For most of this past week, the conference badge was on the other lanyard: My wife was out of town for work.That brief spell of solo parenting ended with the house miraculously not much messier than before and me needing a nap more than usual.

10/17/2018: Ex-CIA chief’s take on election security: Don’t panic, do stay paranoid, Yahoo Finance

When I filed a first draft of my interview with former CIA director John Brennan two weeks ago, my editor said it read more like two posts and asked if I wouldn’t mind turning it into a pair of stories. This covers the second half of our conversation, folding in some quotes from some subsequent election-security events around D.C.

10/20/2018: Saudi Arabia’s Twitter mole, Al Jazeera

The New York Times reported Saturday that Saudi Arabia’s attempts to suppress dissidents like murdered Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi extended to recruiting a Twitter insider. Several hours later, I told viewers–as overdubbed into Arabic–that this development represented a serious departure from Silicon Valley’s traditional definition of espionage as “an employee takes trade secrets to a competitor.”

10/21/2018: Saudi Twitter operations Al Jazeera

As part of what looks like the same kind of flood-the-zone coverage strategy I usually associate with Apple events, AJ had me on two more times Sunday to talk about this Twitter mole and Riyadh’s other attempts to change the social-media conversation.