I’m a writer, interested in how artificial intelligence is affecting higher education, particularly the humanities. When I asked whether they felt that ChatGPT-assisted cheating was common on campus, they looked at me like I had three heads. “I’m an English major,” one told me. “I want to write.” Another added: “Chat doesn’t write well anyway. It sucks.” A third chimed in, “What’s the point of being an English major if you don’t want to write?” They all murmured in agreement.

Read the full article.

What to Read Next

AI cheating is getting worse: “At the start of the third year of AI college, the problem seems as intractable as ever,” Ian Bogost wrote in August. A chatbot is secretly doing my job: “Does it matter that I, a professional writer and editor, now secretly have a robot doing part of my job?” Ryan Bradley asks.

P.S.

With Halloween less than a week away, you may be noticing some startlingly girthy pumpkins. In fact, giant pumpkins have been getting more gargantuan for years—the largest ever, named Michael Jordan, set the world record for heaviest pumpkin in 2023, at 2,749 pounds. Nobody knows what the upper limit is, my colleague Yasmin Tayag reports in a delightful article this week.

— Matteo

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.

What’s the scariest part of Halloween? Maybe it’s how far we’ve strayed from the spirit of the holiday, a night meant to be celebrated with eager trick-or-treaters and over-the-top costumes. A recent gripe about the holiday comes from the writer Kate Lindsay, who notes that  “Halloween has been steadily succumbing to the chronically online for years now.” More costumes target niche social-media-savvy audiences, meaning fewer people are experiencing the delight of seeing more traditional getups (think: a grown man dressed as a pumpkin, or a toddler version of the president).

Following the norms on Halloween may seem boring, but give them a chance, Kate argues. The spookiest day of the year is also a day of socialization and joy—one where people can gorge themselves on candy, watch a horror flick, or dress in whatever silly costumes they want, as long as they do it together.

On Halloween

The Chronically Online Have Stolen Halloween

By Kate Lindsay

Obscure meme costumes are sucking the joy from the holiday.

Read the article.

Big Candy Bars Have No Place on Halloween

By Ian Bogost

They ruin the “fun” of the fun-size treat.

Read the article.

Trick-or-Treating Isn’t What It Used to Be

By Julie Beck

Instead of going door-to-door on Halloween night, many parents are taking their kids elsewhere to get candy.

Read the article.

Still Curious?

The Halloween scare that won’t go away: For 40 years, Joel Best has tried to debunk the unfounded fear that bad actors might tamper with children’s trick-or-treat stashes, Caroline Mimbs Nyce wrote in 2022. What to do with that rotting pumpkin corpse: Millions end up rotting in landfills. But Halloween’s leftover pumpkins don’t have to go to waste, Linda Poon and CityLab wrote in 2019.

Other Diversions

This influencer says you can’t parent too gently. Americans are hoarding their friends. Six political memoirs worth reading

P.S.

Courtesy of Cynthia Case

I recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. “A few years ago I was stealthily photographing birds at a local park while sitting in my car,” Cynthia Case, 68, from Laguna Woods, California, writes. “The day had turned misty and cold, and just as I was preparing to leave, this bobcat appeared out of nowhere.”

I’ll continue to feature your responses in the coming weeks.

— Isabel Fattal

Many of this year’s most popular Halloween costumes make sense. One trend tracker’s list includes characters from Beetlejuice and Inside Out, thanks to the respective sequels that recently hit theaters. But at No. 2 sits a costume that’s not like the others: Raygun, the Australian dancer who went viral for her erratic moves during the Olympics earlier this year. Her costume—a green-and-yellow tracksuit—beat out pop-culture stalwarts such as Sabrina Carpenter, Minions, and Wolverine. Raygun is not a monster, or a book character, or any other traditional entertainment figure. She is, for all intents and purposes, a meme.

Halloween has been steadily succumbing to the chronically online for years now. As early as 2013, publications were noting memes’ slow creep into the Halloween-costume canon. A few years later, the undecided voter Ken Bone, who went viral during the October 2016 presidential debate for his distinctive name and midwestern demeanor, somehow went even more viral when the lingerie company Yandy made a “Sexy Undecided Voter” costume. Surely, it couldn’t get any weirder than that. Instead, meme costumes not only persist; they have become even more online. Today, participating in Halloween can feel like being in a competition you did not enter—one that prioritizes social-media attention over genuine, person-to-person interactions.

Costumes beyond classics such as witches or skeletons have long reflected pop culture; that the rise of meme culture would show up at Halloween, too, is understandable. But unlike traditional culture, which follows, say, the steady release of movies and TV shows, internet culture spirals in on itself. When we say meme in 2024, we’re not talking about a straightforward text graphic or even a person from a viral YouTube video. To understand a meme now, you must know the layers of context that came before it and the mechanisms of the platform it sprang from, the details of which not everyone is familiar with.

Meme enthusiasts, our modern-day hipsters, must dig through the bowels of the internet for their references to position themselves as savvy. It’s not enough to be Charli XCX anymore; you have to somehow embody “brat summer” instead. The meme costume is a reference to a reference to a reference—a singer in a Canadian funk band called My Son the Hurricane, for instance, but specifically from the viral video where she was teased (and then heralded) for her emphatic dancing; or the “me as a baby” puppet, a TikTok joke that spawned from people filming themselves to convince children that a video of a puppet named Tibúrcio was them as a baby. When seen in person, the costume-wearer will most likely need to offer a lengthy explanation for their pick. If, by the end, you do understand their costume, the effort probably wasn’t worth it, and if you still don’t, it’s somehow your fault that “Nicolas Cage and Pedro Pascal in the scene from The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent soundtracked by Cass Elliot’s ‘Make Your Own Kind of Music,’ but specifically in its context as a TikTok trend template” didn’t ring any bells in its real-life form (two guys standing in front of you at a party).  

[Read: Adult Halloween is stupid, embarrassing, and very important]

This is, perhaps unsurprisingly, terrible for in-person Halloween gatherings. As a rare monocultural touchstone, Halloween should be treasured for its offline traditions. Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa share custody of most of December; Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July have become, for some, political lightning rods. But a holiday for nothing other than dressing up and having fun (and eating candy) is October 31, every year, for everyone. In an era of declining socialization, the holiday gives Americans the opportunity for a shared physical place to be in and people to connect with, whether on doorsteps or at costume parties. For many, this can mean celebrating through children, whose simple and easily recognizable costumes embody the holiday in its purest playful iteration. Do it right, and adults, too, can have the pleasure of riding public transportation next to a grown man dressed as a bumblebee.  

The meme invasion threatens the spirit of Halloween. In my experience, an interaction with these meme hipsters—a moment that should be one of immediate recognition and joy—becomes a lengthy, borderline-inscrutable conversation I had no idea I would be saddled with when I tried to make small talk. Instead of connecting, I feel alienated, and not just because I don’t understand. Within seconds of embarking on these conversations, it becomes clear the costumes aren’t intended for my—or any other partygoer’s—consumption. They’re for our phones.

That’s where the costume will be appreciated, and where people can reenact the video required for it to make sense. That’s where the wearer can debut the outfit to an online community that needs no explanation for “JoJo Siwa’s ‘Karma’ dance” or “the concept of ‘demure.’” I, a fellow partygoer, become relegated to the backdrop of a social-media post.

But living life phone-first is what got Americans in this lonely, third-placeless crisis to begin with. If our costumes aren’t for the other people in this room, then what are we all doing here? In what way are we bonding? We’re not just hanging out less but also allowing the pursuit of internet points to ruin the rare times we do.

And yet I, in my pumpkin costume or celebrity getup, am made out to be the problem. Those who dress up as more traditional, recognizable characters get categorized online as somehow cringe, while those whose costumes require descriptions that would kill a Victorian child claim dominance. There is, of course, always the option to just not care what the internet thinks, but that’s starting to feel as delusionally obstinate as refusing to give up a landline phone or pointedly saying “Merry Christmas” in response to “Happy Holidays.”

To give in and play Halloween by the internet’s rules results in an inevitably stressful few weeks of fall. I have to come up with a costume that’s the exact right combination of referential and recent, something that happened online in the past few months but not something that everyone else is going to be. My costume has to signal something about me, whatever inside joke I’m part of, without being a reflection of my actual interests—boring! Even if I get this right, it’ll all be to spend time at a party that’s more “Instagram set piece” than it is “Halloween get-together.” If I opt out, I risk facing a Millennial’s scariest costume of all: irrelevance.

Exorcising the internet from Halloween, though, could resurrect the holiday’s true spirit: a cultural potluck at which all, whether Marvel or monster, are welcome. This isn’t to say that you can’t go as a meme—who am I to deny the Rayguns of the world?—but it is to say that we can drop the one-upmanship that results in a Sisyphean race for online notoriety. Like the ghosts and ghouls that adorn front lawns, Halloween can be brought back to life.