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.It’s never been more fraught to be the “main character” in the United States. Below, I look at how this week’s debacle in the House of Representatives is illustrative of a larger cultural phenomenon.

No one alive has seen a race like the 2024 presidential election. For months, if not years, many people have expected a reprise of the 2020 election, a matchup between the sitting president and a former president.But that hasn’t prevented a crowded primary. On the GOP side, more than a dozen candidates are ostensibly vying for the nomination.

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.Last week I asked readers to opine on whether Democrats should stick with Joe Biden in 2024 or replace him with a younger nominee.

Last month, I found myself in a particular seat. A few places to my left was Elon Musk. Down the table to my right sat Bill Gates. Across the room sat Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, and not too far to his left was Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google. At the other end of the table sat Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, the company responsible for ChatGPT.

“The office of speaker of the House of the United States House of Representatives is hereby declared vacant.”
With those words, uttered in the well of the House on Tuesday afternoon, Kevin McCarthy’s reign as speaker came to an inglorious end. McCarthy is the first speaker in history to be removed by his own party; eight Republicans voted to dethrone him, along with all 208 Democrats who were present and voting.

The fall of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy today demonstrated again that the one sin that cannot be forgiven in the modern Republican Party is being seen as failing to fight the Democratic agenda by any means necessary.Of all the accusations that could be leveled against McCarthy, the notion that he was insufficiently committed to battling Democrats would not seem high on the list.

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 embracing the term Bidenomics, Joe Biden is clapping back at his critics. But he’s also attaching his legacy to a notoriously unwieldy part of American life.First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:
Kevin McCarthy’s brief speakership meets its end.

Updated at 8:14 p.m. ET on October 3, 2023Kevin McCarthy began his 269th day as House speaker by recounting all the times he proved his doubters wrong. In January, after a series of humiliating defeats, the California Republican hung on to become speaker of the House. In the months since, he reminisced, he has narrowly averted the twin crises of a national-debt default and, this past weekend, a government shutdown.

Thirty years ago today, the U.S. military was involved in a brief but brutal battle in Somalia. In a series of firefights over two bloody days, 18 members of America’s most elite Special Forces and hundreds of Somali militiamen were killed. This was the Battle of Mogadishu, which the journalist Mark Bowden (now an Atlantic contributing writer) famously reported for The Philadelphia Inquirer and later adapted as the book and the film Black Hawk Down.