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Election Day is in a few weeks, but for millions of Americans, early voting in the presidential and downballot races is already under way. Over the next 19 days, how people vote in dozens of swing districts will determine which party takes control of the House of Representatives.

In 2021, Israel bombed Gaza for 11 days in a campaign known as Operation Guardian of the Walls. At the end of the battle, Yahya Sinwar, the head of Hamas in Gaza, posed for a photograph in broad daylight. Surrounded by rubble, he sat in an armchair. On his face, he wore a defiant smile.
Sinwar—obsessed with operational security, paranoid about Israeli collaborators in his midst—possessed a genius for survival that inflicted death on his own people.

Kamala Harris’s fate in the remaining weeks of the presidential campaign may turn on whether she can shift the attention of enough voters back to what they might fear from a potential second White House term for Donald Trump.
Since replacing President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee this summer, Harris has focused her campaign message above all on reassuring voters that she has the experience and values to serve in the Oval Office.

In 2008, Yahya Sinwar—then an inmate in Israel’s Eshel Prison—developed a brain tumor.  An Israeli surgeon operated on his head and saved his life. Today, Israel announced that one of its snipers had done the opposite. Photos of the Hamas leader’s body, half-sunk in rubble and dust in Rafah, show a massive head wound. Sinwar’s killing ends a one-year manhunt but not the invasion that his decision to attack and kidnap Israeli civilians last year all but guaranteed.

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 March 2023, when Mark Milley was six months away from retirement as a four-star general and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he met Bob Woodward at a reception and said, “We gotta talk.

For decades, my dad has been saying that he doesn’t want to hear a word about self-driving cars until they exist fully and completely. Until he can go to sleep behind the wheel (if there is a wheel) in his driveway in western New York State and wake up on vacation in Florida (or wherever), what is the point?
Driverless cars have long supposedly been right around the corner. Elon Musk once said that fully self-driving cars would be ready by 2019. Ford planned to do it by 2021.

Floridians regularly observe that Florida is trying to kill us. Venomous water snakes lie in wait for heedless kayakers paddling down the wrong slough. More people die of lightning strikes in Florida than in any other state. I-4, from Tampa to Daytona Beach, is the deadliest highway in the country. Mosquitoes the size of tire irons carry several sorts of fever and encephalitis, and the guacamole-colored algae infesting our waters can cause severe respiratory distress and liver disease.

Illustrations by Ben Denzer
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The splendor of the American big-box store lay before me, with its endless variety of shaving products in every imaginable size and color—a retail extravaganza, all of it locked behind Plexiglas. I needed a razor, and in order to obtain one at my neighborhood Target, I had to press a red button to summon a store clerk. Depending on where you live, you may know the drill.