The Atlantic Daily Newsletter

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning. A few years ago, my colleague Faith Hill reported on what psychologists call the “Michelangelo phenomenon”: the idea that over time, romantic partners mold each other. “Some researchers have found that when that happens, the art tends to look conspicuously like the artist,” she wrote.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. One of Donald Trump’s current favorite riffs is to contrast how (in his opinion) the United States was seen under his predecessor, Joe Biden, and how it’s seen now. “They didn’t respect us two years ago. They laughed at us. NATO laughed at us.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Cory Mills’s reelection campaign was in trouble before it even began. Washington, D.C., police investigated the Florida representative early last year after a woman alleged that he’d assaulted her; later in 2025, a different woman was granted a restraining order against him. Neither woman was his wife.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. For many observers of American politics, the past few years have been disillusioning, knocking down hopeful beliefs about what the people of the United States will support or tolerate. Even some of Donald Trump’s backers have become disaffected.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Over the past nine years, Donald Trump has returned again and again to the concept of steam power. He loves the way that steam propels fighter jets off the decks of aircraft carriers, and he laments that the Navy has pivoted to electromagnetic launchers in its new ships.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. A memorandum of understanding between Iran and the United States, reached in June and intended to provide breathing room to end the conflict between the two countries, expired today.

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning. “Summer always overstays its welcome by about a month,” my colleague Elizabeth Bruenig wrote last week.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Last year, I asked The Atlantic’s writers and editors to name a perfect episode of TV, but a perfect finale is especially hard to pull off—and nothing invokes the wrath of fans quite like a bad ending. Here are eight shows that make the most out of their last minutes.

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here. Before his latest book, Marlon James hadn’t written a novel set in Jamaica in more than a decade. In the years following his Booker Prize–winning A Brief History of Seven Killings, the author focused on his Dark Star Trilogy, set in a fantasy universe.

How to describe President Trump’s Freedom 250 Patriot Games? The contest, which took place earlier this week, brought students ages 14 to 17 together from across America to answer the question: What if your high-school gym teacher walked headfirst into a pole and was then asked to throw an Olympics with a budget of exactly $6 and three weeks’ notice?