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Wildfires have been ripping across the American West. Last week, the first major fire that California has seen since 2021 quickly became one of the 10 largest in the state’s history.

Every second of every day, people across the world type tens of thousands of queries into Google, adding up to trillions of searches a year. Google and a few other search engines are the portal through which several billion people navigate the internet. Many of the world’s most powerful tech companies, including Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI, have recently spotted an opportunity to remake that gateway with generative AI, and they are racing to seize it.

Jamie Squire / Getty
It is an incredible moment when the support of a world-class team pays off and everyone can celebrate their moment of victory. This amazing shot captures the reactions of the gymnast Simone Biles and her teammates in the background, as Biles finishes her floor-exercise routine and they realize that Team USA will win the artistic-gymnastics women’s team final. Photographed on day four of the 2024 Paris Olympic Games, at Bercy Arena.

Google is running a new commercial during the Olympics. It’s about a cute little girl—she’s a runner, and she loves Team USA’s Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, a world-record-holding track star who won two Olympic gold medals in 2021. The little girl wants to write her a letter. So Dad fires up an AI chatbot.
“Help my daughter write a letter telling Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone how inspiring she is,” he asks Google’s Gemini.

The word mother is strikingly similar in languages all across the world: From Swedish (mamma) to Swahili (mama), Czech (matka) to Chinese (mama), most use some combination of the same two sounds, m and ah, to refer to the female parent. This consistency across space and time makes physiological sense, the pioneering linguist Roman Jakobson explained. One of the easiest sounds for a baby to make is ah.

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.
The choice of Donald Trump versus Kamala Harris is proving to be a remarkably easy one for the Never Trumpers who really meant never.
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
The most revealing moment of a Trump rally
“This is the worst police-shooting video ever.

Ben Thouard /AFP / Getty
Nearly 10,000 miles away from the Games in Paris, the 2024 Olympic surfing events are taking place in Teahupo’o, on the French Polynesian Island of Tahiti, where 48 surfers from 21 nations are competing in the men’s and women’s shortboard events. I’ve always loved surf photography—the incredible power and beauty of nature, combined with the daring, skill, and grace of the riders.

Saturday’s rocket strike on a football field in the Golan Heights was precisely the type of large-casualty event that many observers have feared could ignite an all-out war between Israel and Hezbollah. After nine months of contained clashes, mostly along the Lebanon-Israel border, a rocket landed at dusk on Saturday in the Druze village of Majdel Shams and killed 12 young people.

Imagine that you just got a bad job evaluation, or learned that your suspicious mole really might be cancer. Your heart races, your chest tightens, your mouth is cottony dry and your skin damp with sweat—all classic physical symptoms of anxiety. Unless you’re one of the Alex Honnolds of the world, the sensation of anxiety is just about universal.
But the human body’s consistent response to anxiety actually masks two different psychological (and biological) phenomena.