Last week, the Department of Health and Human Services finally followed through on a plan it first outlined for several of its top officials nearly a year ago: It reassigned them to positions in the Indian Health Service.

It probably won’t shock you to learn that the best-selling game of 2026 thus far is not about the mundane activity of running a video store. Yet for me, it might as well be: Retro Rewind, an indie exercise in retail management, has captured my attention as much as the real global chart-topper, Resident Evil Requiem. That latest entry in the smash-hit horror franchise is exceptionally sleek, with gory action and a discomfiting atmosphere.

Each Sunday, a group of Catholics meets in the basement of St. Joseph’s Church in Greenwich Village after the 6 p.m. Mass. They mingle over wine and cheese for half an hour, and then Father Jonah Teller, a Dominican friar and priest, usually leads an hour-long discussion—about the nature of freedom, perhaps, or the virtue of hope, or a theologically laden Gerard Manley Hopkins poem. The weekly gathering is called In Vino Veritas, Latin for “In wine, there is truth.

President Trump clearly wants out—and soon.
The war that the United States and Israel started with Iran delayed what Trump sees as a landmark visit to China, which he postponed until mid-May, suggesting that he thinks he will be free to travel by then. He said in a Cabinet meeting that most of Iran’s military capabilities have been destroyed, implying a high degree of success.

When he was interviewed onstage at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was asked a question unlikely to be on anyone’s mind in the midst of upheaval in the department he oversees and a conflict in the Middle East: “Who’s stronger—you or Secretary of War Pete Hegseth?”
The exchange was emblematic of the role that Kennedy and other HHS officials played during the four-day conference.

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 term virtue signaling refers to an annoying moral peacocking that has less to do with politics than with self-gratification. It’s the dinner guest who feels compelled to comment on the climate impact of every course.

Thore Graepel may have been the first human to be vanquished by a superintelligence. In 2015, on his first day as a researcher at Google DeepMind, he was challenged to play against the earliest iteration of AlphaGo—a computer program developed by DeepMind that would prove so effective at the ancient-Chinese game of weiqi (or Go, as it is commonly known in the West) that it changed how humans play it, and then upended the field of AI itself.

The Trump administration has made a habit of pressing criminal charges against Americans observing and protesting harsh immigration-enforcement tactics, using the power of the executive branch to intimidate and punish those who visibly dissent from the president’s political agenda. In many ways, the prosecution of LaMonica McIver is in line with this general approach.

“I chose and my world was shaken, so what? The choice may have been mistaken; the choosing was not.” 
— Stephen Sondheim in a lyric presumably inspired by playing trivia
And by the way, did you know that Sondheim wrote exclusively with Blackwing 602 pencils, the flat-tailed, lightweight instrument also favored by John Steinbeck? They were discontinued while Sondheim was still writing, but he had purchased boxes and boxes of them just in case.