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Kamala Harris is in the midst of a media blitz this week, including an interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes yesterday evening and an appearance on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert tonight.

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The list of Nobel laureates reads like a collection of humanity’s greatest treasures: Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Francis Crick, Toni Morrison. As of this morning, it also includes two physicists whose research, in the 1980s, laid the foundations for modern artificial intelligence.

Mexico has sworn in its first woman president. This looks like a bold step for equality and progress—all the more impressive because the new president, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, is of Jewish origin. Her father’s parents immigrated to Mexico from Lithuania in the 1920s; her mother’s parents escaped to Mexico from Axis-aligned Bulgaria in the early 1940s.
But Mexico is not advancing toward an egalitarian future. It is regressing into an authoritarian past.

When the Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel wrote his will in 1895, he designated funds to reward those who “have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind.” The resulting Nobel Prizes have since been awarded to the discoverers of penicillin, X-rays, and the structure of DNA—and, as of today, to two scientists who, decades ago, laid the foundations for modern artificial intelligence.

One of Donald Trump’s signature rhetorical moves—and there are many—is wrapping his most heinous and controversial public statements in the faintest patina of ambiguity. Not enough to obscure his point. Not even enough to give actual plausible deniability. But enough for Trump and his followers to wave away their critics as hysterical.
In 2015, when Trump famously said that Mexican immigrants are criminals and rapists, he also said, “Some, I assume, are good people.

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.
A Donald Trump rally is always a strange spectacle, and not only because of the candidate’s incoherence and bizarre detours into mental cul-de-sacs.

Very few podcasters would apologize to their fans for clogging up their feed by interviewing a presidential candidate. But Alex Cooper—the host of a podcast variously described as “raunchy, “sex-positive,” “mega-popular,” and “the most-listened-to podcast by women”—is an exception. “Daddy Gang,” she began her latest episode, “as you know, I do not usually discuss politics, or have politicians on this show, because I want Call Her Daddy to be a place where everyone feels comfortable tuning in.

Over the past three years, as I worked on a book about the history of the video-game company Blizzard Entertainment, a disconcerting question kept popping into my head: Why does success seem so awful? Even typing that out feels almost anti-American, anathema to the ethos of hard work and ambition that has propelled so many of the great minds and ideas that have changed the world.
But Blizzard makes a good case for the modest achievement over the astronomical.