"Pipe bombs were sent to former President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, as well as to CNN's offices in New York, sparking an intense investigation on Wednesday into whether a bomber is going after targets that have often been the subject of right-wing ire." From the NYT: Pipe Bombs Sent to Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and CNN Offices. There's no doubt that the constant sowing of political, racial, and gender-based hate has taken a toll on the collective American psyche. Now we need to ask ourselves if that same fear and resentment mongering is directly leading to hate crimes and today's intercepted pipe bombs. It's a question that's no longer merely rhetorical.

+ "Recently, Donald Trump blamed Soros for the protests against Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court nomination. Senator Chuck Grassley, of Iowa, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, when asked if he believed that Soros was paying the protesters, said, 'I tend to believe it.'" The rank anti-semitism that has fueled the alt-right's George Soros obsessions didn't come out of thin air. As you can see from the quotes above, it comes right from the top. The New Yorker: The Bombs Addressed to Obama, Clinton, and Soros, and the History of Anti-Soros Hate-Mongering.

+ "If political rhetoric in this country continues on its current trajectory, people are going to start getting killed, and then inevitably, the violence will escalate. Perhaps last year's shootings at the congressional baseball game and today's apparent assassination attempts on the Clintons and Obamas were the isolated acts of deranged individuals. But with many thousands of people distraught and despairing over politics in a nation as heavily armed as ours, the metaphorical 'mobilization' already under way could become literal more easily than we might normally imagine." Ed Kilgore: Violent Political Rhetoric Can Feed Political Violence.

+ Here's the latest on the attempted bombing from CNN.

"Now, more than ever — as leaders of governments, as decision-makers in business, and as citizens — we must ask ourselves a fundamental question: What kind of world do we want to live in?" WaPo: Apple's Tim Cook blasts Silicon Valley over privacy issues. (The tech industry consistently earning itself a bad rap greatly diminishes the good it can do for society.)

+ NYT: This Thermometer Tells Your Temperature, Then Tells Firms Where to Advertise. (That could be uncomfortable depending on how you take your temperature...)

"I would like people to keep in mind that, if we're coming to this country, it's because we are truly suffering in our own countries. I've seen a lot of women that were mutilated, their arms were cut off. Or they'll cut your face ... Maybe people don't know the need that we have to be protected. And that our governments are not doing a good job, that they don't defend the rights of women and children. But I feel hope in people, the people who have been surrounding me lately ... And I have hope that people will recognize that we're people, too, with faith and hopes. And that our human dignity is being violated. And that it's so sad to come here to seek refuge, and we can't find it." If we're willing to block people from coming in, or force others to leave, we should be willing to examine exactly who we're talking about. In The New Yorker, Dave Eggers visits with one of those people.

+ "The caravan is real. The migrants in it — mostly Hondurans (with some Guatemalans), half of whom are girls and women, many intending to seek asylum in the US — are real people. They made the decision to leave their home countries, assessing that the danger of leaving was outstripped by the danger of facing gang death threats or feeding a family on $5 per day. And they made the decision to go together, joining the caravan as it progressed, instead of alone like tens of thousands of their fellow Guatemalans and Hondurans (and Salvadorans) do every year." Vox: The migrant caravan, explained.

+ "They are not yet close to the US border, having only crossed between Guatemala and Mexico last weekend." Wired: Don't Believe Everything You Read About The Migrant Caravan.

"The infinite promise of stacking is why, whatever weight you attribute to the evidence of their efficacy, nootropics will never go away: With millions of potential iterations of brain-enhancing regimens out there, there is always the tantalizing possibility that seekers haven't found the elusive optimal combination of pills and powders for them—yet. Each 'failure' is but another step in the process-of-elimination journey to biological self-actualization, which may be just a few hundred dollars and a few more weeks of amateur alchemy away." Swallow a pill and become a better you? Nootropics sound too good to be true. So GQ sent one staffer to investigate. Do Nootropics Actually Work? I Took a Bunch of Magic Brain Pills to Find Out.

"A child's life begins at home with the family even before the neighborhood, friends, or classmates can lead them astray." The Atlantic: When Crime Is a Family Affair. "10 percent of families account for two-thirds of criminals." (Just the other day I caught my kids clearing a browser cache to get around a news-site paywall...)

"Some future company executive deciding whether to accept an acquisition bid might pull out her cell phone, open a chat window, and pose the question to the late CEO. The digital avatar, created by an artificial-intelligence platform that analyzes personal data and correspondence, might detect that the CEO had a bad relationship with the acquiring company's execs. 'I'm not a fan of that company's leadership," the avatar might say, and the screen would go red to indicate disapproval." MIT Tech Review: How your life's data means a version of you could live forever.
Vox: No industry is weirder than the dead celebrity hologram industry.

+ Actors are digitally preserving themselves to continue their careers beyond the grave.

"The winning numbers -- 5, 28, 62, 65 and 70, with a Mega Ball of 5 -- were sold at a KC Mart gas station and convenience store in upstate South Carolina outside Simpsonville, a city of about 18,000 near Greenville. It's the largest US jackpot won by a single ticket." (If you don't count internet startups...) CNN: Single ticket in South Carolina wins $1.5 billion Mega Millions jackpot.

+ WaPo: He won Powerball's $314 million jackpot. It ruined his life.

From Vice: Stoned Fighting: Jiu-Jitsu Meets Cannabis. "High Rollerz co-founders Matt Staudt and Big Lonn Howard have decided to put together a cannabis infused jiu-jitsu tournament where some of the sport's top athletes get high with their opponent before competing - and where the winner's grand prize is a pound of weed." (The whole point of getting high with your opponent is realizing you don't need to fight in the first place...)

"Gilroy, a small city about 35 miles south of San Jose, is known as 'the garlic capital of the world.' But for all the ways garlic is ubiquitous in Gilroy, little of the bulbous crop is actually grown here—at least not anymore. That impenetrable aroma1 , which locals say is strongest on hot afternoons, is the result not of garlic fields, but of the behemoth garlic peeling, grating, and roasting facility owned and operated by Christopher Ranch. It is today the only commercial garlic producer in the city and one of just three nationwide." Curbed: The giant of Santa Clara County.

"In Japan, you might find the Kit Kat at a drugstore, but here the Kit Kat has levels. The Kit Kat has range. It's found in department stores and luxurious Kit Kat-devoted boutiques that resemble high-end shoe stores, a single ingot to a silky peel-away sheath, stacked in slim boxes and tucked inside ultrasmooth-opening drawers, which a well-dressed, multilingual sales clerk slides open for you as you browse. The Kit Kat, in Japan, pushes at every limit of its form: It is multicolored and multiflavored and sometimes as hard to find as a golden ticket in your foil wrapper." NYT Magazine: Big in Japan.

+ For a spooky Halloween, you need spooky music. Let's start with the scary chord.

+ The Cotton Bureau hosted store for NextDraft shirts, hats, and stickers just got a major upgrade. It now takes Apple Pay. It's easier than ever to dress for success!