poneclub Internet Star? Rock Star? Carter Vail Would Like to Be Both.

Seven months ago, Carter Vail released “Dirt Man,” a fairly ridiculous song that is just over 30 seconds long. “It just came to me while I was sleepingponeclub,” he said. The song is about leaving dirt under his pillow for “the dirt man.”

The silly yet snappy song propelled Mr. Vail, 27, to a new level of internet fame almost overnight. That and other social-media-friendly hits helped him build a combined audience of more than two million followers on Instagram and TikTok.

“It started a lot of very surprising momentum,” Mr. Vail said of “Dirt Man.”

The rapper Yung Gravy tapped Mr. Vail to open for his fall tour; Zane Lowe of Apple Music posted a video of himself on TikTok dancing to Mr. Vail’s music; and record labels started a bidding war for Mr. Vail.

In addition to other hit songs geared to a social media audience (in one, he assures his audience that he would be able to beat up aliens if they ever came to Earth), Mr. Vail, who studied sound engineering at the University of Miami, has multiple albums of what he calls his “serious” music. Another is on the way.

Mr. Vail says he is in talks with production studios that want to turn his shorter songs into animated projects. He hopes to eventually make a variety show, write a blog and start a clothing line.

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Ms. Harris’s speech in Georgia, a top battleground state where she has narrowly trailed in polls, signaled a more combative and nimble approach in the closing weeks of the presidential campaign. On Monday, ProPublica reported that the deaths of two women in the state were a result of delayed treatment after receiving medication abortions, episodes that occurred in the months after Georgia passed a 2022 law banning abortion at six weeks. Two days later, Ms. Harris’s campaign announced that she would travel to the state to highlight their stories.

Little is known about why the two men argued or what prompted the gunfire in the district judge’s chambers in the Letcher County courthouse, beyond the initial details that the authorities gave on Thursday evening. But the violence has shaken the county, a tight-knit Appalachian community of about 21,000 people that has been battered in recent years by the demise of the coal industry and a series of devastating floods in 2022.

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