Saturday morning an American flag left the deck of a warship in New York harbor and started walking to Washington. Two hundred fifty miles. Five days. It is not a race, and it is not one runner carrying it the whole way.

Also: the radar over Lithuania picked something up, and a NATO fighter went after it. A hundred thousand ecstasy pills, every one of them wearing the same dead man's face. A whirring in the Mexican mountains you could hear half a mile off. The hottest week of the summer, in the middle of September. A rate touching five percent for the first time since 2023. A firefighter who went into a storm pipe and came out a hundred seventy nine feet later. Two hikers whose way down disappeared. A hot sauce company that told a state government no. And a man of seventy who walked eleven days on an island looking for another human being. ...