Daily Bafflements

• It’s that time again! Join us for our second presidential debate live blog this evening, featuring the likes of Amber A’Lee Frost, Natasha Vargas-Cooper, Chris Lehmann, and David Rees. Tune in to this space around 9 p.m. tonight. We promise it’ll help you retain a shred of sanity—if it doesn’t, please direct all complaints here.

• Over at GQ, documentarian Adam Curtis explains the rise of Trump and what his outrageous campaign means for the media. “If someone like Trump comes along and just lies all the time—allegedly—and a journalist says he’s lying and no-one bothers, and his popularity goes up, I’d say that journalism has lost of its main foundation,” he says. The mainstream media doesn’t seem to mind, even though, as Chris Lehmann wrote in September, “it’s hard to see how our press corps can take much professional pride in providing a platform for a hateful, preening mountebank to embarrass himself on.”

• Harvard graduate students have scheduled a formal election on unionization for next month. But it’s not all good news over in Cambridge, where the richest university in the world has yet to budge on demands to better compensate its dining-hall staff. 

• “A chorus of outraged conservatives . . . expressed anger on Monday at what they wrongly called evidence that a postal worker in Ohio had destroyed absentee ballots cast in the Republican’s favor.”