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“HOLY COW!!!!!” read the subject line of a fundraising email just after the debate on Tuesday evening. Democrats and their allies were quick to use Kamala Harris’s strong performance to ask voters to chip in.

After weeks of speculation about a new and more powerful AI product in the works, OpenAI today announced its first “reasoning model.” The program, known as o1, may in many respects be OpenAI’s most powerful AI offering yet, with problem-solving capacities that resemble those of a human mind more than any software before. Or, at least, that’s how the company is selling it.
As with most OpenAI research and product announcements, o1 is, for now, somewhat of a tease.

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.
The last time The Atlantic put a modern pop star on its cover was 2008, when Britney Spears, clad in oversize sunglasses, occupied a piece of media real estate usually devoted to probing the fate of democracy. Her appearance shocked many readers.

When the tobacco industry was accused of marketing harmful products to teens, its leaders denied the charge but knew it was true. Even worse, the industry had claimed that smoking made people healthier—by reducing anxiety, say, or slimming waistlines.
The social-media industry is using a similar technique today. Instead of acknowledging the damage their products have done to teens, tech giants insist that they are blameless and that their products are mostly harmless.

In July of this year, a U.S.-based company called CrowdStrike released an update for its widely used cybersecurity software, inadvertently triggering a massive system crash. In the hours that followed, what has since been described as the “largest outage in history” affected nearly every facet of our global society. On X, the phrase Leave the world behind went viral.

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The most appropriate terms to describe how Kamala Harris triumphed over Donald Trump in Tuesday’s debate come not from political punditry but from the field of psychology: triggered, baited, ego deflated.

During last night’s debate, Donald Trump said some strange things, even by his own standards. He praised the Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán (using the antidemocratic term strongman approvingly); lamented that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are “eating the dogs”; and falsely suggested that Kamala Harris wants to do “transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison.” This is not merely the stuff of normal Trumpian discourse.

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.
This morning found the former apex predator of American politics looking for some hand-holding.

The bar for tastelessness in American politics has dropped precipitously in the past decade. It’s even dropped in the past 24 hours. Nonetheless, it takes a unique kind of vulgarity to bring a 9/11 “truther” to events marking the 23rd anniversary of the September 11 attacks.
The culprit is former President Donald Trump, who attended commemorative events in New York and Pennsylvania today.

Before last night’s debate, I got a text from a friend who summed up Kamala Harris’s predicament: She has to appear feminine but not dainty. She has to be firm but not nasty. She has to call out Donald Trump’s lies but not be naggy. She has to dress presidentially but not be blah.
Evidently, women candidates face challenges that men don’t—voters question their toughness and are often ambivalent about how they should discuss identity.