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.
Sure, NASA is set to reduce its workforce by at least 2,145 employees, most of them senior-level and with expertise that will be extremely hard to replace.

Earlier today, Grok showed me how to tell if someone is a “good scientist,” just from their demographics. For starters, according to a formula devised by Elon Musk’s chatbot, they have to be a white, Asian, or Jewish man.
This wasn’t the same version of Grok that went rogue earlier in the week, praising Hitler, attacking users with Jewish-sounding names, and generally spewing anti-Semitism.

When I was little, I asked God for straight hair. I begged him to persuade my ballet instructor to let me dance en pointe instead of holding me back to give my ankles another year to strengthen. And I prayed that my parents would send me to Camp Mystic.
These are the kinds of things girls think about and talk about with one another, and with God. I grew up in Austin, Texas, and every third girl I knew went to Mystic, the Christian girls’ camp that was devastated by flooding last week.

This story was updated on July 11, 2025, at 4:35 pm ET.
Working in government, especially in national defense or the intelligence community, can be an unsettling business. You must give up a few of your rights and a lot of your privacy in order to remain a trustworthy public servant.

The great joy of a reality dating show is watching couples evolve. You see two strangers meet and make stilted small talk. Then they loosen up, share a first kiss, look at each other with progressively gooey gazes—until they leave the show hand in hand, or one of them breaks it off and starts the process over again with someone else.

The Trump administration had promised a bombshell. Americans, many of whom had spent years wondering over the unknowns in the Jeffrey Epstein case, would finally get their hands on the secret files that would explain it all.

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.
Japan is the one place in the world that has felt, and personally mourned, the staggering damage of nuclear warfare. The tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have turned the country into a longtime proponent of nuclear disarmament. But that national identity is starting to shift.

Air travelers in America shall no more doff their chukkas, their wedges, their wingtips, their espadrilles, or their Mary Janes, according to a rule-change announced by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Tuesday. It’s been more than two decades since the Transportation Security Administration started putting people’s footwear through its scanners, after a man named Richard Reid tried and failed to detonate his high-top sneakers on a flight to Miami in December 2001.

As The Atlantic continues to expand its editorial team, today it announced the hire of Idrees Kahloon as a staff writer. Idrees is currently the Washington bureau chief of The Economist.
This week, The Atlantic also announced two additional staff writers: Vivian Salama, joining next month from The Wall Street Journal to cover national security and foreign policy; and Tom Bartlett, who began yesterday to cover health and science under the second Trump administration.