During Donald Trump’s crude and shambolic first run for president in 2016, Michelle Obama offered a mission statement for the Democratic Party that doubled as a pithy summary of her family’s political project: “When they go low, we go high.” A decade and a half before that, Barack Obama announced himself as a major figure by declaring at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, “There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America, there’s the United States of America.

Here’s the thing about political conventions: They are, foremost, productions—obsessively planned and guided heavily to what looks pretty on screens. But here’s the thing about the Democratic Party: Now, as ever, it is a bit of a mess.
A seemingly happy mess. But a mess nonetheless. And this can make for an awkward production.

On top of the stairs of Chicago’s elevated Green Line yesterday, I had a fine view of the 13-acre Union Park. I squinted, looking for the promised cauldron of Democratic National Convention protesters, the tens of thousands of pro-Palestinian “Crashing the Party” masses ready to rumble at what was billed by the Democratic Socialists of America on social media as the “event of the season.”
I spotted a clump of protesters around a soundstage.

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.
Lora Kelley: Observers in the media have talked about the Harris campaign’s “vibes” as a way to describe the newfound energy she’s brought to the ticket.

For the past few nights, I’ve concerned myself with the private lives of autonomous vehicles.
It started when I read a news story about a San Francisco apartment complex whose residents were repeatedly awoken at 4 a.m. by honking self-driving taxis. The building overlooks an open-air parking lot that Waymo recently leased to store its vehicles.

“Our best days aren’t behind us, they’re before us,” President Joe Biden said last night at the Democratic National Convention.
It was a poignant line. A statesman must believe that what he is doing will benefit his country after he exits the stage, but Biden’s speech was on the first, rather than the last, day of the convention because his fellow Democrats had concluded that his own best days were behind him and nudged him to step down from the nomination.

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.
One of the great myths of American politics is that detailed policy positions are crucial to winning elections. Yes, policy matters in broad strokes: Candidates take general positions on issues such as taxes, abortion, and foreign policy.

For nearly 50 years, the Hyde Amendment has been considered an unassailable fixture of the United States budget. First passed in 1976, just three years after the now-defunct Roe v. Wade ruling, the amendment prohibits federal programs from covering the cost of most abortions, with exceptions for cases of rape, incest, and life-threatening pregnancies.

The financier and bon vivant Wallace Groves had little use for the law or social norms. His wife, a former Hollywood starlet, left him in 1937 after he’d had their infant son briefly kidnapped from their glittering Park Avenue triplex apartment. A day after the supposed abduction, authorities arrested Groves on the tarmac at Newark airport, in the company of two women whom Time magazine coyly described as his “girl friends.