Prosecutors ask for limits on what Donald Trump is allowed to publicly say about the election fraud case.

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.

After a series of botched executions, Alabama recently managed to execute a prisoner without incident. What does that mean for the future of capital punishment in the state?

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Putting Trump on the couch What happens when a carnival barker writes intellectual history The problem with “Why do people live in Phoenix?” A strike scripted by Netflix

A Killing Without Incident

Late last month, the state of Alabama executed a man named Jimi Barber. That the procedure went according to plan is itself notable, my colleague Elizabeth Bruenig wrote this week. Last year, the state made history by botching three executions in a row: Two condemned men, Alan Miller and Kenny Smith, survived their own attempted killings, pierced with needles over and over as executioners tried to set IV lines, until their death warrants expired at midnight. Another man, Joe Nathan James, was executed after repeated attempts to insert an IV catheter all over his body.

In November, Alabama Governor Kay Ivey ordered a temporary moratorium on executions and announced a review of the state’s execution process. Barber’s killing was the first real test of that review—which, Liz notes, has been hamstrung from the start—and of the state’s ability to successfully carry out an execution.

Now, with Jimi Barber, Alabama has “at last managed what prisoners and their attorneys had been demanding … an unremarkable judicial killing.” What happens now? The state will likely use Barber’s death to show courts that it can carry out uncomplicated executions, Liz told me today, but Alabama is still in litigation with Smith’s attorneys and may have to surrender sensitive information in discovery.

Alabama’s blunders are primarily a story about the process of execution in America: how it works, and what happens when it doesn’t. But lurking just beyond these procedural issues is also the question of whom execution is really for. “Executions are performed by the state with a lot of dedication to the victims’ families,” Liz told me when we talked about her reporting last year. “This is part of the pageantry of an execution.” But sometimes, the desire that the state assigns to victims’ families is not what those families actually want.

Jimi Barber is one such example. “Barber’s execution, like all of the other past and future executions in Alabama, would be, in Ivey’s telling, for the victims and their families—though in Barber’s case, at least one member of his victim’s family has forgiven him, and isn’t looking forward to his execution,” Liz wrote last month. She continued:

Yet victims’ family members who do not wish to see prisoners executed don’t seem to be who the governor has in mind; the botched execution of Joe Nathan James in July of 2022 also happened against the express and vocal wishes of his victim’s family. Whatever desire is actually driving Alabama’s zealous pursuit of judicial killings, it seems related to the wishes of grieving families only theoretically, not specifically.

Liz got to know Barber in the months before his execution, and she found that his spiritual transformation went well beyond the clichés one might associate with a “jailhouse conversion.” For years, Barber had been in close communication with Sarah Gregory, the granddaughter of the woman he murdered. The day before Barber’s execution, Gregory told Liz that it felt like she was “losing a friend tomorrow … I would’ve never thought I would’ve ever said that. He was a friend of mine, and I’m gonna miss him.”

Her statement is “a testament to Barber’s own penitence, the way he had thrown himself into Gregory’s forgiveness and forged a bond from the remnants of what he had broken,” Liz argues. But in the end, “capital punishment is indifferent to redemption,” she writes. To the state of Alabama, Barber’s death is a sign that their experiment was successful. The state will work to ensure that more executions follow.

Related:

Jimi Barber died a forgiven man. A history of violence (from 2022)

Today’s News

The U.S. economy showed steady employment growth last month, but it also shows signs of cooling.   The Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny was sentenced to 19 more years in prison for “extremist activities.” He is currently serving a nine-year sentence. Justin Pearson and Justin Jones, two Tennessee Democratic state representatives who were expelled from the legislature after participating in a protest against gun violence, won back their seats in a special election.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: “The last book I read may be the perfect summer novel,” Gal Beckerman writes. It’s one of his contributions to our updated summer reading list.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Jim Goldberg / Magnum

Marriage Isn’t Hard Work; It’s Serious Play

By Nina Li Coomes

Marriage is work: I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard that saying. In my personal life, I heard it from youth pastors at Bible camp, from well-meaning aunts at bridal showers, even from the woman who threaded my eyebrows the week before my wedding. In popular culture, I’ve seen the adage espoused on Martha Stewart’s website and by Ben Affleck on the Oscars stage. The idea has the sheen of a proverb, timeless and true.

So after my wedding a few years ago, I attempted to be the best marriage worker I could be. I scheduled biweekly budget meetings and preached the benefits of the “I” statement in an argument. I analyzed my husband’s working style to optimize how we could divide unloading the dishwasher and vacuuming the kitchen. At its best, this attitude gave our marriage the clean hum of a caffeinated, productive morning at the office—every task checked off, every email replied to. At its worst, I felt resentful, exhausted, and miserly with my affection, like I could dole it out only after one of us had completed a job. Viewing marriage as labor never made me feel more connected to the man I had chosen to partner with.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The next test for the abortion-rights movement Doctors suddenly got way better at treating eczema. You’re probably drinking enough water.

Culture Break

Photo-illustration by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Read. In his new novel, Death of the Great Man, the psychiatrist Peter D. Kramer imagines a Trumplike president’s sessions with a shrink.

Watch. The Righteous Gemstones (streaming on Max), a show about a flawed evangelical family, is goofy on its face but unusually eloquent on the topic of forgiveness.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Before you go, spend some time with one of my favorite Liz essays on another topic: loving and leaving her homeland of Texas. “Texas was always too extreme for me, somehow. The heat, the brightness, the wildness of the place—honestly and prominently presented—overwhelmed me in their charge. But it must have taught me what beauty is, because I still search for it everywhere I look,” she wrote last year.

— Isabel

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.