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.
For a few precarious hours last week, Elon Musk reportedly lost his title as the world’s richest man.

Three weeks into Donald Trump’s deployment of federal forces into Washington, D.C., the president announced on Truth Social that the capital had become a “CRIME FREE ZONE.” To hear the president tell it, the District—now patrolled by more than 2,200 members of the National Guard and federal law-enforcement officers from roughly 10 government agencies—has gone from hellscape to paradise. “People who haven’t gone out to dinner in Washington, D.C.

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.
The defining art form of our times might be the reaction video. You’ve surely seen a few: some influencer gasping, or screaming, or doing bug eyes as they take in a much-hyped new song or a movie’s big twist. The point is to bottle unpredictable, sizzling human emotion into rewatchable content.

In the fall of 1983, Judd Apatow made his way down to a musty room in the basement of Syosset High School and stumbled upon his secret weapon—he just didn’t know it yet.
Apatow was 15 years old, deep into an infatuation with comedy, but had nowhere to channel it. Boyhood on Long Island was something like a John Hughes movie: idyllic on the outside and tormented on the inside.

On Ukraine’s front lines, combat patches are currency. Soldiers trade their insignia for those of other units, mostly, but sometimes for alcohol and cigarettes. When I visited earlier this summer, I brought a stack of U.S. Navy patches from my time as an aviator, along with a rucksack that has featured a steady rotation of insignia from soldiers I’ve met in war zones around the world.
The latest addition is a camouflaged crab, the emblem of Ukraine’s 34th Coastal Defense Brigade.