What’s Going on Over North America?

Updated at 8:05 p.m. ET on February 13, 2023

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Over the past few weeks, U.S. military aircraft have shot down four “objects” over North America, one of which U.S. officials claim was a Chinese surveillance balloon. This is unusual but not a cause for panic.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

• The inconvenient truth about electric vehicles
• Margaret Atwood: “Go ahead and ban my book.”
• The sleek truth in Rihanna’s halftime show

99 Red (Chinese?) Balloons

Almost everyone of, ahem, a certain age will remember the 1983 hit song “99 Red Balloons” by the German singer Nena. A classic bit of Cold War pop culture, the lyrics tell a story of a girl buying some balloons and letting them go into the air—where they are promptly misidentified as a threat by the world’s militaries, who then mistakenly launch World War III [“the world lies in ruins.”])