The announcement that the stand-up comedian Nate Bargatze would be hosting Saturday Night Live this weekend was met in some corners with a bit of confusion. When SNL goes the stand-up route for a host, it usually plucks an alum (John Mulaney, for instance) or a household name (Dave Chappelle, for example) to do the job.

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.Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is our Science editor Sarah Laskow. Sarah recently investigated whether salsa is gazpacho—and whether gazpacho is salsa.

The poet Wisława Szymborska was a 16-year-old in Krakow, Poland, when Germany invaded her country in 1939. Everything changed after that: The Nazis banned secondary schools and universities, so she had to finish high school illegally in secret classes. Eventually, after the war, she went to university—and ultimately won the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature. She kept writing about the long trail of violence through the centuries, and the stories we tell about that violence in hindsight.

The Jewish cemetery in Ferrara, Italy, is a melancholy place nestled against the walls that encircle the medieval city. Its 800 gravestones are bunched in clusters amid overgrown grass, fallen leaves, and brooding trees. The impressive expanse is evidence of what had been, before the Second World War, a large, vibrant Jewish community, now reduced to a few dozen souls.

In early September, Jawan, or “Soldier,” Indian cinema’s latest mega-budget extravaganza, registered the highest opening-day gross in Bollywood history. The film’s success cemented the remarkable renaissance of Shah Rukh Khan, the country’s biggest movie star, after a turbulent phase in the era of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

No one alive has seen a race like the 2024 presidential election. For months, if not years, many people have expected a reprise of the 2020 election, a matchup between the sitting president and a former president.But that hasn’t prevented a crowded primary. On the GOP side, more than a dozen candidates are ostensibly vying for the nomination.

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. The House of Representatives finally has a new speaker. After a bruising battle and several weeks without a leader, Republicans have elected Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana to be the 56th speaker of the House.

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.“I believe in chasing the ghost of my former lighthearted self,” my colleague Faith Hill wrote last year. And “if there’s one day when I might almost catch up, it’s Halloween: the most ridiculous, inherently childish holiday, and perhaps the one grown-ups need most.

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine.Jumping spiders are an obsession for me. But it wasn’t always so.Although never a spider hater or an arachnophobe, I was pretty ambivalent about them for most of my life. Then I learned about jumping spiders: I’ve reported on their impressive vision (as good as a cat’s in some ways!), their surprising smarts (they make plans!), and the discovery that they have REM-like sleep (and may even dream!). I was hooked.

On August 16, 1867, a young farmer named Alfred McDonald Sargent Johnson walked into the courthouse of Cherokee County, Georgia. He had an oath to swear.The effects of the Civil War were still visible in Canton, a village of about 200 people and the county seat. For one thing, that makeshift courthouse was inside a Presbyterian church—its predecessor having been torched by William Tecumseh Sherman’s men shortly before their march to the sea.