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 Republicans have been fighting among themselves over the federal budget as a possible government shutdown looms.

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.“The microwave is a baffling contradiction: a universal, time-saving appliance that also seems trapped in time,” Jacob Sweet wrote this week.

This article originally appeared in High Country News.“These aren’t the right kind of rocks,” Tony Fiorillo said, pointing at the jagged pink and black stones along Alaska’s Yukon River. The sun blazed down on Fiorillo on the 14th day of a 16-day expedition.

The trains never end. I see them go by from my bedroom window. Freight trains of varying lengths. I hadn’t given enough consideration to the noise when I rented in suburban Chicago a place directly behind the train tracks. On some level, I must have liked the idea of living in a house charged by the feeling that time was slipping away—the hours of my life marked by the passing of each train, gone forever. But of course, the reality is different.

Right before Sha’Carri Richardson smoked the field in the 100-meter final at the U.S. Outdoor Track and Field Championships in Eugene, Oregon, in July, the 23-year-old star sprinter sent a thrilling message to every Black woman who’s ever been shamed for her hairstyle and never felt fully free to be herself.Richardson pulled off her signature bright-orange wig and threw it to the side, exposing the braids underneath. She then won the U.S.

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.Corporate jargon is grating. It can also both amp up and diminish the drama of corporate life, depending on the agenda of those in charge.

At long last, the rigid and outdated dress code in Congress has been sent down the river of bad ideas, along with the Segway and natural childbirth.Americans have been going through a sea change regarding work, with many of us experiencing not less but more productivity when we started working from home during the pandemic. Among the young, the change is even deeper.

As the chair of the department of obstetrics and gynecology at UT Southwestern Medicine, Catherine Spong is used to seeing a lot of baby bumps. But through her decades of practice, she’s been fascinated by a different kind of bump: Year after year after year, she and her colleagues deliver a deluge of babies from June through September, as much as a 10 percent increase in monthly rates over what they see from February through April. “We call it the summer surge,” Spong told me.

In a court of law, defendants are entitled to a presumption of innocence. In the court of public opinion, Senator Bob Menendez enjoys no such indulgence.The Democrat from New Jersey was indicted today—along with his wife, Nadine, and three others—on three counts of corruption. Federal prosecutors say the group accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes to assist the Egyptian government. Among other allegations, they say Menendez gave sensitive U.S.

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Question of the WeekEarlier this month in San Francisco, two friends and I wanted to imbibe strong rum drinks at the bar Smuggler’s Cove, so we used a phone app to summon a car.