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When Lori Chavez-DeRemer was nominated, she had a chance to be a pathbreaking secretary of labor, supposedly tasked with shepherding the Republican Party in a more worker-friendly direction. Instead, she turned out to be a typical Trump Cabinet member: disempowered and disgraced.

Here is the promise of a house manager. Hire one, and soon someone else could be doing your laundry, washing your dishes, prepping your meals, and completing those Amazon returns you’ve been meaning to make. They could reorganize the utensil drawer, notice if your kid is outgrowing their shoes and order more, take your car to the repair shop, and be at home to meet the plumber.

If Elon Musk gets his way, space will soon look very different. Through his ownership of SpaceX, the world’s richest man already operates most of the roughly 14,000 active satellites that are orbiting Earth. Now his rocket company is asking the government for permission to launch up to 1 million more. It’s part of Musk’s plan to build data centers in space that can harness the power of the sun for AI. “You’re power-constrained on Earth,” Musk said last month.

Earlier this month, a staff writer for The Free Press, Olivia Reingold, asked the Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed from Michigan a question: “Does Israel have a right to exist as a Jewish state?”
El-Sayed replied with his own question: “What do you mean by a ‘Jewish state’?” When Reingold went silent, before beginning to stutter out a response, El-Sayed continued, “If you can’t define the question, I’m not going to answer your question.

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.
Earlier this month, top officials in the Trump administration were facing two problems—one distant and acute, one near and chronic.
The first was that two American airmen were missing inside Iran after their jet had been shot down.

A reasonable rule is that once you begin making an argument ad Hitlerum—comparing some malevolent politician to Hitler or some malignant movement to the Nazis, or declaring a brutal (but non-eliminationist) war a genocide comparable to the Holocaust—you have lost the plot. The facile but extreme analogy is the first resort of the unimaginative alarmist.

Vandals have done some senseless stuff on Bay Area Rapid Transit. They have removed the fire extinguishers from the station walls and sprayed them all over the place, for example. But what particularly vexed Alicia Trost, the chief communications officer for the train system that connects San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose, was their destruction of map display cases at stations across the system: “You could not see the maps for years.”
Now you can.

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The day that Donald Trump swore his second oath of office, he signed an executive order demanding “accountability for the previous administration’s weaponization of the Federal Government against the American people.

People like to say that American culture has a puritanical streak: one that entails, among other things, a certain haughty piousness, instilled by the killjoys who reached New England’s shores in the 17th century. Yet the Pew Research Center, in a pair of reports released last month, asked participants in various countries about a host of moral issues—and found few in the United States that were widely condemned.