This is Atlantic Intelligence, an eight-week series in which The Atlantic’s leading thinkers on AI help you understand the complexity and opportunities of this groundbreaking technology. Sign up here.What will next year hold for AI? In a new story, Atlantic staff writer Ross Andersen looks ahead, outlining five key questions that will define the technology’s trajectory from here.

Last month, Harvard announced that I would be teaching a class next semester called “Taylor Swift and Her World,” an open-enrollment lecture partly about Swift’s work and career and partly about literature (poems, novels, memoirs) that overlaps with, or speaks to, that work. When the news came out, my inbox blew up with dozens of requests, from as far away as New Zealand.

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.In the smartphone era, libraries might seem less central. But it turns out that young people actually use them.First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
How to be happy growing older
America should be more like Operation Warp Speed.
The Middle East conflict that the U.S.

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.