In the quiet hum of the Cape Girardeau County election office, something unusual is happening. It isn’t the steady stream of voters, though there have been plenty of those since early voting opened. It isn’t the clicking of the doors or the low murmur of poll workers checking IDs. It’s a rumor, spreading through social media, that a ballot could be thrown out if an election worker so much as touches it with a pen. For anyone who has ever stood in a voting booth, that thought is enough to make your stomach drop. You’ve done everything right. You registered,…

War used to be something that happened on a map, with front lines you could draw in red and blue. Today, the front line is a timeline. It runs through Twitter feeds and TikTok recommendation pages, through Facebook groups and YouTube comments, through a hundred thousand anonymous accounts that were created not to share a human experience but to share a human emotion — specifically, outrage. The weapons are no longer only missiles; they are screens. The bombs are no longer only explosive; they are viral. When a false story can reach millions of people before a single fact-check has…