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.
Every two years, politicians declare the most important election of our lifetimes, and becoming inured to that is easy. But as I reported on how the 2026 election could be in danger for my recent story, I started to wonder if maybe the assertion was true this time.

What does Elon Musk want the world to know about “white genocide theory”? Because he’s been vocal about the issue in the past—advancing the idea, for example, that Jews are pushing “hatred against whites”—I decided to search for the term on Grokipedia, the competitor to Wikipedia that Musk launched yesterday.
First, the site uses just that term, theory, rather than conspiracy theory, as you would see on Wikipedia and elsewhere.

Updated with new questions at 4:35 p.m. ET on October 28, 2025.
It’s said that the 17th- and 18th-century polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was the last person to know everything. He was a whiz at philosophy, law, logic, science, engineering, politics—the works. But there was also simply less to know back then; the post–Industrial Revolution knowledge explosion killed the universal genius.
Which is to say that I bet Leibniz wouldn’t know the full oeuvre of K-pop if he were alive today.

For most of my adult life, I’ve felt helpless about being overweight. When I met with a doctor a few years ago to discuss my high cholesterol, he held up a hunk of faux flesh meant to model a pound of excess fat and encouraged me to lose 20 of said gelatinous blobs. Perhaps, he suggested, I should eat less red meat and start exercising. I still remember his perplexed stare after I told him I had an established gym routine and had been a vegetarian for the better part of a decade.

The Atlantic is announcing two new editorial roles: the hire of Adam Kirsch as senior editor, coming from The Wall Street Journal, and Luis Parrales, who is moving from the role of fact checker to staff writer at The Atlantic, focusing on coverage of religion.