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.
More than a decade after Tinder introduced the swipe, many Americans are sick of dating apps. As I explored in a recent article for The Atlantic, the cracks are starting to show in what looked to be the foundation of modern dating.

In October 2003, Mark Zuckerberg created his first viral site: not Facebook, but FaceMash. Then a college freshman, he hacked into Harvard’s online dorm directories, gathered a massive collection of students’ headshots, and used them to create a website on which Harvard students could rate classmates by their attractiveness, literally and figuratively head-to-head.

This is Atlantic Intelligence, a limited-run series in which our writers help you wrap your mind around artificial intelligence and a new machine age. Sign up here.
Generative AI is famously data-hungry. The technology requires huge troves of digital information—text, photos, video, audio—to “learn” how to produce convincingly humanlike material.

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
The fact that I live close to a dedicated cookbook-and-food-writing store—and that it’s one door down from a specialty market full of bread, cheeses, and confections—is a constant delight, though a mild threat to my household’s financial security.

A certain type of person will tell you that they read cookbooks like they do novels. This usually means they flip through them at night, in bed, perhaps with the help of some gentle, warm light and a hot cup of tea. They pore over the notes and instructions that precede each recipe; they dream up menus the way a fiction reader might picture the furniture inside a character’s home. They might flag dishes they want to cook, or they might not. The point of this practice is pleasure, not pragmatism.

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.
Are young people turning away from the Democratic Party in 2024? Will turnout be as high as it was last time around? What about the gender gap? Today I’ll do my best to address some pressing questions about how young folks will behave in November.

After a deluge of record-breaking rainfall this week, citizens of the United Arab Emirates and Oman are still trying to return to regular life. The storms forced schools, offices, and businesses to close, transformed the tarmac of Dubai’s international airport into a rippling sea, and killed more than 20 people across both nations. The downpour seemed almost apocalyptic: On Tuesday, the UAE received the amount of rain that usually falls in an entire year.

During Nickelodeon’s golden era, the network captivated young viewers by introducing them to an impressive roster of comedic talent—who happened to be kids, just like them. Starting in the mid-1990s, actors such as Amanda Bynes, Kenan Thompson, and Ariana Grande became household names, as popular children’s shows including All That, Drake & Josh, and Zoey 101 helped propel Nickelodeon to astronomical ratings.

Moments after receiving my lunch order, the robots whirred to life. A clawlike contraption lurched forward, like a bird pecking at feed, to snatch dishes holding a faux-chicken cutlet and potatoes, then inserted them onto a metal track that snakes through a 650-degree-Fahrenheit oven. Seven minutes, some automatic food dispensers, and two conveyor belts later (with a healthy assist from human hands), my meal was sitting on a shelf of mint-green cubbies.