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In some states, public funds are being poured into the child-care industry—and private-equity groups are seeing an attractive target for investment.

My KitchenAid stand mixer is older than I am. My dad bought the white-enameled machine 35 years ago, during a brief first marriage. The bits of batter crusted into its cracks could be from the pasta I made yesterday or from the bread he made then.
I learned to make my grandfather’s crunchy molasses gingersnaps in that stand mixer. In it, I creamed butter and sugar for the first time.

It feels like a sin against the sanctitude of being alive to put a dollar value on one year of a human life. A year spent living instead of dead is obviously priceless, beyond the measure of something so unprofound as money. But it gets a price tag in the world of economic models. Different agencies and organizations use different estimates—no one can seem to agree on the precise going rate. But according to the Environmental Protection Agency, a statistical lifetime is valued at about $11.

It’s still a mystery why the Coen brothers stopped working together. The pair made 18 movies as a duo, from 1984’s Blood Simple to 2018’s The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, setting a new standard for black comedy in American cinema. None of those movies was flatly bad (although The Ladykillers comes close, I don’t mind it); many of them were masterpieces. Then, a few years ago, they split up—allegedly, Ethan Coen had grown tired of the grind, though neither of them ever spoke about it on the record.

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.
IBM’s new pension program may not change the game for workers. But it raises big questions about what companies owe their employees, and how existing retirement structures could better serve them.
First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:
Texas’s social-media law is dangerous.

Last week, as American sports fans’ eyes moved from football to baseball, a great cry—or at least a significant grumble—was heard from MLB players arriving at spring training: The new uniforms are bad.
The MLB announced the uniforms, which have been redesigned by Nike for all of the league’s 30 teams, in a press release last Tuesday. It included praise from some of the biggest baseball names on Nike’s endorsement roster.

In my childhood home, an often-repeated phrase was “All disease begins in the gut.” My dad, a health nut, used this mantra to justify his insistence that our family eat rice-heavy meals, at the exact same time every day, to promote regularity and thus overall health. I would roll my eyes, dubious that his enthusiasm for this practice was anything more than fussiness.
Now, to my chagrin, his obsession has become mainstream.

As a progressive legal scholar and activist, I never would have expected to end up on the same side as Greg Abbott, the conservative governor of Texas, in a Supreme Court dispute. But a pair of cases being argued next week have scrambled traditional ideological alliances.