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It’s been a rocky year for the type of restaurant that could have served as the setting for an awkward lunch scene in The Office: the places you might find at malls and suburban shopping developments, serving up burgers or giant bowls of pasta and sugary drinks.

Yesterday, President-Elect Donald Trump announced his nomination of Jared Isaacman, a 41-year-old entrepreneur, private astronaut, and pilot, as the head of NASA. The statement that went out was pretty bland. It included stock phrases—“delighted to”; “paving the way”; “demonstrated exceptional leadership”—of the type that corporations use when elevating middle managers.

Updated: Thursday, Dec. 5, 2024 at 10:58 p.m. ET
Two very ugly, uniquely American things happened yesterday: A health-care executive was shot dead, and because he was a health-care executive, people cheered.
UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was murdered yesterday outside his hotel in Midtown Manhattan by an unknown assailant. The identity of the killer is unknown. His motive is not yet clear.

Across the country, the thirst for an illicit beverage is growing. Raw milk can’t be sold legally for human consumption in many states, but some 11 million Americans drink it anyway as wellness influencers, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., extol its benefits. They do so despite a well-established risk of disease and death: E. coli, salmonella, and listeria have all been found in unpasteurized milk.
This year, a new pathogen has been added to the list.

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The allure of smoking has proved hard to stamp out. Despite the fact that cigarette use is at an 80-year-low in America, smoking has, unfortunately, become cool again. At the New York Fashion Week show in February, some models accessorized their runway outfits with a cigarette.

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.
Ronald Reagan, invoking the 17th-century Puritan John Winthrop, once compared America to “a shining city on a hill.” This image of visibility and power, my colleague David Frum writes in a new essay, “imposed extra moral responsibility on the city dwellers.

Updated at 8 p.m. ET on December 4, 2024.
This morning, I had an unsettling experience.
I was invited onto MSNBC’s Morning Joe to talk from a studio in Washington, D.C., about an article I’d written on Trump’s approach to foreign policy. Before getting to the article, I was asked about the nomination of Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense—specifically about an NBC News report that his heavy drinking worried colleagues at Fox News and at the veterans organizations he’d headed.

No federal agency is as hated as the IRS, and perhaps no federal agency deserves so much hate.
The average American spends 13 hours a year completing the agency’s ugly, indecipherable forms. The process is so onerous that Americans fork over $10 billion annually to tax preparers, who nevertheless screw up an estimated 60 percent of their clients’ returns. The IRS audits low-income working families more often than it audits all but the very richest families.

Hunter Biden has lived a troubled life, and faced years in prison—until Sunday, when his father rescued him, issuing a full executive pardon clearing him of all charges. Show me a parent who wouldn’t have done the same. If saving Hunter was politically improper or reputationally risky, it was also done in accordance with the higher and fiercer laws of familial love.