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The Attack at the Pelosis’ Home Was Part of a Dangerous Pattern  (Economist)
The attempt to assassinate Mrs. Pelosi may have been amateurish, but it would be a mistake to dismiss it as an outlier incident committed by a deranged man. As American politics have grown more feverish, the number of near-misses has been rising at a disturbing pace.

Who Is the Man Accused of Attacking Nancy Pelosi’s Husband?  (Kellen Browning, Alan Feuer, Charlie Savage and Eliza Fawcett, New York Times)
Those who have known the suspect describe an individual who seemed to fall into isolation and deeply troubling thoughts.
From August until the day before the attack on Mr. Pelosi, the blog featured a flurry of antisemitic sentiments and concerns about pedophilia, anti-white racism and “elite” control of the internet.
One of the blog posts suggested that there had been no mass gassing of prisoners at Auschwitz, and others were accompanied by malicious and stereotypical images. Another reposted a video lecture defending Adolf Hitler.
In one post, written on Oct. 19, the author urged former President Donald J. Trump to choose Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii, as his vice-presidential candidate in 2024. Ms. Gabbard left the Democratic Party this month and then made several high-profile campaign appearances with Republicans running for office.
But mixed in with those posts were others about religion, the occult and images of fairies that the user said he had produced using an artificial intelligence imaging system.

Elon Musk, in a Tweet, Shares Link from Site Known to Publish False News  (Kurtis Lee, New York Times)
The tweet on Sunday posted an article that made baseless allegations about the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband.

The article was from the Santa Monica Observer, a local paper owned by onetime City Council candidate David Ganezer. The paper is notorious for publishing false news. In 2016, for example, the publication advanced a claim that Hillary Clinton had died and that a body double was sent to debate the Republican presidential nominee, Donald J. Trump.

A Plea for Making Virus Research Safer  (Jesse Bloom, New York Times)
New scientific breakthroughs make it increasingly easy to identify dangerous viruses in nature, manipulate them in the lab and synthetically create them from genetic sequences. In just the past few weeks, scientists at Boston University reported making hybrids of variants of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, while the media reported on a proliferation of labs studying dangerous viruses. And so a debate rages: Is virology making us more or less safe?
I am a virologist who studies how mutations enable viruses to escape antibodies, resist drugs and bind to cells. I know virology has done much to advance public health. But a few aspects of modern virology can be a double-edged sword, and we need to promote beneficial, lifesaving research without creating new risks in the lab.

Pandemic Learning Loss Is Not an Emergency  (David Wallace-Wells, New York Times)
What is the panic about pandemic learning loss actually about?
when I look at the data in detail, I just don’t see the signs of catastrophe that so many others seem to. I’m inclined to see that data as, at least, a glass half full, if not quite a best-case scenario. That’s because the declines, all told, strike me as relatively small, given the context: a brutal pandemic that terrified the country and killed more than a million of its citizens, upending nearly every aspect of our lives along the way.
The panic of parents and policymakers is both unsurprising and, to a degree, productive: As we approach the third anniversary of the beginning of the pandemic, we should be thinking about what went right and what went wrong with school closures and other mitigation policies. But in doing so, let’s try not to forget the scale of the impact or the context in which it happened.
Could we have managed the first year of the pandemic more strategically, doing more to protect the vulnerable and prioritize essential functions like schools? Almost certainly. (Personally, I would’ve liked to have seen schools open nationwide in fall 2020, with additional focus on rapid testing and improved ventilation.) Do we know how well each mitigation measure suppressed spread and saved lives? Not as clearly as we might like if we were trying to strategize a plan for future pandemics, and we may well be less universally restrictive if given another chance. But however open these questions may seem to you today, they were first asked not in the context of endemic Covid but of mass death and illness, uncertainty and anxiety and social disarray.

Erosion of Trust: When Attacking Civilian Infrastructure Becomes the Weapon of Choice  (Briana Petyo Frisone, Patricia F.S. Cogswell, and Daniel Lewis, HSToday)
With the evidence of a growing number of these types of cyber attacks, critical infrastructure owners must re-evaluate their perception of consequence.

That’s it? Biden’s Overdue Pentagon Strategy Underwhelms  (Kevin Baron, Defense One)
Delayed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Biden administration’s Pentagon policy team finally released their first National Defense Strategy. It arrives just two weeks after the White House’s broader National Security Strategy, and in conjunction with the nearly-as-important nuclear and missile defense strategies—one PDF to rule them all.
The result is that we can now see on paper the administration’s thinking behind what was already largely in practice at the Pentagon anyway: China is a “pacing challenge,” Russia is an “acute threat,” and the United States will keep building and improving its nuclear umbrella and missile defenses. 
But not there’s not much more than that in this NDS, and that’s troublesome.