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After returning from a trip to Tel Aviv to demonstrate U.S. support for Israel’s war with Hamas, President Joe Biden used Thursday evening’s Oval Office address to make the case for sending wartime aid to Israel and continuing American support for Ukraine.

The president’s plan is complicated by events at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. Legislating is at a standstill as House Republicans have yet to reach a consensus on who will be their next speaker.

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic and moderator, Jeffrey Goldberg, this week to discuss this and more are Dana Bash, the chief political correspondent and anchor of Inside Politics With Dana Bash on CNN; Franklin Foer, a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future; Steve Inskeep, the host of Morning Edition on NPR and the author of Differ We Must: How Lincoln Succeeded in a Divided America; and Nancy Youssef, a national-security correspondent at The Wall Street Journal.

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.

“I wonder whether the non-photographer can grasp the peculiar quality of the pleasure of being an amateur photographer,” Richard L. Simon, the co-founder of the publishing house Simon & Schuster, wrote in The Atlantic in 1942. Simon credits the camera itself with much of the joy of amateur photography:

Imagine, then, you unhappy non-photographers, a glorious piece of mechanism … that has within itself the ability to capture for posterity a baby’s smile, a setter at point, the kindly wrinkles of a grandfather … It can magnify a hundredfold the pollen on the rose petal. It can re-create the glistening of the snow and of the trees on a frosty February morning. No, it cannot tell you the time, but it can immortalize the scenes, the moods, even the overtones of daily life.

Simon’s love letter to the camera is a reminder that photography is as much about the mechanism as it is about the result. Today’s newsletter explores how we take photos, and how new technology can both dull and complicate the experience.

On Photography

You Can Learn to Be Photogenic

By Michael Waters

Hollywood invented the idea that some people naturally look better on camera. Don’t believe it.

AI Is About to Photoshop Your Memories

By Charlie Warzel

The smartphone camera roll is a digital diary. What happens when the images inside are more perfect than real?

Our Photo Editor’s Must-See Images

By Isabel Fattal

Alan Taylor on the visuals that have stuck with him

Still Curious?

Street photography from ’80s and ’90s New York: Armed with his camera and a collection of albums, Jamel Shabazz documented Black life in the city. The photography of Margaret Bourke-White: A small collection of the thousands of remarkable images she made over a lifetime

Other Diversions

Self-checkout is a failed experiment. The sociopaths among us—and how to avoid them If you ever speak in public, follow this advice.

P.S.

“The editor of the Atlantic wishes me to come down to earth,” Simon writes toward the end of his essay about the glory of the camera. He obliges by making a list of tips for readers hoping to become decent amateur photographers themselves. One good piece of advice: “Photography being mostly a study and rendition of lights and shadows, take your pictures before ten o’clock in the morning and after four o’clock in the afternoon.”

— Isabel