As we count down to Election Day, the drama at City Hall has hit that stage where the debates feel less like political forums and more like reality TV — minus the commercial breaks and with slightly better lighting. Washington isn’t doing much better either — we’ve reached Day 22 of the government shutdown, which means federal workers are running out of patience, and the rest of us are running out of new ways to say “still no deal.” Then, just when you thought the week couldn’t get any stranger, the internet decided to take a sick day. Planes were grounded, banks froze up, and for a few terrifying hours, people actually had to talk to each other. It was like a mass social experiment no one signed up for. And through all this chaos, we somehow found time to argue about Halloween — specifically, whether trick-or-treating with pillowcases and carving lopsided pumpkins was better than today’s LED-lit, algorithm-approved version. Spoiler alert: back then, our biggest outage was running out of candy.

In the headlines on #TheUpdate this Wednesday, an immigration enforcement sweep targeting vendors on Manhattan’s famed Canal Street turned chaotic after droves of angry New Yorkers surrounded federal agents and attempted to block them from driving off, prompting arrests and fierce standoffs along a bustling downtown corridor.

We continue our coverage of The Road To City Hall. With 13 days to go until the general election, New York City’s mayoral candidates are set to meet for their final debate, with Democrat Zohran Mamdani looking to stay in control of a race increasingly seen as his to win while former Gov. Andrew Cuomo amps up the pressure on Republican Curtis Sliwa to drop out.

And OpenAI introduced its own web browser, Atlas, putting the ChatGPT maker in direct competition with Google as more internet users rely on artificial intelligence to answer their questions.