The president is terrifying! He has laser eyes, or he has laser eyes and he’s screaming, or he has laser eyes and he’s commanding bolts of lightning, like God. He is drinking Republican tears with a splash of lime. He is eating Mitch McConnell’s head?Although Joe Biden has often been the subject of memes related to his friendship with Barack Obama or his obsession with ice cream, he has lately become a different sort of internet figure, known as “Dark Brandon.

On April 19, 1979, Senator Joe Biden of Delaware was in Beijing, meeting with China’s paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, when he put Washington’s nascent friendship with the Communists to the test.That Biden was sitting there at all was remarkable. The United States and China had been implacable foes for decades.

Rarely in the annals of public controversy has so much certainty been expressed in the face of such great ignorance. With very few exceptions, the Republican Party has coalesced around Donald Trump and expressed the fierce conviction that the Department of Justice’s decision to serve a search warrant on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence was a grotesque abuse of power.There’s a notable problem with this conclusion: The American public still hasn’t seen the search warrant.

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.“It’s not just my opinion that things are weird,” Derek Thompson told me recently. It’s a fact of life, he explained, that the U.S. economy is behaving very strangely right now.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

Unless Serena Williams pulls off the kind of feat typically reserved for Hollywood endings at this year’s U.S. Open, 23 is the number of Grand Slam singles titles with which she will retire. It is a number that makes her the all-time winningest, slammiest singles champion, of any gender, in the modern incarnation of tennis (Rafael Nadal did recently inch closer to her record, capturing his 22nd at this year’s French Open, but still).

Once again, the United States is messing up its approach to vaccines. Three months into its monkeypox outbreak, just 620,000 doses of the two-injection Jynneos shot—the nation’s current best immune defense against the virus—have been shipped to states, not nearly enough to immunize the 1.6 million to 1.7 million Americans that the CDC considers at highest risk. The next deliveries from the manufacturer aren’t slated until September at the earliest.

Two days after FBI agents executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago, details about the underlying investigation are still scarce. News reports suggest that it is connected to concerns around presidential record-keeping—that Trump White House documents that should have been in the hands of a professional archivist somehow ended up on vacation at the former president’s Florida home.