Last week, the Council on Foreign Relations invited me to a roundtable discussion it will be hosting Tuesday with the president of Iran, Ebrahim Raisi, who will be in New York for the United Nations General Assembly. As a longtime member of the council, I wrote back to decline the invitation and published a brief statement about why I believe that Raisi, a man who ought to be behind bars for mass murder, must not be accorded this legitimacy.

All our pretty sons on the playground
running in bright colors, their high, bright voices ringing out.
Now the slides, now climbing, now leaping from swings.
They’re wonder-struck at the sight of
a green maple tree spilling its magic,
waving its arms at blue sky. They are so little, the language
of violence hasn’t yet entered them.
Older boys haven’t yet taught them how to be cruel.

This article originally appeared in Undark Magazine.In 2016, Ox Lennon was trying to peek in the crevices inside a pile of rocks. Lennon, who uses they/them pronouns, considered everything from injecting builders’ foam into the tiny spaces to create a mold to dumping a heap of stones into a CT scanner. Still, they couldn’t get the data they were after: how to stack rocks so that a mouse wouldn’t squeeze through, but a small lizard could hide safely inside.Lennon, then a Ph.D.

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.Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is staff writer Annie Lowrey, who covers economic policy, housing, and other related topics.

“Should I mention that I saw Anne Frank in Belsen? Do you think they’d be interested in that?” I was in my late teens when my mother was first asked to give a talk about her experiences as a German refugee and Dutch Jew in the Second World War. Until the late 1970s, people rarely asked her about it, and she didn’t want to be a bore.Then things began to change. Within a few years of her first speech, she was giving lectures in schools quite regularly.

Editor’s Note: Washington Week with The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings or watch full episodes here. House GOP infighting reached new heights this week as Trump-aligned House Republicans threatened to shut down the government.

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 those of us who have siblings, these relationships will likely be the longest of our life. That fact is a basic statistical one, but it’s also an emotional one.

This article was originally published by Knowable Magazine.We’ve all heard of the five tastes our tongues can detect: sweet, sour, bitter, savory-umami, and salty. But the real number is actually six, because we have two separate salt-taste systems. One of them detects the attractive, relatively low levels of salt that make potato chips taste delicious. The other registers high levels of salt—enough to make overly salted food taste offensive.