Earlier this year, I moved from San Francisco to New York with my dogs, kids, and husband. My family rented an apartment. And once we figured out that we liked it here and wanted to stay, we looked to buy a place.For roughly 11 minutes, before realizing that literally any other activity would be a better use of our time. Brooklyn has 1.1 million housing units. Just a dozen of them seemed to fit our requirements and were sitting on the market. All of the options were too expensive.

In May 2022, an air-traffic controller in Florida received a frantic call. The pilot of a single-engine Cessna 208 had collapsed, leaving the sole passenger—with no experience at all flying a plane—to fend for himself in the cockpit. Remarkably, the controller was able to direct the passenger to take the controls, reach an airport, and safely land.The story went viral for several days, perhaps in part because we can all imagine ourselves in that nightmare come true.

Dylan Longton really knows how to flip an egg. A 33-year-old line cook at an unassuming diner just outside Albany, New York, Longton can make an omelet do a backflip and land it smoothly right back into its pan cradle. And people love him for it. Not just people in Albany, or people in New York. People all around the world, sometimes more than a thousand at once, tune in on TikTok to watch Longton flip eggs, and reheat bacon and homefries on the grill.

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.Today, we’ll introduce you to The Atlantic’s time machine. Plus, our editors selected seven great reads for you to dive into this weekend.

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 or watch full episodes here. Anger and frustration are growing among some members of House Speaker Mike Johnson’s caucus over government spending.

In his Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, André Breton wrote, “The marvelous is always beautiful, anything marvelous is beautiful, in fact only the marvelous is beautiful.” That line came to mind when I stood before Mother Nature, a giant canvas depicting a killer whale lifting a naked man into the air, eye level with a flock of gulls. The image was a highlight of “The Bathers,” Chase Hall’s standout debut at the David Kordansky Gallery in Chelsea this fall.

If there is one statistic that best captures the transformation of the American economy over the past half century, it may be this: Of Americans born in 1940, 92 percent went on to earn more than their parents; among those born in 1980, just 50 percent did. Over the course of a few decades, the chances of achieving the American dream went from a near-guarantee to a coin flip.What happened?One answer is that American voters abandoned the system that worked for their grandparents.

This Thanksgiving, America is divided: One half knows why the word squirle is funny, and one half does not. Are you in the latter group? Then you should know that earlier this month, a series of tweets surfaced by Taylor Swift’s new boyfriend, the Kansas City Chiefs star Travis Kelce. In one of them, from 2011, he offered this observation: “I just gave a squirle a peice of bread and it straight smashed all of it!!!! I had no idea they ate bread like that!! Haha #crazy.