Robert Mueller III was a Bronze Star Marine veteran, an FBI director, and an American citizen. When the president of the United States heard the news that Mueller died today, he put it this way: “Good, I’m glad he’s dead.”
Mueller was honored for his service in Vietnam, and served presidents of both parties as the director of the nation’s top law-enforcement agency.

Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings, watch full episodes here, or listen to the weekly podcast here.
Opposition to President Trump’s continued attacks on Iran is growing—not only from resentful European allies and Democratic Party leaders, but also from parts of his MAGA base.

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.
When Andrew McCarthy’s 21-year-old son turned to him and asked, “You don’t really have any friends, do you, Dad?” McCarthy had to stop and think. He had friends—at least he thought he did—but he saw and heard from them so infrequently that he started to wonder if they still counted as his friends.

In 1926, a widely respected Dutch gynecologist named Theodoor Hendrik van de Velde published a manual whose aim was to explain the vital role of sex in marriage. “What husband and wife who love one another seek to achieve in their most intimate bodily communion,” he wrote, is “a means of expression that makes them One.” The book, Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique, was addressed mostly to men—and became a best seller.

This is a trend? The Alpine Divorce? When a man abandons his girlfriend and his relationship mid-hike? This sounds like a cutesy name for something genuinely alarming! Here are some other trends that might be coming next.
Alpine Divorce, Hannibal Edition: When you leave your significant other in the Alps on foot but you yourself ride across them on an elephant.

Here’s how you know Project Hail Mary is a work of science fiction: It’s about the disparate nations of Earth pooling together their resources and intelligence to confront an apocalyptic problem—in this case, the pending death of the sun, due to a mysterious alien substance.

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.
To national audiences, the news that a North Carolina state senator had apparently lost a Republican primary race by two—yes, two—votes seemed like one of those quirky election stories that come around every year, such as when the mayor of Boca Raton, Florida, recently won by five votes.

Bad news to the many, many Duke-basketball haters out there: It appears that you’re going to have to put up with the Blue Devils in all of their punchable smugness, with their fade haircuts and the skinny blue letters on their swelling chests, their floor-smacking defense and their clean, net-twitching shots, for at least another day, if not another generation.

Taylor Frankie Paul’s turn on The Bachelorette was meant to be a fairy tale fit for reality, an age-old love story made modern by a heroine who had risen to fame as an antihero. Frankie Paul first gained notoriety as an online influencer and came to ABC’s soft-lit dating show through her role on The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, where—as a reliable purveyor of high-stakes melodramas and telegenic tantrums—she has helped make the Hulu series a hit.