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.

The following contains spoilers for some of the episodes mentioned.

Recently, I tasked seven Atlantic writers and editors with selecting a perfect episode of TV. What emerged was a list that spans genres, generations, and cultural sensibilities. Their recommendations, which include the Veep episode “C**tgate” and a SpongeBob episode that examines “the empty promise of the good life,” are proof that identifying good TV is, at its core, a gut instinct. A perfect episode must find a way to burrow itself in the viewer’s mind, ready to be recalled in today’s crowded field of television.

When I posed the same challenge to The Daily’s readers earlier this week, I was met with enthusiasm and exasperation. “This is an impossible question,” Eden wrote back. “It’s like asking for the perfect song, the perfect movie, or the perfect book.” That being said, “I can think of five off the top of my head!”

Eden’s list includes “Forks” from The Bear, “Through the Looking Glass” from Lost, “The Suitcase” from Mad Men, and “Long, Long Time” from The Last of Us. And that doesn’t even cover “Friday Night Lights, or The Wire, or Insecure, or Derry Girls, or The Sopranos, or The Wonder Years, or My Brilliant Friend, or Curb Your Enthusiasm,” Eden added. I can sympathize—the breadth of options is dizzying.

Maybe some criteria would help. Our culture writer Sophie Gilbert wrote that “the thing I love most is when a television series tells a complete story in miniature—a stand-alone short that puts a particular dynamic or relationship or cast member front and center.” Radio Atlantic’s podcast host, Hanna Rosin, argued that, “unlike a perfect movie, a perfect episode of television does not need to surprise you or make you cry. It just needs to move your beloved or loathed characters through the formula in an especially excellent way.” And Suzanne, 59, offered her own formula: “The script must be: (1) tense or funny; (2) warm and loving to the viewers, performers, and crew; and (3) move the overall story forward.”

Of course, the benchmarks for what makes an episode perfect are as subjective and varied as viewers’ selections. But a thorough analysis of The Daily’s reader responses has uncovered some patterns. At least five people named a West Wing episode: Two readers nominated “Two Cathedrals,” which shows “the effects of death on time,” wrote David, from Chicago; L. Hawkins, 70, recommends “Noel,” adding that viewers should “listen for the sirens as the episode fades out.”

“Long, Long Time” from The Last of Us was mentioned by both Eden and Bob—it offers “a lesson that love may find you at any time, any place, and under the most unexpected circumstances,” Bob wrote. Two readers agreed with Atlantic film critic David Sims, who insisted in our recent roundup that “the richest cache [of perfect episodes] to search is the ‘case of the week’ entries of The X-Files.” Lisa, 47, wrote that she was thrilled to see “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose” in our list (she also recommends the series finale of Derry Girls).

Other readers highlighted examples of good comedy. In only 22 minutes, “Remedial Chaos Theory” from Community “tells seven different stories, with each timeline building on the last,” E.F., 46, wrote. “The Ski Lodge” from Frasier stands out to Bruce, 52, who said that the episode is “riddled with quotable laugh-out-loud lines.” And L.M., 61, laughed until she cried watching a loopy Steve Martin in Only Murders in the Building’s “Open and Shut.”

For some, a perfect episode tells a story that reverberates throughout their life. Sharon, from California, wrote about an episode she remembers watching on Hallmark Hall of Fame, which follows a grief-stricken child who reads a story about magical silver shoes. To his astonishment, he finds skates that look identical, which he puts on to go skating in hopes of bringing back his dead parent. “As life went on and I became the mother of a child who lost his father in childhood, I’ve recalled the episode more than once,” Sharon wrote. “Now, at 80 years old, it still breaks my heart.”

Related:

Eight perfect episodes of TV The 13 best TV shows of 2024

Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

The oligarchs who came to regret supporting Hitler The last days of American orange juice America’s “marriage material” shortage

The Week Ahead

Captain America: Brave New World, a Marvel action movie starring Anthony Mackie and Harrison Ford (in theaters Friday) Season 3 of Yellowjackets, a thriller series about a girls’ soccer team whose plane crash-lands in the wilderness (premieres on Paramount+ Friday) Beartooth, a novel by Callan Wink about two brothers near Yellowstone who agree to commit a heist to settle their debts (out Tuesday)

Essay

Illustration by The Atlantic

ADHD’s Sobering Life-Expectancy Numbers

By Yasmin Tayag

When I was unexpectedly diagnosed with ADHD last year, it turned my entire identity upside down. At 37, I’d tamed my restlessness and fiery temper, my obsessive reorganization of my mental to-do list, and my tendency to write and rewrite the same sentence for hours. Being this way was exhausting, but that was just who I was, or so I thought. My diagnosis reframed these quirks as symptoms of illness—importantly, ones that could be managed. Treatment corralled my racing thoughts in a way that I’d never before experienced.

Read the full article.

More in Culture

10 indie films you should watch for in 2025 A horror movie that already gave away its twist How the economists took over the NBA Music’s new generation is here. The modern voice of war writing

Catch Up on The Atlantic

The government’s computing experts say they are terrified. Nobody wants Gaz-a-Lago. Trump’s assault on USAID makes Project 2025 look like child’s play, Russell Berman writes. How Trump lost his trade war

Photo Album

Naga sadhus, or Hindu holy men, arrive in Prayagraj, India. (ANI / Rahul Singh / Reuters)

Take a look at these photos of Maha Kumbh Mela, a religious festival in India that’s also the largest gathering in the world.

P.S.

I realize it’d be a bit unfair to make everybody else share their perfect episode without naming mine: the series finale of Fleabag. There are many good things I can point out about this episode—Claire’s mad dash to happiness, Fleabag’s final confession, the Alabama Shakes song that plays over the show’s last moments. But above all else, it moved me, reminding me that love can outlast the person who prompted it.

— Stephanie

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

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.

So you’re a world leader and you’ve been threatened by the American president. What now? First, take some consolation: You’re not alone. The first two weeks of the second Trump administration have seen the White House trying to wring policy concessions from allies and adversaries both near and far.

Now to come up with a response. Simply ignoring Donald Trump is not an option. The United States wields so much power that even if you think the president is irrational or bluffing, you have to reply. Any leader must calibrate a response that will speak not only to Trump but also to their own domestic audience. This may be Diplomacy 101, but Trump will nonetheless expect your answer to be fully focused on him. “Trump doesn’t seem to have any concept that maybe other people have publics to which they’re accountable,” John Bolton, who served as national security adviser in his first term, recently told me.

As heads of state scramble for the best response, we’ve seen several different approaches. Each has clear upsides—but also some pitfalls.

Fight Fire With Fire

Example: Colombia. On January 26, President Gustavo Petro posted on X announcing that he’d turned back two American military planes full of deportees. “We will receive our citizens in civilian airplanes, without them being treated as delinquents,” he wrote. “Colombia must be respected.” Trump promptly threatened huge tariffs; Petro fired back, threatening tariffs of his own and saying, “You will never dominate us.” In the end, Petro agreed to accept military flights but also got assurances from the U.S. that Colombians would not be handcuffed or photographed, and would be escorted by Department of Homeland Security staff, not troops.

Why it might work: Trump doesn’t actually like conflict, so he might blink. (While the presidents sniped at each other, their respective aides were hammering out an agreement.) He also sometimes respects a bold, brassy response—just ask his good pal Kim Jong Un of North Korea.

Why it might not: If Trump had gone through with 25 or 50 percent tariffs, Colombia’s economy would have been devastated. It’s a high-risk play.

***

Make a Deal

Examples: Mexico, Panama, Denmark. These countries aren’t powerful enough to fight Trump outright, so they’re looking for a way to compromise. This weekend, the White House announced large tariffs on Mexican and Canadian goods, but this morning, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo announced that she had struck a deal with Trump to avoid tariffs. “Mexico will reinforce the northern border with 10,000 members of the National Guard immediately, to stop drug trafficking from Mexico to the United States, in particular fentanyl,” she posted on X. “The United States commits to work to stop the trafficking of high-powered weapons to Mexico.” That’s a concrete commitment from Mexico and a rather vague one from the U.S., but it allows Mexico to escape tariffs and save some face. Elsewhere, Panama is promising to not renew an infrastructure agreement with China after Trump threatened to seize the Panama Canal. And Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen is offering the U.S. a chance to expand its presence on Greenland, even as she says the island is absolutely not for sale. “If this is about securing our part of the world, we can find a way forward,” she said.

Why it might work: Trump is fundamentally transactional, and in each of these cases he’s getting a win without having to do anything besides issue a threat.

Why it might not: Trump is getting a win without having to do anything besides issue a threat. He might be satisfied for now, but he also might conclude that you can be easily bullied—so he might come back for more later. Giving in to Trump could offend your domestic audience and win only a temporary reprieve.

***

Try Targeted Threats

Example: Canada. Facing similar tariffs to Mexico, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau initially announced his own tariffs. Trudeau’s list included a few particular goods produced in red states that support Trump, including Kentucky bourbon and Florida orange juice. At a press conference Saturday, Trudeau spoke directly to Americans. “Tariffs against Canada will put your jobs at risk, potentially shutting down American auto assembly plants and other manufacturing facilities,” he said. “They will raise costs for you, including food at the grocery store and gas at the pump.” Late this afternoon, Trudeau announced that he and Trump had struck a deal in which Canada made hazy commitments to border security in exchange for Trump pausing tariffs.

Why it might work: This strategy is effective for countries like Canada, large enough trading partners that they can inflict real pain on the U.S. economy—which gives their threats some heft. Trudeau's tariffs were also cleverly tailored for maximum political impact in the U.S.

Why it might not: Trump backed down now, but Canada still stands to lose more than the U.S., and Trump knows that Trudeau is a lame duck.

***

Speak Softly and Carry a Big Stick

Example: China, the European Union. Trump has already imposed new tariffs on China and has threatened Europe as well. China’s government promised “necessary countermeasures to defend its legitimate rights and interests,” and French President Emmanuel Macron said today, “If our commercial interests are attacked, Europe, as a true power, will have to make itself respected and therefore react.” (Confidential to the Élysée: “True powers” don’t usually need to announce themselves as such.)

Why it might work: Trump doesn’t like conflict, has many reasons to work with American allies in Europe, and already lost a trade war with China in his first term. These vague threats are a sign of some strength, following Theodore Roosevelt’s maxim about foreign policy.

Why it might not: You think Trump’s going to be scared off by vague threats? This could just whet his appetite. Trump’s exchange with Petro suggests that threats work only if he thinks you really mean it.

Related:

What Trump’s finger-pointing reveals The price America will pay for Trump’s tariffs

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Purging the government could backfire spectacularly. The Democrats show why they lost. The race-blind college-admissions era is off to a weird start.

Today’s News

Secretary of State Marco Rubio was appointed to be the acting administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, which Trump wants to shut down, according to Elon Musk. Trump signed an executive order that sets up plans for a U.S. sovereign-wealth fund. The fund could be used to pay for infrastructure projects and other investments, including buying TikTok, according to Trump. The Treasury Department reportedly gave Musk and members of the Department of Government Efficiency access to the federal payment system, which contains sensitive information for millions of Americans.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: “To stay in or to go out, that is the question,” Stephanie Bai writes. The cost-benefit analysis of weekend plans never ends.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

The Illegal Drug at Every Corner Store

By Amogh Dimri

To judge by the shelves of America’s vice merchants, the nation is in the grips of a whipped-cream frenzy. Walk into any vape store or sex shop, and you’ll find canisters of nitrous oxide showcased in window displays—ostensibly to catch the eye of bakers and baristas, who use the gas to aerate creams and foams. At the bodega near my apartment, boxes of up to 100 mini-canisters are piled up to eye level, next to Baby Yoda bongs.

In fact, culinary professionals generally don’t shop for equipment at stores with names like Puff N Stuff or Condom Sense. The true clientele inhales the gas to get high.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

David Frum: The tasks of an anti-Trump coalition The truth about Trump’s Iron Dome for America If RFK Jr. loses Trump’s campaign to dismantle the government

Culture Break

Warner Bros. Entertainment

Watch. Companion (out in theaters) is a horror movie that has already given away its twist—but it has others in store, David Sims writes.

Celebrate. This year’s Grammys ceremony showcased the next generation of willful, distinct talents, Spencer Kornhaber writes.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai 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.

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.

Senator Katie Britt, Republican of Alabama, is upset. She believes that someone in the United States Air Force decided to interpret President Donald Trump’s recent executive order to terminate “all discriminatory programs, including illegal DEI and ‘diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility’ (DEIA) mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government, under whatever name they appear,” just the way it was written.

No one is quite sure what happened, but somehow this order resulted in the excision from a U.S. Air Force training course of some materials about the legendary Tuskegee Airmen, the all-Black World War II fighter pilots known as the Red Tails because of their aircraft’s distinctive markings. Air Force officials confirmed on Saturday that a video had been removed from the training curriculum but only because it was “intertwined in courses now under review,” and it is now back in the curriculum.

Britt referred to this kind of action as “malicious compliance,” meaning a kind of opposition through aggressive and sometimes overly literal implementation of a command or policy. Rather than refuse to obey, the person or group engaging in malicious compliance takes a kind of “monkey’s paw” approach, implementing the directives as destructively as possible. (Every teenager who has loaded the dishwasher improperly on purpose, hoping never to be told to clear the table again, knows what malicious compliance means.)

Britt also tagged Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on social media. Hegseth, who was nominated for his position in part because of his vow to root out wokeness and DEI and to replace them with “lethality,” responded enthusiastically: “Amen! We’re all over it Senator. This will not stand.”

Britt’s complaint about malicious compliance is a diversion. Trump’s wave of executive orders is designed to be performatively malicious. My colleague Adam Serwer years ago noted that, for the MAGA movement, “the cruelty is the point,” and now Trump’s orders make clear that the malice is the policy.

The series of presidential decrees is largely intended to delight the Republican base; unfortunately, government workers cannot divine what Trump really meant. The president has not given any cue that his orders should be interpreted in some more generous way. In fact, days before the Air Force kerfuffle, federal workers received an email from their supervisors (based on a template provided by the Office of Personnel Management) that could have come straight from a party apparatchik in the old Soviet Union. This memo not only told staff to be on the lookout for attempts to hide DEI-related ideological contamination, but warned them of their obligation to rat out colleagues who did so or face “adverse” job consequences themselves.

The advisory, which has since been taken off a government website, continued: “We are aware of efforts by some in government to disguise these programs by using coded or imprecise language. If you are aware of a change in any contract description or personnel position description since November 5, 2024”—that is, since Election Day—“to obscure the connection between the contract and DEIA or similar ideologies,” employees must report it to OPM within ten days.

This is not exactly language that encourages anyone to use common sense and good judgment to decide what constitutes DEI contraband. This is a command that says, in effect: This could mean anything; if you don’t report it, and we find it, you’re in trouble. When government employees get a memo like that, they are not inclined to sit around wondering what counts and what doesn’t.

Trump’s other executive orders are likewise designed to show the GOP base that the new administration is doing all of the things that Trump promised he’d do—even if they’re things that, legally, no president can do. Trump had pledged, for example, to eliminate birthright citizenship, so he sharpied out part of the Fourteenth Amendment and declared victory. He froze federal grants and loans—an order now temporarily blocked by a judge—which could have endangered any number of programs, including school lunches. (And about time, according to Representative Rich McCormick, Republican of Georgia, who told CNN today that those indolent kids need to go get jobs—even, apparently, schoolchildren who aren’t old enough to work—instead of “spong[ing] off the government”).

What would non-malicious compliance with such a mandate even look like? Instead of a lunch, are schools supposed to hand poor kids a glass of water and then wish them luck in their job search?

Of course, the Trump administration knows that aid to states and localities will begin to flow again, that children will be getting lunches, and that babies born on U.S. soil are citizens. The goal of all these orders is not to implement policy, but to generate outrage, report the spasms of liberal apoplexy to the MAGA faithful, and then, when necessary, go to court. And why not? The president now has a politically sympathetic Supreme Court majority that worked hard to keep him out of prison while he was a candidate, and has functionally immunized him against almost any challenge now that he’s back in office. Trump’s people know that they cannot actually shake the Constitution like an Etch A Sketch and make birthright citizenship disappear, but why not give it a shot, especially if a trolling executive order makes the base happy?

Trump and his people may also believe that a sleet storm of executive orders, some of which might stick here and there while others melt on contact with reality, is a way to demonstrate competence. They are likely still stung by the fiasco over the 2017 travel ban that initially got swatted down in court, and this time they want to appear as if they know what they’re doing.

But this is merely mimicking competence and energy. The “return to work” order, for example, is a MAGA fan favorite, because it plays to a common stereotype among many Americans that federal employees who work from home are scamming goldbrickers plodding around the house in their bunny slippers and tapping the occasional key on a laptop. Although showing up to an office or worksite in-person is (and should be) a basic requirement of most jobs, remote work in many cases benefits the government and the taxpayer: It reduces congestion in cities, and it offloads a lot of overhead costs (heat, water, lighting, etc.) onto the worker. That’s why the government and private industry were trending toward remote arrangements long before the pandemic.

In any case, many federal offices don’t have enough space to bring everyone back, but Trump may be attempting to make government service onerous enough that some of them will leave anyway: All federal employees have until February 6 to accept a sizable buyout if they cannot or will not return to in-person work. In the end, the RTO power play isn’t really about trying to fill empty offices. Instead, Trump is telling federal employees that all of the arrangements they’ve made with their departments about schedules, child care, commutes, and staffing are now invalid, because their career and service matters less than making some red-state voter feel that the president finally stuck it to them and their co-workers.

Maybe a non-malicious way to enforce such orders exists. But that’s not the point.

Related:

The cruelty is the point. (From 2018) The strategy behind Trump’s policy blitz

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Trump tries to seize the “power of the purse.” What an undervaccinated America would look like China’s DeepSeek surprise

Today’s News

A district-court judge temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s pause on federal grants and loans. Trump signed an executive order that would exclude gender-transition care from federal insurance programs. The Department of Justice announced yesterday that it has fired more than a dozen officials who worked on the criminal investigations into Trump.

Evening Read

Illustration by Danielle Del Plato

Just Say No to Terrible White LEDs

By Gilad Edelman

God said, “Let there be light”—everyone knows that. But God did not specify what color light, and this would eventually prove problematic.

In the age of the LED light bulb, consumers have an unfathomable range of lighting options. This has, perversely, made the task of pleasantly illuminating our homes harder, not easier.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

“Dear James”: Oh, how the men drone on The libs are having their paranoia moment. Blind partisanship does not actually help Trump. Biden’s Middle East legacy

Culture Break

Jordan Hemingway

Listen. The sensation you get when dancing or making a really good cup of tea? FKA Twigs wants to bottle that in Eusexua, her latest album.

Debate. The Oscars have left the mainstream moviegoer behind, David Sims argues.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

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

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.

When the Panama Canal was unveiled by the United States in 1914, the roughly 50-mile-long waterway symbolized American power and technological advancement. But the glow of progress soon faded. Building the canal killed roughly 5,600 workers over a decade, and many historians think that the death toll was higher. “Beginning with Lyndon B. Johnson, American presidents of both parties understood the strategic necessity of handing the canal back,” my colleague Franklin Foer wrote last week. The 1964 anti-American riots in Panama revealed that “the anger over America’s presence would never subside.”

The 1977 U.S.-Panama treaties signed by President Jimmy Carter relinquished control of the canal to Panama and established the passageway’s neutrality. This move sowed discord in the Republican Party, the rumblings of which are most clearly felt in President Donald Trump’s recent pledge to retake the canal. I spoke with Franklin about why Trump is fixated on this waterway, and what his preoccupation reveals about his vision for American expansionism.

Stephanie Bai: In Donald Trump’s inauguration speech, and even before he assumed office, he promised to retake the Panama Canal. Is this an issue that Americans care about?

Franklin Foer: Until Trump started talking about it, the Panama Canal hardly ranked on the list of the top 500 strategic threats to America. Best I can tell, there were some toll increases, and the Chinese have started to pay greater interest to the canal over time. But there’s zero national-security reason for the United States to deploy its prestige and military might to take back the canal. When it comes to his domestic audience, I think what Trump is betting on is a rising sense of nationalism that he can tap into. And I think by framing the canal as a lost fragment of the American empire and implying that it’s rightfully ours, he’s betting that it will be a piece of the broader “Make America great again” sentiment that he coasts on.

Stephanie: You wrote in your recent story that “reclaiming the Panama Canal is an old obsession of the American right.” Why is it important to that faction of the country?

Franklin: Many countries failed to build a canal connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, so America’s success was seen as a feat of engineering—at least, Americans viewed it that way for much of the 20th century. But its construction exacted an enormous human toll; thousands of workers died. And by the 1960s, most American presidents pretty clearly realized that the canal generated so much resentment toward the United States that keeping it didn’t make sense.

But you also had a large sector of the American right that felt like we were abandoning our empire. And so Ronald Reagan, when he ran for president in 1976, made reclaiming the Panama Canal one of his central slogans. The issue was something that the insurgent New Right movement, a rising force in American politics, exploited mercilessly in order to raise money and garner enthusiasm.

Stephanie: Trump’s grievances include his claim that the canal’s neutrality has been violated because it’s under the control of China.

Franklin: China likes to involve itself in the operation of infrastructure, and it has lots of global trading routes that it aims to control and exert influence over. There is a new Chinese presence in the canal, but that doesn’t mean that they’re about to take it over.

One of the things that’s ludicrously self-defeating about Trump’s strategy within the hemisphere is that he’s deliberately aggravating countries that could conceivably be thrown into the arms of China. So Panama may not want to enter into any sort of alliance with the Chinese, but because Trump is threatening military action against it, the country may decide that aligning more closely with China is in its interest.

Stephanie: In response to Trump’s inauguration speech, Panama President José Raúl Mulino said that “the canal is and will remain Panama’s.” As you noted, Trump has already floated the idea of using military force to retake the canal. Do you think this could actually come to pass?

Franklin: I think Trump is testing limits to see what he can get. I would be surprised if he was asking the Pentagon to draw up plans right now to retake the Panama Canal. But the problem is: Once he goes down this road of threatening to use military force to take something back, what happens when Panama doesn’t give it back? I don’t think there’s an extremely high chance that we will go to war to take back the canal. But I think there’s at least some possibility that we’re going down that road.

Stephanie: American expansionism seems to be top of mind for Trump. He talked about his “manifest destiny” vision in his inauguration speech, and he has repeatedly spoken about annexing Greenland and Canada in addition to taking back the Panama Canal.

Franklin: The fact that he’s using the term manifest destiny, which is a callback to American expansion in the West in the 1840s and 1850s, shows that this is not a departure from American history but a return to the American history of imperialism.

This is a big shift in the way that America now thinks of its role in the world. I think for Trump, who is a real-estate guy, acquiring real estate is a token of his greatness. He looks at Vladimir Putin and sees the way in which Putin has projected his power to expand his territory with Ukraine and thinks, Well, that’s what powerful leaders and powerful nations do. And here he is starting to explore that possibility himself.

Related:

Emperor Trump’s new map The political logic of Trump’s international threats

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Europe’s Elon Musk problem Trump can’t escape the laws of political gravity. Greenland’s prime minister wants the nightmare to end. Beware the weepy influencers.

Today’s News

Trump is expected to sign executive orders that would ban transgender people from the military, reinstate troops who were discharged for refusing to get the COVID-19 vaccine, and remove the military’s DEI programs. Colombia reached an agreement to accept the flights of deported migrants from the U.S. after Trump made threats that included steep tariffs and a travel ban on Colombian citizens. U.S. markets fell today after the Chinese AI company DeepSeek’s latest cutting-edge chatbot app shot up in popularity over the weekend.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: Dinner is whatever you want it to be, and that fact can be overwhelming or freeing, Isabel Fattal writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: neal.fun.

The Worst Page on the Internet

By Yair Rosenberg

The worst page on the internet begins innocently enough. A small button beckons the user to “Click me.” When they do, the game commences. The player’s score, or “stimulation,” appears in the middle of the screen, and goes up with every subsequent click. These points can then be used to buy new features for the page—a CNN-style news ticker with questionable headlines (“Child Star Steals Hearts, Faces Prison”), a Gmail inbox, a true-crime podcast that plays in the background, a day-trading platform, and more. Engaging with these items—checking your email, answering a Duolingo trivia question, buying and selling stocks—earns the player more points to unlock even more features.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

RFK Jr. is an excellent conspiracy theorist, Benjamin Mazer writes. The border got quieter, so Trump had to act. Tom Nichols: “America is now counting on you, Pete Hegseth.” The chaos in higher ed is only getting started.

Culture Break

Illustration by Ben Denzer

Examine. Starbucks’ most beloved offering—free bathrooms—is disappearing, Ellen Cushing writes. And it reflects a tragedy of American life.

Watch. Presence (out now in theaters) is a horror movie that locks its monster—and the viewer—behind the camera, David Sims writes.

Play our daily crossword.

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

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.

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.

Related:

Trump’s pardons are sending a crystal-clear message. Why 2025 is different from 2017

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.

More From The Atlantic

The online porn free-for-all is coming to an end. The quiet way RFK Jr. could curtail vaccinations The “dark prophet” of L.A. wasn’t dark enough. On Donald Trump and the inscrutability of God

Culture Break

Sony Pictures Classics

Watch. I’m Still Here (out now in select theaters) tempts viewers into a comforting lull before pulling the rug out from under them, David Sims writes.

Examine. In an age of ideological conformity and technological brain-suck, the world needs more disobedient artists and thinkers, Jacob Howland writes.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

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

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.

For a few years in the 2010s, America seemed to be falling out of love with soda. But some blend of price-conscious shopping, kooky social-media trends (milk and coke, anyone?), and perhaps a streak of fatalistic behavior on the part of Americans has made the beverage newly relevant.

Soda consumption declined consistently over the decade leading up to 2015, in part because of backlash from a health-conscious public and a series of soda-tax battles; some soda drinking was also displaced by the likes of energy drinks, coffee, and bottled water. However, in 2017, the CDC announced that rates of sugary-beverage consumption had plateaued—at a rate far above the government-recommended limit. Now soda sales are ticking back up modestly: Coca-Cola and Dr Pepper both saw soda-case sales rise in the past year, and total sales volumes for soft drinks have risen, according to the investment-bank advisory firm Evercore ISI; last year, Coca-Cola was among the fastest-growing brands for women, Morning Consult found. Soda is having a cultural moment too: Addison Rae’s “Diet Pepsi” was a, if not the, song of the summer. And the U.S. president-elect is famously a fan of Diet Coke, reportedly drinking a dozen a day during his first term.

Compared with 20 years ago, Americans are drinking far fewer sugar-sweetened beverages, particularly soda—but compared with a decade ago, they are drinking almost as much, Dariush Mozaffarian, a physician and a nutrition expert at Tufts, told me. Researchers have suggested that there are links between drinking large amounts of sugary drinks and a range of negative health outcomes, but the people most open to changing their soda habits may have already changed them, Mozaffarian noted. In order for cultural norms around soda to shift, drinking it needs to become uncool, he argued. That’s not an impossible goal, but it can be achieved only through a combination of sustained policy efforts, strong messaging from public-health officials, and perhaps even a bit of help from celebrities.

Public-health messaging alone can’t get people to change their behavior. Soda brands have been “a part of our cultural life for decades,” my colleague Nicholas Florko, who covers health policy, told me. “And so there is going to be some reluctance if you tell people” to ease up on “this thing that your parents, your grandparents, your great-grandparents, have been drinking forever.” Part of the draw of soda is that it’s generally quite cheap. To undercut that appeal, activists and politicians have pushed to implement taxes on sugary drinks; in many cases, they have received major pushback from industry and business groups. Researchers have found that, in places where sugary-drink taxes managed to pass, they do help: One study last year found that sales of sugary drinks went down by a third in American cities with soda taxes, and there’s no evidence that people traveled beyond the area looking for cheaper drinks. But these taxes require political will—and pushing for people’s groceries to cost more is not always an appealing prospect for politicians, Nicholas pointed out, especially in our current moment, when Americans are still recovering from the effects of high inflation.

Soda taxes are controversial, but a soda tax isn’t just about cost: Part of the reason such policies work, says Justin White, a health-policy expert at Boston University, is that they can make sugary drinks seem less socially acceptable. “Policies affect the norms, and norms feed back into people’s choices,” he told me. Now new soda norms are emerging, including a crop of sodas that claim to be gut-healthy (although, Mozaffarian said, more research needs to be done to confirm such claims).

Soda feels like an intrinsic part of American life. But generations of canny advertising and celebrity endorsements, Mozaffarian noted, are responsible for embedding soda in so many parts of America—think of its placement in ballparks and other social spaces—and in the day-to-day rhythms of offices and schools. Curbing soda consumption would require a similarly intentional shift.

Related:

Being alive is bad for your health. Public health can’t stop making the same nutrition mistake.

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Franklin Foer on how Biden destroyed his legacy Let’s not fool ourselves about TikTok. The secretary of hard problems L.A. isn’t ready for what’s next.

Today’s News

The Supreme Court upheld a law that will effectively ban TikTok in the United States if the social-media platform’s Chinese parent company does not sell it by Sunday. The Israeli cabinet voted to approve a cease-fire deal with Hamas, which is expected to take effect Sunday. South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem testified in her Senate confirmation hearing for the role of secretary of Homeland Security.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Two novels take different approaches to resurrecting the dead, Maya Chung writes. Atlantic Intelligence: TikTok is set to be banned in the U.S., following a decision by the Supreme Court. But the legacy of its algorithm will live on, Damon Beres writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

‘I Won’t Touch Instagram’

By Kaitlyn Tiffany

If TikTok does indeed get banned or directly shut off by its parent company, it would be a seismic event in internet history. At least a third of American adults use the app, as do a majority of American teens, according to Pew Research Center data. These users have spent the past few days coming to terms with the app’s possible demise—and lashing out however they could think to.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Where Biden turned the battleship No, Biden can’t change the Constitution. The GoFundMe fires

Culture Break

Apple TV+

Watch. The first season of Severance was a chilly riot, too cool to offer viewers catharsis. The second season (streaming on Apple TV+) digs into more human questions, Sophie Gilbert writes.

Commemorate. The death of David Lynch, America’s cinematic poet, is shocking only because it seemed he’d be with us forever, David Sims writes.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai 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.

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.

Not long after Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth read his opening statement and began fielding questions from the Senate Armed Services Committee, I began thinking: I hope neither America’s allies nor its enemies are watching this. The hope was, of course, completely unreasonable. Such hearings are watched closely by friends and foes alike, in order to take the measure of a nominee who might lead the most powerful military in the world and would be a close adviser to the president of the United States.

What America and the world saw today was not a serious examination of a serious man. Instead, Republicans on the committee showed that they would rather elevate an unqualified and unfit nominee to a position of immense responsibility than cross Donald Trump, Elon Musk, or the most ardent Republican voters in their home states. America’s allies should be deeply concerned; America’s enemies, meanwhile, are almost certainly laughing in amazement at their unexpected good fortune.

Most of the GOP senators asked questions that had little to do with the defense of the United States and everything to do with the peculiar obsessions that dominate the alternative reality of right-wing television and talk radio, especially the bane of “wokeness.” Perhaps that was just as well for Hegseth, because the few moments where anything of substance came up did not go well for him. When Senator Deb Fischer of Nebraska, for example, tried early on to draw Hegseth out with some basic questions about nuclear weapons, he was lost. He tried to fumble his way around to an answer that included harnessing the creativity of Silicon Valley to innovate a future nuclear force … or something.

On many other questions, including adherence to the Geneva Conventions, the role of the military in domestic policing, and the obligation to disobey illegal orders, Hegseth fudged and improvised. He seemed aware that he had to avoid sounding extreme while still playing for the only audience that really matters: 50 Republican senators and one former and future president of the United States. His evasions were not particularly clever, but they didn’t need to be. He was clear that his two priorities as secretary will be to lead a culture war within the Pentagon, and to do whatever Trump tells him to do.

If America’s friends and adversaries saw an insubstantial man in front of the committee, they also saw Republicans—members of what once advertised itself as the party of national security—acting with a complete lack of gravity and purpose. Few Republicans, aside from Fischer and a rather businesslike Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, asked Hegseth anything meaningful about policy. Ernst extracted a promise from Hegseth to appoint a senior official to be in charge of sexual-assault prevention, but most of her colleagues resorted to the usual buzzwords about DEI and cultural Marxism while throwing Hegseth softballs. (Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri also managed to mention drag queens, but the trophy for most cringe-inducing moment goes to Senator Tim Sheehy of Montana, who asked Hegseth how many genders there are. When Hegseth said “two,” Sheehy said: “I know that well. I’m a she-he.” Get it? Sheehy? She-he? He’s here all week, folks; tip your waiters.)

And speaking of buzzwords, most of Hegseth’s answers relied on his vow to support “the warfighters” and their “lethality,” two words that have been floating around the Pentagon—as things full of helium will do—for years. Hegseth, to his credit, has learned how to speak fluent Pentagon-ese, the content-free language in which the stakeholders help the warfighters leverage their assets to increase their lethality. (I taught military officers for years at the Naval War College. I can write this kind of Newspeak at will.) As Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut noted, Hegseth might not be qualified to be secretary of defense, but he could squeak by as a Pentagon spokesperson.

Some Democrats highlighted that Hegseth has never run anything of any significant size, and that his record even in smaller organizations hasn’t been particularly impressive. Senator Gary Peters of Michigan pointed out that no board of directors would hire Hegseth as the CEO even of a medium-size company. Other Democrats drilled Hegseth on his personal behavior, including accusations (which he has denied) that he has engaged in sexual assault and alcohol abuse. At one point, Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona listed specific incidents, asking Hegseth to confirm or deny them. Each time, Hegseth responded only by saying “anonymous smears,” which he seems to think is like invoking the Fifth Amendment. Hegseth also said he wasn’t perfect, and that he’s been redeemed by his faith in Jesus Christ, whose name came up more often than one might expect during a hearing related to national security.

Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, an Army veteran who was wounded during her service in Iraq, brought out a large poster of the Soldier’s Creed, emphasizing the insistence on standards and integrity embodied in it. She asked Hegseth how the Defense Department could still demand that service members train and serve at such high standards if the Senate lowered the bar for leading the Pentagon just for him. After she quizzed him on various matters and Hegseth again floundered, she put it simply and directly: “You’re not qualified, Mr. Hegseth.”

Not that any of it mattered to the Republicans on the committee, some of whom took great offense at questions about Hegseth’s character. Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma tried to turn the tables on his colleagues by asking how many of them had ever voted while drunk or cheated on their spouses, as if that somehow obviated any further fussing about whether a possible secretary of defense was an adulterer or struggles with substance abuse.

Unfortunately for Mullin, he doesn’t know his Senate history, so Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the ranking member, helpfully spelled it out for him: If any member of the Senate were nominated to such a position, Reed said, they too would have to answer such questions. And then he added that the late Senator John Tower was in 1989 rejected for the same job Hegseth wants—over accusations of a drinking problem.

Throughout this all, I tried to imagine the reaction in Moscow or Beijing, where senior defense-ministry officials were almost certainly watching Hegseth stumble his way through this hearing. They learned today that their incoming opponent apparently has few thoughts about foreign enemies, but plenty of concerns about the people Trump calls “the enemy from within.” The MAGA Republicans, for their part, seem eager only for Hegseth to get in there and tear up the Pentagon.

After today, I suspect America’s enemies are happily awaiting the same thing.

Related:

Pete Hegseth declines to answer. The perverse logic of Trump’s nomination circus

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Jack Smith gives up, David Frum writes. How Los Angeles must rebuild A secret way to fight off stomach bugs

Today’s News

Israel and Hamas are “on the brink” of accepting an agreement for a cease-fire in Gaza and the exchange of some hostages and prisoners, according to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Former Special Counsel Jack Smith’s final report on Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election was released last night. The Biden administration announced that Cuba will be removed from the state-sponsor-of-terrorism list, which would help clear the way for the release of some political prisoners.

Evening Read

Illustration by Federico Tramonte

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

By Ariel Sabar

On a Wednesday morning in October 2014, in a garage in the woods of Pennsylvania, Tommy Trotta tried on some new jewelry: a set of rings belonging to the baseball great Yogi Berra. Each hunk of gold bore a half-carat diamond and the words “New York Yankees World Champions.”

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Why didn’t Jack Smith charge Trump with insurrection? Iran’s return to pragmatism “Dear James”: I have a huge crush on a writer.

Culture Break

Paramount Pictures

Watch. The musical biopic Better Man (out now in theaters) is so much more than its chimpanzee gimmick, David Sims writes.

Read. In Han Kang’s novels, the South Korean Nobel laureate returns again and again to her country’s bloody past, Judith Shulevitz writes.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

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

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.

Last week, I pronounced unequivocal judgment—as I tend to do regarding many things—on the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. I think it’s a contrived and embarrassing idea driven by nostalgia and capitalism, and antithetical to the youthful rebelliousness that drives rock-and-roll music.

Usually, I make these pronouncements and then let the chips fall. This time, however, we asked The Daily’s readers for their views. And I was surprised: Many of you, far more than I expected, agreed with me. But your responses—and I regret that I could not include more of them here—also raised some good points of disagreement.

First, of course, a fist bump to the folks who agreed with my basic argument that the idea of the Rock Hall, not the building itself, is the problem. One reader, Brian, thought the degree to which the whole thing was “over-hyped” was “really quite sad and pathetic, actually.” Pamela wrote that the Rock Hall reminded her of the participation trophies given to her children years ago: “They, too, were unnecessary, and in my mind are a very similar notion as inducting random old rockers for random attributes into the random concept of a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.”

Right on, Pamela, and I want you to know I made devil horns with my fingers and bobbed my head while reading your comment.

Ahem. Moving on. Some of you volunteered your ages, and many of you chided me for being churlish about nostalgia. Angie, 67, said that she looks back on her youth “fondly” and has no issue with reminders of some of “the best days of my life.” And many readers took offense at the fact that I have never actually been to the Rock Hall or to Cleveland: They thought I was attacking the museum and the city. M Anderson didn’t pull any punches: “Ah, Tom, to have such a low opinion of a place that you admit you have never visited—the deeply entertaining Rock and Roll Hall of Fame—is just wrong. Do yourself a favor and visit the place … Your narrow and uninformed opinion comes off as beneath you, and that is [a] sad fact of too many opinion pieces today.”

And a good day to you, sir or madam. Look, I’m sure I’d find the exhibits in Cleveland fascinating. I love pop-culture museums. I’ve been to the Louvre and seen the Mona Lisa, but it wasn’t nearly the thrill of gawking at Archie Bunker’s chair or at a costume the late Christopher Reeve once wore as the greatest movie Superman. I’m the guy, after all, who loves Las Vegas, and I read the plaques and labels on almost every bit of memorabilia plastered on the walls of its casinos and restaurants. But I don’t need a committee of music pooh-bahs to tell me that the Beatles were great while they also tell me that Mary J. Blige or Donovan are legendary “rock” stars. It’s not about Cleveland or the Hall itself, I promise.

As Anders, a reader from Minnesota, rightly notes, the word rock is now thrown around so loosely “that it doesn’t seem to have much real meaning in regard to the actual Hall of Fame these days. And while I’m sure any band would mostly be honored to be recognized by the Hall, I don’t begrudge those like Iron Maiden who laugh in its face.” Exactly. Although Iron Maiden isn’t my cup of grain alcohol, I get why they and other bands likely wouldn’t give a hoot about getting an attaboy from the suits in the music industry.

A Canadian reader, Laura, spoke for many of you when she suggested just having a general rock museum, especially if it could ensure that lesser-known works “don’t get lost among the big names.” But that’s the problem with a “hall of fame”: The museum aspect is lost in the spectacle of voting and the sometimes wince-inducing performances of the inductees.

Lee pointed out that the Rock Hall “is organized primarily around how much curatable material has been donated,” which means that the origins of rock in the Deep South and the Mississippi Delta are ignored, while there is an “abundance of space dedicated to midwestern bands that nobody has heard of that were inconsequential.” Lee is right that “when Elvis is celebrated as a bedrock of rock and roll, and the people he imitated [are] ignored[,] the whole thing is disingenuous.”

Jay from Washington State was also pretty blunt: “The problem for the hall is that rock is in fact essentially a dead art form. Trying to be really good at it today is a bit like trying to be an impressionist painter in the 1960s—it might be nice to look at or hear, but it’s been done (to death) by now.” I’m not sure rock is dead, but Jay is right that the period we normally associate with the rise of rock as a music form, a 20-year span that begins in the mid-’50s, was a cultural moment in time, not an ongoing revolution.

Let’s end on a more positive note. One thing the Rock Hall can do is keep reintroducing music to younger listeners. Sandra, 82, wrote: “I can attest the museum is an enjoyable visit to the past. However after going to a recent Billy Joel concert I realized nothing can replace youth or innocence.” True enough, but each generation can offer the music of its youth to the next generation. As Gael MacGregor, a recording artist who once sang backup for the legendary Dick Dale, warned us in her note: “Ageism in the arts has always been an issue—whether the claim is ‘You’re too young to know anything,’ or ‘You’re too old to be singing/playing this music.’”

So let’s celebrate the one thing the Rock Hall does well: start arguments about music. That’s a good thing, because then we all have to be aware of the acts we’re talking about. Ralph, a 77-year old reader, recently lost his wife of 52 years. (Our condolences, Ralph.) “The songs of lost love I listened to in my teens,” he wrote, “have a painful new resonance now.” But Ralph also saw these older songs as a bridge: “Maybe the Hall of Fame will inspire some new listeners to experience these old artists,” he said, “but will it light their fire”?

Perhaps the Rock Hall isn’t a great idea, but if it gets us to listen to the music, then long may it stand on the shores of Lake Erie.

Related:

The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame should not exist. The secret joys of geriatric rock

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Trump’s sentencing made no one happy. Trump is right that Pax Americana is over, Charles A. Kupchan argues. These bizarre theories about the L.A. wildfires endanger everyone.

Today’s News

President-Elect Donald Trump was sentenced to unconditional discharge in his New York criminal hush-money case. He will avoid jail time, fines, and probation for his conviction, but he became the first president to be sentenced as a felon. The Supreme Court heard arguments in the TikTok case. The justices seem likely to uphold the law that could ban the app. Meta is ending major DEI programs at the company, including for “hiring, development and procurement practices,” according to Axios.

Dispatches

Atlantic Intelligence: Scientists have collected troves of DNA and microscopic imaging data from human cells—and now they have a tool that might make sense of all that information, Matteo Wong writes. The Books Briefing: Boris Kachka explains why The Atlantic’s Books department likes to make an extra toast on January 1 for a concurrent holiday: Public Domain Day.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Credit: Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Yamil Lage / AFP via Getty.

The Return of Havana Syndrome

By Shane Harris

Two years ago, U.S. intelligence analysts concluded, in unusually emphatic language, that a mysterious and debilitating ailment known as “Havana syndrome” was not the handiwork of a foreign adversary wielding some kind of energy weapon. That long-awaited finding shattered an alternative theory embraced by American diplomats and intelligence officers, who said they had been victims of a deliberate, clandestine campaign by a U.S. adversary, probably Russia, that left them disabled, struggling with chronic pain, and drowning in medical bills. The intelligence report, written chiefly by the CIA, appeared to close the book on Havana syndrome.

Turns out, it didn’t.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The unfightable fire The intellectual rationalization for annexing Greenland Drop the outrage over Trump’s foreign-policy bluster. The saint America needs now

Culture Break

A24

Watch. The Brutalist (out now in theaters) makes an ambitious gamble with its 215-minute run time—and it mostly pays off, David Sims writes.

Read. Check out these seven books when you feel like the odds are stacked against you.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai 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.

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 back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition.

Few things are more satisfying than watching a show pull off a clever and high-octane episode. For those looking to revisit some greats, our writers and editors answer the question: What do you think is a perfect episode of TV?

The following contains spoilers for the episodes mentioned.

“The Panic in Central Park,” Girls (streaming on Max)

Maybe this is the former theater critic in me coming out, but the thing I love most is when a television series tells a complete story in miniature—a stand-alone short that puts a particular dynamic or relationship or cast member front and center. Girls, which revolves around four friends in New York City, has always been brilliant at this, and never more so than with “The Panic in Central Park,” a Marnie-centered episode that deals with the particular moment in young adulthood when fantasy becomes untenable.

“The Panic in Central Park,” like the best Girls episodes, is written by Lena Dunham and directed by Richard Shepard. It begins with Desi mournfully reproaching his “cruel” new wife, Marnie, for declining to go get a scone, ends with her asking for a divorce, and riffs on film history, romance, and codependency in between. The high-strung Marnie, out on a walk to clear her head, encounters her ex, Charlie, who’s almost unrecognizable. He whisks her away on a whirlwind New York City adventure involving a consigned red cocktail dress (Millennial Williamsburg’s answer to Pretty Woman), a fake identity, Italian food, a rowboat in Central Park, a robbery, and—finally—the revelation that Charlie is addicted to heroin. A sadder, wiser Marnie walks home barefoot, having accepted the idea that no one is going to save her. The episode is beautiful and incisive about the allure of the stories we wrap ourselves in and the power of shaking them off.

— Sophie Gilbert, staff writer

***

“If It Smells Like a Rat, Give It Cheese,” Survivor: Micronesia (streaming on Hulu and Paramount+)

If I could erase my brain in order to watch anything for the first time again, I would do it for the penultimate episode of Survivor: Micronesia. The 16th season of the reality game show is famously one of the best, and this episode is why. Watching it is like witnessing Alex Honnold climb El Capitan without ropes—except instead of sheer athleticism in the face of seemingly impossible odds, you’re seeing how master manipulators exploit social dynamics to get what they want. It’s the Olympics for those who prefer politics or gossip to sports.

People who haven’t watched Survivor often assume that it’s about “surviving” the wilderness, but it’s always primarily been about surviving human nature. Driven by power and social capital, the show has more in common with Game of Thrones than Naked and Afraid. Explaining exactly what happens in this episode would be like explaining an inside joke; you need to watch the whole season to get why it hits. Just know that it features Red Wedding–level of gameplay, setting the bar high for how far people will go to get ahead.

— Serena Dai, senior editor

***

“C**tgate,” Veep (streaming on Max)

Unlike a perfect movie, a perfect episode of television does not need to surprise you or make you cry. It just needs to move your beloved or loathed characters through the formula in an especially excellent way. But the element of surprise may be why I remember “C**tgate” so many years later. In this episode of Veep, Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) orchestrates two tasks that are both impossibly monumental and petty. She has to decide if she is going to bail out a bank owned by her current boyfriend, and she must find out who on her staff called her a “cunt” so loudly in public that it was overheard by a reporter.

These interweaving plots alone would make a perfectly satisfying episode. What makes it golden are two of the funniest, most unexpected subplots in Veep’s run. One involves a focus group for the bumbling White House liaison Jonah Ryan, now running for Congress in New Hampshire, who is workshopping an ad. The second is a surprise announcement by Selina’s daughter, a recurring sad sack who can never get her mother’s attention. Guess who she’s dating?

— Hanna Rosin, senior editor

***

“Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose,” The X-Files (streaming on Hulu)

If you’re seeking out a perfect episode of TV, the richest cache to search is the “case of the week” entries of The X-Files. The show wove an elaborate arc about aliens on Earth but saved most of its best material for the smaller stuff. “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose,” written by Darin Morgan, is a gothic short story, following FBI agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) as they investigate a murder with the help of a tetchy local psychic named Clyde Bruckman (Peter Boyle).

This being The X-Files, Mulder is immediately taken with Bruckman’s clairvoyance, while Scully is skeptical—but Morgan’s script resolves each of Bruckman’s predictions about the future in clever, tragicomic ways, reinforcing Mulder’s belief while also finding ways to affirm Scully’s cynicism. It’s funny, dark, and beautifully acted—particularly between Anderson and Boyle—with an elliptical plot structure that feels wonderfully complex even by today’s TV standards.

— David Sims, staff writer

***

“It’s the End of the World” and “As We Know It,” Grey’s Anatomy (streaming on Netflix and Hulu)

I’ve previously written that after more than 20 seasons, it’s time for Grey’s Anatomy to come to an end. But in its early days, the series was responsible for some of the most memorable episodes of television: The second season’s two-part storyline, “It’s the End of the World” and “As We Know It,” demonstrated the show’s mix of humor and drama at its best.

Colloquially known as the “bomb in the body cavity” episodes, they tell the story of a patient who comes in with live ammunition in his chest. At the same time, the show’s powerhouse resident Dr. Miranda Bailey goes into labor, and two other characters perform surgery on her husband, who crashed his car on his way in. In the midst of some very suspenseful plotlines, the dialogue explores the relationships among, and vulnerabilities of, the characters in a beautifully human way. On a show that’s known for putting people in harm’s way, this pair of episodes focuses as much on the emotions as on the drama: the fear of losing someone you care about, and what it really means to be in love.

— Kate Guarino, supervisory senior associate editor

***

Season 2, Episode 10, The Mole (streaming on Netflix)

The Season 2 finale of Netflix’s reboot of The Mole is made perfect if you first watch all of the other episodes. The show’s formula is simple: 12 people collaborate on Indiana Jones–style missions to earn money for a prize pot, but one of them is a “mole” hired by the producers to sabotage the other contestants. Elimination isn’t based on your performance in missions. It’s about how accurately you identify the mole, according to your answers on a quiz given each round.

What results is sumptuous chaos, set among abandoned buildings and real explosives that make you wonder what the release form for this show must look like. Everyone is pretending to be the mole (to mislead others) while testing their fellow players (to figure out who the mole is) and still, somehow, trying to collect money for the prize pot. Oh, and did I mention that Ari Shapiro of All Things Considered fame is this season’s host?

I won’t spoil the finale, but it involves minefields and three equally mole-like characters. There’s not a single weak link in this episode, and if you correctly guess who the mole is, you’ll have bested much of the internet.

— Katherine Hu, assistant editor

***

“Chocolate With Nuts,” SpongeBob SquarePants (streaming on Paramount+)

At about 11 minutes per segment, SpongeBob SquarePants doesn’t have much room to play around with. But its best episodes use that brevity to their advantage, stuffing in visual gags, one-liners, callbacks, goofy voice acting, and witty repartee. “Chocolate With Nuts,” from the third season, is the greatest example of the show’s “run out the clock” ethos: SpongeBob and his best friend, Patrick, become chocolate-bar salesmen to achieve “fancy living.” Their ensuing door-to-door journey introduces them to a cavalcade of bizarre Bikini Bottom dwellers, including a seemingly immortal, shriveled-up fish and a man who feigns “glass bones” syndrome in one of many efforts to dupe the boys into buying chocolate from him instead.

More than most episodes of this kids’ cartoon, “Chocolate With Nuts” threads the needle between the juvenile hijinks and some more adult themes: the empty promise of the good life, the uphill battle of entrepreneurship, the fallacy of “trust thy neighbor.” That headiness is all conveyed through SpongeBob’s elastic face and Patrick’s gobsmacking vacuousness—the best way to explore any nuanced concept, in my view.

But the primary reason I have been rewatching this episode for more than 22 years now is its unassuming density. SpongeBob is wonderfully breezy, but its hidden strength is how layered each joke is: I laugh at different things every time—a certain line delivery, a certain facial expression—and impulsively repeat its most memorable quotes. “Chocolate,” says the pruned old-lady fish, wistfully. “Sweet, sweet chocolate. I always hated it!”

— Allegra Frank, senior editor

Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

The anti-social century The army of God comes out of the shadows. The agony of texting with men

The Week Ahead

September 5, a drama film detailing an ABC Sports crew’s efforts to cover the massacre at the 1972 Olympics in Munich (in theaters nationwide Friday) Season 2 of Severance, a sci-fi series about a corporate employee who agrees to surgically “sever” his personal life from his work life (streaming on Apple TV+ on Friday) The JFK Conspiracy, a book by Josh Mensch and Brad Meltzer about the first assassination attempt on John F. Kennedy (out Tuesday)

Essay

Illustration by Jackson Gibbs

Parents Are Gaming Their Kids’ Credit Scores

By Michael Waters

Several years ago, Hannah Case decided to examine her personal credit history. Case, who was then a researcher at the Federal Reserve, hadn’t gotten her first credit card until she was 22. But as she discovered when she saw her file, she’d apparently been spending responsibly since 14.

Read the full article.

More in Culture

The reason The Brutalist needs to be so long The payoff of TV’s most awaited crossover What to read when the odds are against you September 5 captures a crisis becoming must-watch TV. The bizarre brain of Werner Herzog The film that rips the Hollywood comeback narrative apart

Catch Up on The Atlantic

Trump’s sentencing made no one happy. Trump is right that Pax Americana is over, Charles A. Kupchan argues. Why “late regime” presidencies fail

Photo Album

A man watches as flames from the Palisades Fire close in on his property in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles. (Ethan Swope / AP)

The Palisades Fire grew quickly in California, burning many structures and sending thick plumes of smoke into the air. These photos show parts of Los Angeles scorched by the wildfire.

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