Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.Next to one’s birthday, the passing of the calendar year induces us to reflect on the march of time in our life. This is not a welcome subject for many—which is perhaps why a lot of people simply redefine old age virtually out of existence. When Americans were asked in 2009 what “being old” means, the most popular response was turning 85.

A few weeks ago, I came across a GIF from the 1994 film The Lion King that made me weep. It shows the lion cub Simba moments after he discovers the lifeless body of his father, Mufasa; he nuzzles under Mufasa’s limp arm and then lies down beside him. I was immediately distraught at that scene, and my memories of the ones that follow: Simba pawing at his dead father’s face, Simba pleading with him to “get up.

For the holidays, Radio Atlantic is sharing the first episode of the Atlantic podcast How to Keep Time. Co-hosts Becca Rashid and Ian Bogost, an Atlantic contributing writer, examine our relationship with time and what we can do to reclaim it.In its first episode, they explore the idea of “wasting” time.

The U.S. government can achieve great things quickly when it has to. In November 2020, the Food and Drug Administration granted emergency-use authorization to the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for COVID-19. Seven days later, a competing vaccine from Moderna was approved. The rollout to the public began a few weeks later. The desperate search for a vaccine had been orchestrated by Operation Warp Speed, an initiative announced by the Trump administration that May.

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.Nearly three months into the Israel-Hamas war, our writers think through the possible futures that await the region.First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
81 things that blew our minds in 2023
Political accountability isn’t dead yet.

After, with their underwear still tangled
in the top sheet, or just waking
in winter, the stunned trees
thrusting up their arms,
he was always the first to leave the bed.
Rising, he’d put on coffee.

On September 22, when federal prosecutors accused Senator Robert Menendez of taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes, Representative Andy Kim, a fellow New Jersey Democrat, asked one of his neighbors what he thought of the charges. “That’s Jersey,” the man replied.The neighbor’s shrug spoke volumes about not only a state with a sordid history of political corruption but also a country that seemed to have grown inured to scandal.

Over the past year, the writers on The Atlantic’s Science, Technology, and Health desk have learned about the dynamics of the cosmos and tiny microbes, the nature of the human brain and artificial intelligence. We’ve also covered some of the most pressing issues facing the planet: the climate crisis, infectious-disease outbreaks, a new wave of transformative weight-loss drugs. Along the way, our reporting has revealed some fascinating, sobering, and unusual facts.

My friend Lee Caggiano, who died several weeks ago, was not famous. But through her work, she changed one particular corner of the world: Lee made people who stutter, like me, want to talk.Like 99 percent of the population, Lee was fluent, meaning she never knew what it was like to stutter herself. But her son did. His experience with stuttering made her pivot her life and go back to school.