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A High-Octane Mystery Series

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2025 › 01 › a-high-octane-mystery-series › 681467

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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.

Welcome to The Daily’s culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Shayla Love, a staff writer who has written about how sobriety became a tool of self-optimization, the ways invisible habits are driving our lives, and how RFK Jr. is seducing America with wellness.

Shayla’s recommendations include a 1967 British television series that starts out like The Good Place, a “Page Six–esque thriller” about the Sigmund Freud Archives, and an “eclipse-viewing” experience that takes place entirely indoors.

The Culture Survey: Shayla Love

The television show I’m most enjoying right now: The 1967 British television series The Prisoner starts out remarkably similar to The Good Place: A person wakes up in an idyllic town that caters to their every need and also torments them. But in The Prisoner, Patrick McGoohan, the show’s creator and star, isn’t dead; he’s a retired British intelligence agent called Number 6 who refuses to submit to the will of the “Village.” He is put through a series of surreal and futuristic tests by a rotating cast of characters named Number 2 while trying not to be killed by a murderous white bouncing ball. A perfect low-stakes, high-octane episodic mystery. And who is Number 1?

A painting, sculpture, or other piece of visual art that I cherish: The best eclipse I saw last year was not the solar eclipse in April but the Instant Eclipse at Novelty Automation in London. For a few coins, you shut yourself inside a broom-closet-size box, look up, and experience an automated eclipse—no path of totality required. It was made in 1999 by Tim Hunkin, an engineer and artist who created dozens of strange and ingenious arcade machines. When I crammed into the contraption with my boyfriend, we heard audio of a noisy crowd that abruptly silenced when the “sun” vanished. We were surprised by how much wonder we felt as the artificial sky lit up with stars. [Related: The most dazzling eclipse in the universe]

Best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: In the Freud Archives is Janet Malcolm at her best. She turns academic drama into a Page Six–esque thriller that you won’t be able to put down. And just when you think the ride is over, there’s a stunning afterword in the NYRB edition that takes you through the messy aftermath of her reporting.

Three Summers by Margarita Liberaki is my fiction pick. Read this book if you have sisters, if you’ve ever been crushed by a crush, if you have authority problems, or if you feel overwhelmed by a family’s capacity for secrets.

The last museum or gallery show that I loved: To see Pink Mist (Space Division) by James Turrell, you have to wait. You walk into a completely dark room, hands outstretched, blindly searching for a bench. You sit, feeling lost, staring into pitch black. Then, it appears: a pinkish-red rectangle hovering in front of you. The shape doesn’t move or change colors, but it’s a successful optical trick; it changes you. Once your eyes have adjusted, you can’t unsee it. All of the pieces in the Turrell retrospective at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art toy with both your perception and your patience.

Something I recently revisited: I rewatched the entire Canadian sci-fi series Orphan Black with my boyfriend, who had never seen it before. I realized how much this show is a part of my DNA—biomedical patents, an utopian island, longevity, nature versus nurture. Tatiana Maslany plays a handful of characters you’ll be convinced are different people by the end. [Related: The slow creep of uncanny television]

A favorite story I’ve read in The Atlantic: “The Nitrous Oxide Philosopher,” written in 1996 by Dmitri Tymoczko. I’ve returned to this piece dozens of times. The psychologist William James’s interest in altered states of consciousness through nitrous oxide is well known, yet this piece chronicles the lesser-known story of the rogue autodidact philosopher and mystic Benjamin Paul Blood, who inspired James. An Atlantic classic that is still relevant when thinking about drugs and their role in meaning-making or religious belief.

A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: Robert Hass’s translations of three great Japanese haiku poets: Matsuo Bashō, Yosa Buson, and Kobayashi Issa. Hass has so few words to work with, and he picks exactly the right ones.

Like his verb choice in this Bashō haiku:

A bee
staggers out
of the peony.

Or how he preserves the humor and lightness of Issa:

Even with insects—
some can sing,
some can’t.

Two more, the first from Bashō, the next from Issa, to celebrate the end and start of a year:

What fish feel,
birds feel, I don’t know—
the year ending.

New Year’s Day—
everything is in blossom!
I feel about average.

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Amanda Knox: “My last trial” Evangelicals made a bad trade. Jonathan Chait: There is no resistance.

Today’s News

During a tour of North Carolina to survey the damage of Hurricane Helene, President Donald Trump described plans to overhaul or eliminate FEMA. He proposed an alternative scenario in which the federal government pays “a percentage to the state” to aid in disaster response. Hundreds of undocumented immigrants, including those who have been convicted of crimes, were flown out of the country last night on military aircraft, according to the White House. The Senate plans to vote later this evening on whether to confirm Pete Hegseth as defense secretary.

Dispatches

Atlantic Intelligence: Earlier this week, Trump unveiled perhaps the most ambitious infrastructure project in history—and all but dedicated it to Sam Altman, Matteo Wong writes. The Books Briefing: Boris Kachka suggests what to read in the face of disaster.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

January 6ers Got Out of Prison—And Came to My Neighborhood

By Hanna Rosin

On Monday, Stewart Rhodes, the eye-patched founder of the far-right militia known as the Oath Keepers, was in prison, which is where he has been since he was convicted of seditious conspiracy for his role in the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. By Tuesday afternoon, he was taking a nap at my neighbors’ house.

Read the full article.

Trump Targets His Own Government

found 23 Jan The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2025 › 01 › trump-targets-his-own-government › 681413

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Within hours of taking office on Monday, Donald Trump released a raft of executive orders addressing targets he’d gone after throughout his campaign, such as immigration, government spending, and DEI. He issued full pardons for 1,500 January 6 rioters, and signed the first eight executive orders—of dozens so far—in front of a cheering crowd in a sports arena. But amid the deluge of actions, Trump also signed an executive order that takes aim at his own federal bureaucracy—and allows his perceived enemies within the government to be investigated and punished.

The executive order, titled “Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government,” opens by stating as fact that the Biden administration and its allies used the government to take action against political opponents. Democrats, it says, “engaged in an unprecedented, third-world weaponization of prosecutorial power to upend the democratic process.” Its stated purpose, to establish “a process to ensure accountability for the previous administration’s weaponization of the Federal Government against the American people,” reads like a threat. The order calls out particular targets, including the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission—agencies that Trump and his supporters allege betrayed them under President Joe Biden. Trump’s team, led by whoever is appointed attorney general and director of national intelligence, will be sniffing out what it determines to be signs of political bias. These officials will be responsible for preparing reports to be submitted to the president, with recommendations for “appropriate remedial actions.”

What exactly those remedial actions would look like is not clear. The vagueness of the order could result in a “long-running, desultory ‘investigation,’” Quinta Jurecic, a fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution and a contributing writer to The Atlantic, told me in an email.

But the information gathered in such investigations could lead to some federal employees being publicly criticized or otherwise punished by Trump. And beyond theatrics, this order could open the door to the “prosecutions that Trump has threatened against his political opponents,” Jurecic noted. Put another way: In an executive order suggesting that Biden’s administration weaponized the government, Trump is laying out how his administration could do the same.

Trump’s Cabinet is still taking shape, and whoever ends up in the top legal and intelligence roles will influence how this order is executed. Pam Bondi, Trump’s attorney-general pick, is an established loyalist with long-standing ties to Trump (he reportedly considered her for the role in his first term, but worried that her past scandals would impede her confirmation). Bondi, in her first Senate confirmation hearing last week, attempted to downplay Trump’s persistent rhetoric on retribution, and avoided directly answering questions about how she, as head of the Justice Department, would engage with his plans to punish enemies. She said that she wouldn’t entertain hypotheticals about the president, though she did claim that “there will never be an enemies list within the Department of Justice.” Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence, has a history of political shape-shifting, though she has lately shown fealty to MAGA world.

Well before Trump took office, his allies were signaling their interest in turning federal bureaucracy, which they deride as “the deep state,” into a system driven by unquestioning loyalty to the president. As my colleague Russell Berman wrote in 2023, some conservatives have argued, without even cloaking “their aims in euphemisms about making government more effective and efficient,” that bureaucrats should be loyal to Trump. Russ Vought, the nominee for director of the Office of Management and Budget (an unflashy but powerful federal position), who today appeared before Congress for the second time, has previously written that the executive branch should use “boldness to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will.”

The executive order on weaponizing the federal government is consistent with the goals of retribution that Trump expressed on the campaign trail. And accusing rivals of using the government for personal ends has been a favored Republican tactic in recent years. Still, this order confirms that, now that he is back in office, Trump will have no qualms toggling the levers of executive power to follow through on his promises of revenge. Many of Trump’s executive actions this week are sending a clear message: If you are loyal, you are protected. If not, you may be under attack.

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Trump’s second term might have already peaked. The attack on birthright citizenship is a big test for the Constitution. You’re being alienated from your own attention, Chris Hayes writes.

Today’s News

A shooter killed at least one student and injured another before killing himself at Antioch High School in Nashville. Donald Trump said last night that by February 1, he would place a 10 percent tariff on Chinese products. He has also pledged to put a 25 percent tariff on products from Canada and Mexico by the same date. An Israeli military assault in the occupied West Bank began yesterday, killing at least 10 people and injuring 40 others, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.

Evening Read

Illustration by Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic. Source: Getty

Be Like Sisyphus

By Gal Beckerman

This anxious century has not given people much to feel optimistic about—yet most of us resist pessimism. Things must improve. They will get better. They have to. But when it comes to the big goals—global stability, a fair economy, a solution for the climate crisis—it can feel as if you’ve been pushing a boulder up a hill only to see it come rolling back down, over and over: all that distance lost, all that huffing and puffing wasted. The return trek to the bottom of the hill is long, and the boulder just sits there, daring you to start all over—if you’re not too tired.

Read the full article.