For those of us who devour movies about media, tech and their impacts on society, this season is a feast. “Primetime” has had people talking for weeks. “The Social Reckoning” is out today. Heck, even “Verity” is about an author and her ghostwriter.

Alex Gibney’s “Musk” is also out in North American theaters today. “Depending on your state of mind, a nearly four-hour documentary about Elon Musk might sound exciting or excruciating,” NYT reviewer Alissa Wilkinson commented.

“The leadup to the film’s release has seen some controversy after Musk used several insults to describe Gibney — ‘an idiot’ was among the mildest ones — and threatened a defamation lawsuit,” Steve Inskeep noted on today’s “Morning Edition.”

So far that lawsuit hasn’t materialized, but the threat certainly made the documentary more newsworthy. “All Americans should probably watch this film like their life depends on it,” Sheelah Kolhatkar wrote for The New Yorker today.

The “Musk” release moved up a week, which got it out of the way of “You Can See Everything,” Nathan Fielder’s documentary/puzzle about Elizabeth Holmes. Alamo Drafthouse is reporting very strong preorder sales for that one.

Critics are mixed on Aaron Sorkin’s sort-of-sequel to “The Social Network.” The movie is currently averaging 59% on Rotten Tomatoes and 53 on Metacritic, far lower than 97% Certified Fresh and 95 scored by Sorkin’s first Facebook feature.

TIME’s Stephanie Zacharek says the new film is “an old-school shoe-leather journalism thriller,” with Jeremy Allen White playing Jeff Horwitz, the WSJ reporter who won the trust of whistleblower Frances Haugen, played by Mikey Madison.

“Sorkin’s point seems to be that even in the digital age, there aren’t really any new ways to be a thorough, ethical journalist — all the old rules still apply,” Zacharek wrote.

But as for the film itself, Variety’s Guy Lodge concluded that the follow-up “is missing more than just David Fincher,” while Vulture’s Alison Willmore wrote that “’Artificial’ is a better ‘Social Network’ sequel than ‘The Social Reckoning.’”

“Artificial,” Luca Guadagnino’s Sam Altman biopic, comes out in December, around the same time as Danny Boyle’s “Ink,” about Rupert Murdoch and Larry Lamb…

The connective thread here? Figures like Mark Zuckerberg, Musk and Holmes are “villains in a new, on-screen front in the backlash over Silicon Valley’s power,” Politico’s Daniel Miller and Tyler Katzenberger wrote here.

Trump once threatened Zuck with “life in prison.” But now, the Meta CEO’s political reset with President Trump is paying off.

CNN’s Clare Duffy, Adam Cancryn and Hadas Gold went deep here on how he’s used his ties to Trump “to help stymie the creation of an AI regulatory agency proposed by Meta’s rivals.” The White House also helped get him “off the hook for testifying in a planned Senate committee hearing earlier this year.”

As one person familiar with the dynamics told CNN, Zuckerberg is a “political chameleon” who is “a survivor in terms of his relationships in DC…”

The president is telling Minnesotans to “fight back” because the state is being “taken over by Somali Immigrants.”

The Department of Homeland Security is defending the shooting of a man from the Dominican Republic in the Bronx.

And the Pentagon is saying it will “livestream the military’s first firing squad execution in decades, allowing the public to watch as the man who killed 13 people in a 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood is put to death.”

It’s notable that Pete Hegseth initially teased this public execution plan during an appearance with Jack Posobiec on the far-right Real America’s Voice.

It’s also, as WaPo’s Drew Harwell pointed out, “hard to overstate how much Hegseth’s execution stream mirrors the U.S. military’s traditional description of ISIS propaganda: broadcast killings designed to send a message, strike fear and create a social media spectacle.”

Violence is the throughline of those three stories, and so is fear.

Trump said of Minnesota yesterday, “there is violence, murder, and mayhem all over the state.” (If you want to understand what’s really going on, read the Star Tribune.)

One of the banners on Fox News last night said, “MINNESOTA TODAY, YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD NEXT.”

Here’s something we haven’t seen in a while: Live TV coverage of a landfalling hurricane.

Hurricane Isaias, now a Category 3 storm, will come ashore tonight near the Florida–Alabama border, and correspondents are fanned out along the Gulf.

The Weather Channel’s Jim Cantore, ABC’s Stephanie Ramos and CNN’s Rafael Romo are in Pensacola Beach, to name a few… CNN’s Isabel Rosales is in Gulf Shores, Alabama… and Fox’s Haley Meier is in Mobile with the “FOX Weather Beast” storm-tracking truck.

“It will be the first time a hurricane has struck any US coastline in two years,” CNN’s live updates page notes. In fact, “if Isaias makes landfall before midnight — as it’s currently forecast to — it will be exactly two years between hurricane hits.”

ABC News still hasn’t explained why it published and then deleted a report about the Trump sons’ investment ties to defense companies.

ABC “just totally nuked it. No note, no explanation, no comment,” Andrew Kaczynski tweeted an hour ago. “It had been shared by tons of top lawmakers and Democratic officials.”

The story’s deletion followed public pushback from a rep for 1789 Capital, where Donald Trump Jr. is a partner. As of this morning, the original URL returns a 404 error, with no correction or editor’s note. One of the companies named in the piece was told it was “published prematurely,” I hear…

That’s Politico’s headline about yesterday’s hearing. As CNN’s Tierney Sneed and Jeremy Herb wrote here, Judge Timothy Kelly “signaled skepticism” about the Justice Department’s defense of Trump’s media ban and repeatedly told the DOJ attorney “that he was bound by DC Circuit precedent — including the precedent that the administration was objecting to.”

The judge “did not announce his decision on the media outlet’s request for a long-term order,” the pair wrote, but did extend his