Since his return to office, President Donald Trump has missed few chances to flex the power he wields over the nation’s most formidable institutions and its wealthiest people. So when the White House announced that Trump would host the latest in a series of dinners with top business executives, this time including JPMorgan Chase head Jamie Dimon and the chief executive of Nasdaq, reporters in the White House press pool prepared to watch Trump show off.
Nope.

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.
The bulletins come every few days now. On Tuesday, a U.S. strike in the Caribbean Sea killed four people. On Sunday, two strikes in the Pacific Ocean killed six, and two people died in a November 4 strike. The MO rarely changes: a bellicose announcement from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.
Late in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, one character wonders to another “whether the world is anchored anywhere.” It was a fair question in November 1851, when Moby-Dick was published; it was still an open one in November 1857, when the first issue of The Atlantic Monthly came out. American life felt unmoored.

The window President Donald Trump opened in the Middle East is narrow, but it is real. His intervention helped bring about a cease-fire that many thought impossible. In a region exhausted by endless war, that act alone deserves recognition. But ahead lies a task even more difficult than halting the gunfire: to repair what has been destroyed in Gaza, which is not only infrastructure but trust, both between and among Palestinians and Israelis.

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 past weekend, as I prepared to board a flight from Toronto to New York City, I looked down at my phone to find two pieces of news. One was that the Senate was readying a deal to end the ongoing government shutdown. The other was that my flight was delayed.
I was lucky.

This morning, House Democrats released emails from the notorious sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein that claim, among other things, that Donald Trump spent hours at Epstein’s home with one of his victims. Later in the day, a reporter asked White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt if this was true—that Trump had spent hours at Epstein’s place with a sex-trafficking victim.
“These emails,” she replied, “prove absolutely nothing other than the fact that President Trump did nothing wrong.

Early last year, Grant Smith received an alarmed message from his wife. She had gotten a text notification about a delayed package, clicked the link, and paid a fee. Then she realized that it was not, in fact, the United States Postal Service asking for her credit-card information—that she had no idea who had just collected her payment info. She quickly canceled the card.
The Smiths had been smished.