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.

Pardon the intrusion, but I am asserting my right (such as it is) as editor in chief to seize temporary control of The Atlantic Daily from Tom Nichols (who I imagine is secretly grateful for this hijacking) in order to share good news about our magazine. For the second year in a row, The Atlantic has been named winner of the National Magazine Award for General Excellence. This is the top honor awarded by the American Society of Magazine Editors, and it is quite a privilege to win, especially given the quality of our fellow finalists, which included, among others, New York magazine and The New York Times Magazine.

We received news of this win last night at a ceremony in Manhattan, a ceremony that very much resembled the Oscars, except for the almost total absence of glamor and complete (and somewhat surprising) absence of onstage slapping. Last year, when we won this same award, I assumed we wouldn’t win it again so quickly, but my generally excellent colleagues at The Atlantic have kept producing stellar journalism at such a ferocious pace as to make us unignorable.

I’ll say a bit more about this award, and what it means for The Atlantic and its readers, in a moment. But first, please take a look at some of the stories we’ve published in recent days, stories that make me proud to work here:

How did America’s weirdest, most freedom-obsessed state fall for an authoritarian governor? The only realistic answer to Putin In the age of Ozempic, what’s the point of working out?

Notes From Last Night

As some of you know, The Atlantic has been been on a bit of a sprint lately: We’ve more than doubled our number of subscribers over the past five years, and we recently won our first-ever Pulitzer Prizes: In 2021, for Ed Yong’s definitive coverage of the pandemic, and last year, for Jennifer Senior’s mesmerizing story about the aftermath of 9/11. Jen won the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing for that cover story as well, and this year, she was again a finalist, for her devastatingly knowing profile of Steve Bannon. In fact, many of our writers were National Magazine Award finalists this year: Caitlin Dickerson’s magnificent and Herculean story uncovering the secret history of the Trump administration’s family-separation policy was a finalist in the Public Interest category; Clint Smith’s moving exploration of memory, slavery, and the Holocaust was a finalist in Columns and Essays; George Packer’s searing look at America’s abandonment of its Afghan allies was a finalist in Reporting; and Graeme Wood’s brilliant profile of the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, was a finalist in the Profile Writing category.

We also won the Best Print Illustration award for Sally Deng’s illustration for “My Escape From the Taliban,” by Bushra Seddique, and we were a finalist in the Best Digital Illustration category. As longtime readers of The Atlantic are aware, we have been known for many things over the years, but not especially for aesthetic excellence. This is a magazine, after all, that didn’t include photography for the first 100 years of its existence (because what’s the rush?). One more note from last night: Jerusalem Demsas, one of our young star writers, was named a winner of the ASME Next Award, for the most promising magazine journalists under 30. I have little doubt that Jerusalem will one day have my job, if my job hasn’t been outsourced to Skynet by the time she wants it.

It is gratifying, of course, to see Atlantic journalists receive so much recognition, but it is not particularly surprising. We realized a while ago that the way to differentiate The Atlantic in a very crowded field is to make stories only of the highest quality and ambition. We sometimes fall short of our objective, but not for lack of trying. My goal at The Atlantic is to build the greatest writers’ collective in the English language, and to surround these writers with the very best editors, artists, designers, and fact-checkers. This goal is not an end in itself. Only by gathering together the best journalists in America can we fulfill our historic mission: To illuminate and inspire; to hold the powerful to account; to stand for the belief that the American idea is worth saving and refining; and to be, in the words of our founding manifesto, “of no party or clique,” to be independent in mind and spirit.

Tomorrow, Tom Nichols will be back (and may very well mock my “climb ev’ry mountain” rhetoric, which is his right), so let me thank our most loyal readers for their support, without which we could not pursue the sort of excellence embodied by our brilliant team of journalists.

Read our finalist stories:

“We Need to Take Away Children,” by Caitlin Dickerson American Rasputin, by Jennifer Senior Monuments to the Unthinkable, by Clint Smith The Betrayal, by George Packer Absolute Power, by Graeme Wood

Today’s News

The Manhattan grand jury hearing the hush-money case involving Donald Trump will reportedly break for two weeks in April, which will push back the possible indictment of the former president. Financial regulators testified before the House Financial Services committee about the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank. The Senate voted to repeal the 2002 resolution that approved the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the 1991 resolution authorizing military force against Iraq in the first Gulf War. The bill now goes to the House.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: The West agreed to pay climate reparations. That was the easy part, Emma Marris writes. Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf looks to cosmic events to process the unfathomable.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Photo-Illustration by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic. Source: Steve Lewis / Getty

“The Gun”

By Clint Smith

the gun heard the first shot /

the gun thought it was a bursting pipe /

the gun heard the second shot and the third /

and the fourth /

the gun realized this was not a pipe

Read the full poem.

More From The Atlantic

One more reason to hate cockroaches Stop sharing viral college-acceptance videos. Photos: a collection of cherry blossoms

Culture Break

Paramount Pictures

Read. After Visiting Friends, the author Michael Hainey’s intimate, noirish quest to find out how his father died.

Or try another of these six memoirs that go beyond memories.

Watch. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, in theaters, marks the return of the sincere blockbuster.

Play our daily crossword.

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

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.

On Sunday, news broke that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had abruptly fired the country’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, after Gallant pleaded for a delay in the judiciary-overhaul plan put forward by Netanyahu’s government. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis rolled out of bed and hit the streets, “believing their country’s democracy to be in peril,” my colleague Yair Rosenberg wrote yesterday in The Atlantic. I chatted with Yair about what led to this moment, and what some coverage of the issue can miss.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

My 6-year-old son died. Then the anti-vaxxers found out. A classic American car is having an identity crisis. Why you fell for the fake pope coat

A Right-Wing Wish List

Kelli María Korducki: Can you walk us through the Netanyahu government’s plans for judicial reform and why they were so controversial?

Yair Rosenberg: Shortly after Netanyahu’s hard-right coalition was sworn in, it proposed an ambitious suite of legislation to reform Israel’s judiciary. In Israel and beyond, there’s expert and political consensus that Israel’s Supreme Court is one of the most powerful in the world, and that it ideally should be reformed to better balance power between the judiciary and elected officials. But the reform that the Netanyahu government put forward was more like a right-wing wish list. It hobbled the court in almost every way, from giving the government near-total control over judicial appointments to ending judicial review. This was less a reform than a revolution. In Israel, a country without a written constitution, it would remove the sole check on the government’s power.

There were no attempts to build national consensus around what was a fundamental reform to the democratic order of Israel. And you have to keep in mind that the members of Netanyahu’s coalition got 48.4 percent of the vote in the last election. They ended up with the majority of seats in parliament due to the quirks of the Israeli electoral system, but they don’t actually represent a majority of the votes. So they’re trying to enact this dramatic overhaul of Israel’s judiciary and its democratic system without any real popular mandate or buy-in.

Kelli: Netanyahu’s coalition first proposed its judiciary overhaul in January, two months before the mass protests that caught the world’s attention earlier this week. What happened in between?

Yair: More protests! They started in January, with tens of thousands of people in more liberal areas, and grew to hundreds of thousands of people across the country. And the movement kept picking up steam. Business and tech leaders began expressing concern that the judicial overhaul would harm the Israeli economy. Civil servants who normally don’t make political statements warned that it would weaken Israel’s institutions and international standing. And, most unusually, members of Israel’s elite army units began coming out and saying that the plan would undermine Israeli democracy as they see it, and that they would not serve in the Israeli army if it passed.

Kelli: So, in a state where military service is mandatory for citizens, service members said they would no longer comply.

Yair: Which brings us to Saturday night, when Netanyahu’s own defense minister, Yoav Gallant, saw this happening and essentially said, We need to pause this legislation. We need to negotiate and do something different, because it is threatening national cohesion. In response, Netanyahu fired Gallant on Sunday night—essentially, for saying what many, many people in the country had been saying.

Israel, for understandable historical reasons, is a very security-focused country. We’re approaching the period of the calendar when Ramadan and Passover intersect, which in the past has seen outbreaks of Israeli-Palestinian violence. Iran is still moving toward a nuclear weapon. And yet, in the midst of this, Netanyahu decided to fire the country’s top security official over a political dispute.

This frightened a lot of Israelis. And so, after midnight, protests unfolded across the country. By Monday morning, this culminated in a national strike. Businesses and schools closed, flights were grounded, and the country came to a halt. One hundred thousand protestors converged on the Israeli Knesset, where the government was set to vote on the legislation. That leads to the dramatic moment where Netanyahu finally comes down and says, I’m going to pause the process. He claimed he was doing so to enable all sides to work out an agreeable compromise, but many suspect he simply hopes the break will take the wind out of the protest movement’s sails so that he and his coalition can push through their original plan.

Kelli: You’ve noted in passing that there are elements of this story that U.S. media narratives don’t always capture. Can you summarize what they are?

Yair: Sometimes, people from outside of Israel think that the ongoing unrest boils down to a controversy over whether or not Israel should have an empowered judiciary. But actually, there is broad consensus in Israel that there should be some level of reform, because many agree that the country’s Supreme Court has evolved over time to become a bit too powerful. It’s just that Israelis vehemently disagree on how to do this fairly.

I would also say that people who follow Israeli affairs from afar tend to view the country through a binary political prism: pro or anti, for or against. But this event complicates that approach. Many people who are normally very supportive of Israel are also very supportive of these protests, because they see the attempt to completely overhaul the judiciary as attacking what they believe Israel should be. And on the other side, you have people who normally are sharply critical of Israel finding themselves sympathetic with the hundreds of thousands of Israelis in the streets protesting Netanyahu and his government. These critics and supporters of Israel are suddenly in this weird position of being on the same side. And I actually think this is healthy! We should not be viewing whole countries through an ideological lens.

Related:

Netanyahu flinched. What American liberals have learned from Israel’s protests

Today’s News

A federal judge ruled that former Vice President Mike Pence must appear in front of a grand jury that is investigating January 6 and Trump’s attempts to interfere in the 2020 election. A Maryland appellate court reinstated the murder conviction of Adnan Syed, who was the subject of the Serial podcast. Russia fired supersonic missiles off the coast of Japan in a training exercise.

Evening Read

Illustration by Paul Spella / The Atlantic; Universal History Archive / Getty

ChatGPT Has Imposter Syndrome

By Ross Andersen

Young people catch heat for being overly focused on personal identity, but they’ve got nothing on ChatGPT. Toy with the bot long enough, and you’ll notice that it has an awkward, self-regarding tic: “As an AI language model,” it often says, before getting to the heart of the matter. This tendency is especially pronounced when you query ChatGPT about its own strengths and weaknesses. Ask the bot about its capabilities, and it will almost always reply with something like:

“As an AI language model, my primary function is …”

“As an AI language model, my ability to …”

“As an AI language model, I cannot …”

The workings of AI language models are by nature mysterious, but one can guess why ChatGPT responds this way. The bot smashes our questions into pieces and evaluates each for significance, looking for the crucial first bit that shapes the logical order of its response. It starts with a few letters or an entire word and barrel-rolls forward, predicting one word after another until eventually, it predicts that its answer should end. When asked about its abilities, ChatGPT seems to be keying in on its identity as the essential idea from which its ensuing chain of reasoning must flow. I am an AI language model, it says, and this is what AI language models do.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

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Culture Break

Kailey Schwerman / Showtime

Read. One of these seven books the critics were wrong about.

Watch. Season 2 of Yellowjackets, on Showtime, which understands the horror of toxic best friends.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Yair adds, “Next week is the Jewish holiday of Passover—or so you may have heard. But what if I told you that ‘Passover’ might be a mistranslation from the original Hebrew, and that many classical Jewish commentators understood the holiday’s name very differently, with different moral lessons? You can learn all about it in my Atlantic newsletter, Deep Shtetl.”

— Kelli

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.