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.

In today’s reading list, Atlantic journalists offer an intricate examination of those who swindle or hurt others, and those who must live with the fallout. The stories below follow a con man turned true-crime writer, a prison break facilitated by a dog crate, the spectacle of murder fandoms, and more.

The Con Man Who Became a True-Crime Writer

In his old life, Matthew Cox told stories to scam his way into millions of dollars. Now he’s trying to sell tales that are true.

By Rachel Monroe

The True Story of the Married Woman Who Smuggled Her Boyfriend Out of Prison in a Dog Crate

She wanted to escape her marriage. He wanted to escape his life sentence.

By Michael J. Mooney

They Stole Yogi Berra’s World Series Rings. Then They Did Something Really Crazy.

The childhood friends behind the most audacious string of sports-memorabilia heists in American history

By Ariel Sabar

The Perfect Man Who Wasn’t

For years, he used fake identities to charm women out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Then his victims banded together to take him down.

By Rachel Monroe

The Gross Spectacle of Murder Fandom

After four University of Idaho students were killed, TikTok and Reddit sleuths swarmed the campus. The community is still struggling with the wreckage they left behind.

By McKay Coppins

The Mobster Who Bought His Son a Hockey Team

A tale of goons, no-show jobs, and a legendary minor-league franchise that helped land its owner in prison

By Rich Cohen

The Tomb Raiders of the Upper East Side

Inside the Manhattan DA’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit

By Ariel Sabar

The Rise and Fall of an All-Star Crew of Jewel Thieves

They were highly sophisticated. The local police seemed helpless. Then a retired septuagenarian detective stepped in.

By Geoff Manaugh

The Week Ahead

Season 2 of The Night Agent, an action series about an FBI agent who is drawn into the mysterious world of the Night Action organization (streaming on Netflix on Thursday) We Do Not Part, a book by Han Kang that follows the friendship between two Korean women and the massacre on Jeju Island (out Tuesday) Presence, a horror film told from the perspective of a spirit bound to a family’s suburban home (in theaters Friday)

Essay

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

America Just Kinda, Sorta Banned Cigarettes

By Nicholas Florko

No drug is quite like nicotine. When it hits your bloodstream, you’re sent on a ride of double euphoria: an immediate jolt of adrenaline, like a strong cup of coffee injected directly into your brain, along with the calming effect of a beer. Nicotine is what gets people hooked on cigarettes, despite their health risks and putrid smell. It is, in essence, what cigarette companies are selling, and what they’ve always been selling. Without nicotine, a cigarette is just smoldering leaves wrapped in some fancy paper.

But if the Biden administration gets its way, that’s essentially all cigarettes will be.

Read the full article.

More in Culture

The hipster grifter peaked too soon. A singing chimp isn’t the wildest part of Better Man. Where Han Kang’s nightmares come from A Palestinian story unlike any other A Holocaust novel confronts fiction’s limits.

Catch Up on The Atlantic

How Trump made Biden’s Gaza peace plan happen David Frum on Justin Trudeau’s performative self-regard The one Trump pick Democrats actually like

Photo Album

A young child runs across a rectangle of light in a dreamlike image. (Mitja Kobal / Kolari Vision)

Take a look at the top images in this year’s “Life in Another Light” biannual infrared-photography competition.

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

No drug is quite like nicotine. When it hits your bloodstream, you’re sent on a ride of double euphoria: an immediate jolt of adrenaline, like a strong cup of coffee injected directly into your brain, along with the calming effect of a beer. Nicotine is what gets people hooked on cigarettes, despite their health risks and putrid smell. It is, in essence, what cigarette companies are selling, and what they’ve always been selling. Without nicotine, a cigarette is just smoldering leaves wrapped in some fancy paper.

But if the Biden administration gets its way, that’s essentially all cigarettes will be. Today, regulators at the FDA announced that they are pushing forward with a rule that would dramatically limit how much nicotine can go in a cigarette. The average cigarette nowadays is estimated to have roughly 17 milligrams of the drug. Under the new regulation, that would fall to less than one milligram. If enacted—still a big if—it would decimate the demand for cigarettes more effectively than any public-service announcement ever could.

The idea behind the proposal is to make cigarettes nonaddictive. One study found that some young people begin feeling the symptoms of nicotine addiction within a matter of days after starting to smoke. In 2022, roughly half of adult smokers tried to quit, but fewer than 10 percent were ultimately successful.

For that reason, the rule could permanently change smoking in America. The FDA insists that the proposal isn’t a ban per se. But in the rule’s intended effect, ban may indeed be an apt term. The FDA estimates that nearly 13 million people—more than 40 percent of current adult smokers—would quit smoking within one year of the rule taking effect. After all, why inhale cancerous fumes without even the promise of a buzz? By the end of the century, the FDA predicts, 4.3 million fewer people would die because of cigarettes. The agency’s move, therefore, should be wonderful news for just about everyone except tobacco executives. (Luis Pinto, a vice president at Reynolds American, which makes Camel and Newport cigarettes, told me in an email that the policy “would effectively eliminate legal cigarettes and fuel an already massive illicit nicotine market.”)

Still, there’s no telling whether the FDA’s idea will actually come to fruition. The regulation released today is just a proposal. For the next eight months, the public—including tobacco companies—will have the opportunity to comment on the proposal. Then the Trump administration can decide whether to finalize the regulation as is, make changes, or scrap it entirely. Donald Trump has not signaled what he will do, and his relationship to cigarettes is complicated. In 2017, his FDA commissioner put the idea of cutting the nicotine in cigarettes to nonaddictive levels on the agency’s agenda. But the tobacco industry has recently attempted to cozy up to the president-elect. A subsidiary of Reynolds donated $10 million to a super PAC backing Trump. Even if the Trump administration finalizes the rule, the FDA plans to give tobacco companies two years to comply, meaning that the earliest cigarettes would actually change would be fall 2027.

If Trump goes through with the rule, it may be the end of cigarettes. But although cigarettes might be inseparable from nicotine, nicotine is not inseparable from cigarettes. These days, people looking to consume the drug can pop a coffee-flavored Zyn in their upper lip or puff on a banana-ice-flavored e-cigarette. These products are generally safer than cigarettes because they do not burn tobacco, and it is tobacco smoke, not nicotine, that causes most of the harmful effects of cigarettes. FDA estimates that should cigarettes lose their nicotine, roughly half of current smokers would transition to other, safer products to get their fix, Brian King, the head of the FDA’s tobacco center, told me.

Whether nicotine’s staying power is a good thing is still unclear. Few people—even in the tobacco industry—will argue with a straight face that cigarettes are safe. Nicotine defenders, however, are far more common. In my time covering nicotine, I have spoken with plenty of people who emphatically believe that the drug helps them get through their day, and that their habit is no more shameful or harmful than an addiction to caffeine. There is clearly a market for these products. Just ask Philip Morris International, which earlier this year invested $600 million to build a new factory to meet surging demand for Zyn. But it’s true, too, that nicotine is addictive, regardless of how it’s consumed. There isn’t much data looking at long-term impacts of these new nicotine-delivery devices, but the effects of nicotine, such as increased heart rate and blood pressure, are enough to give cardiologists pause.

I promised my parents—both smokers during my childhood—that I’d never pick up a cigarette. I kept that promise. But about a year ago, I started to wonder just how bad safer forms of nicotine could actually be. (Mom, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry.) I found myself experimenting with Zyn. Doing so gave me a window into why my parents craved cigarettes, but it also quickly gave me a firsthand look at why it was always so hard for them to quit. My one-Zyn-a-day habit quickly became two, and two became four. And yet, each time the pouch hit my lip, that burst of dopamine seemed to get more and more lackluster. Soon enough, I was reaching for nicotine without even thinking about it. The FDA’s new proposal, if finalized, will mean that misguided teens (or, in my case, 33-year-olds) prone to experimentation won’t do so with deadly cigarettes. But that will be far from the end of America’s relationship with nicotine.