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.
They don’t make Washington scandals like they used to. Consider the tale of Representative Wilbur Mills and Fanne Foxe. In October 1974, Mills, a powerful Arkansas Democrat who led the Ways and Means Committee, was pulled over in D.C. while driving with his lights off.

When he is not sharing memes of himself as a conquering Roman centurion or shrieking while brandishing a chain saw onstage at a CPAC conference, Elon Musk occasionally adopts the pose of a reasonable moderate offering an open hand of compromise that Democrats slap away.
“What @DOGE is doing is similar to Clinton/Gore Dem policies of the 1990s,” he wrote on X last week.

Editor’s Note: Is anything ailing, torturing, or nagging at you? Are you beset by existential worries? Every Tuesday, James Parker tackles readers’ questions. Tell him about your lifelong or in-the-moment problems at dearjames@theatlantic.com.
Don’t want to miss a single column? Sign up to get “Dear James” in your inbox.
Dear James,
I’ve been reading a lot lately about the long-term effects, mental and physical, of regular alcohol use.

Elon Musk has allegedly fathered his 13th child with a fourth woman, the conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair. Judging by St. Clair’s public remarks on Musk’s platform, X, theirs was not necessarily a love connection: In asking that Musk acknowledge his paternity, St. Clair did not issue an emotional appeal but rather, through her spokesperson, a request that Musk “finish” an unspecified “agreement” with her.

The woman and her sister had been out jogging by the river when they saw the bird fall from the sky. At first, they mistook it for a falling leaf, but the angle and speed of descent suggested a weightier object. They squatted down like children to inspect the body. A pale-green bird with a cream-colored breast, too delicate for a city bird. They saw nothing above them. No trees or obstructions, just a red fog of diffuse and muddled light.
Poor bird.

Shortly before 11 a.m. on Sunday, the 80,000 physicians, health scientists, disease detectives, and others tasked with safeguarding the nation’s health received instructions to respond to an email sent the day before asking them, “What did you do last week?”
The email arose from a Saturday dispatch issued by President Donald Trump on the social-media platform he owns, Truth Social. “ELON IS DOING A GREAT JOB, BUT I WOULD LIKE TO SEE HIM GET MORE AGGRESSIVE,” he wrote.

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 new president has taken office, elected in response to widespread economic dissatisfaction. Now he’s trying to make big changes to the government, and some voters are upset.

“To a true collector,” the German philosopher Walter Benjamin noted in his 1931 essay “Unpacking My Library,” “the acquisition of an old book is its rebirth.” This is an apt way to describe the many lives a single volume may live. On its initial printing, it may receive a flurry of attention from readers and reviewers—or none at all.

On Saturday, Elon Musk, the billionaire charged by President Donald Trump with cutting government waste, alerted the public to a massive inefficiency in the federal bureaucracy: Government employees would soon be distracted from their actual work by a request from on high. In aggregate, hundreds of thousands of man-hours would be squandered. But Musk wasn’t putting a stop to this wasteful time suck of a requirement. He was the one imposing it.

In the months leading up to February 24, 2022, the day Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Joe Biden warned that such an action would trigger “the most severe sanctions that have ever been imposed”—a threat that many European leaders echoed.
To Daleep Singh, the White House’s top international economic adviser at the time, Biden’s threat could mean only one thing: freezing Russia’s central-bank reserves.