For more than three hours yesterday, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic grilled a pair of virologists about their participation in an alleged “cover-up” of the pandemic’s origins. Republican lawmakers zeroed in on evidence that the witnesses, Kristian Andersen and Robert Garry, and other researchers had initially suspected that the coronavirus spread from a Chinese lab.

In the desert, summer starts in earnest in May. It’s the beginning of dry season, with highs in the 90s—just a taste of the triple-digit days to come. Some people still venture out to trails and campsites, but for me, May marks the end of hiking season and the beginning of pool season.

This week, Donald Trump’s lawyers submitted a court filing that confirmed a theory that Trump critics have been spreading for years. I called my colleague David Graham to talk about the surprises of the latest filing, and how Trump is scrambling the traditional relationship between law and politics.First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:
New Mark Zuckerberg dropped.
The curious personality changes of older age
Google’s new search tool could eat the internet alive.

Mark Zuckerberg is having a nice summer. By his own account, he’s in great shape, owing to a fondness for mixed martial arts and a propensity for doing calisthenics while wearing a camo-print weighted vest. He has recently welcomed a new daughter to the world; placed in jiu-jitsu competitions; appeared sweaty and shirtless with the UFC champion, Alexander Volkanovski; and enjoyed the attention from engaging in some light trolling of Elon Musk.

At the familiar, treacherous hour of 3 a.m., I wake up in a cold sweat, my heart galloping in my chest. I drink some water and take half an Ambien. Then I turn to a sacred document that comforts me in uncertain times. I’ve read it so often, I can practically recite it from memory: “No more than 28 percent of the borrower’s gross monthly income should be spent on housing costs,” says the article from Rocket Mortgage.

Did you think it would all happen this fast? The heat domes, the thousand-year floods, the apocalyptic wildfires, that horrific orange sky? This summer’s convergence of extreme events makes it feel like we’re living in a CGI-laden disaster movie. But those epic blockbusters all offer the same material comfort: an ending. What we’re experiencing is different.First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
It turns out that the debt matters after all.

There’s no such thing as quickly finding a recipe online. Every cooking blog, it seems, is stuffed with paragraphs and paragraphs before you get to an actual recipe, text that might tell you about the history of the dish, or even which of the author’s kids likes it best. It’s not that food writers are categorically long-winded, though. They are just responding to Google’s demands.

Because I am a writer, and because I am a hoarder, my apartment is littered with notebooks that contain a mixture of journal entries and school assignments. Many pages don’t have dates, but I can tell which era of my life they correspond to just by looking at the handwriting. In the earliest examples, from elementary school, my print is angular, jagged; even the s’s and j’s turn sharp corners.

A recurring dynamic of the Trump era is that his opponents warn darkly about his secret motives or actions, and then he bluntly confirms their hunches in public.For years, Democrats insisted that Trump had secret, illicit ties to Russia. Then, in the summer of 2017, Donald Trump Jr. abruptly disclosed a 2016 meeting he’d held with Russians promising “dirt” on Hillary Clinton.

Earlier this year, Google introduced a chat application powered by artificial intelligence—an experimental competitor to ChatGPT and a tool that it hoped, per its marketing copy, would “be a home for your creativity, productivity and curiosity.” Understanding that some potential users might be less sanguine about a technology that blurs the line between the augmentation of human intelligence and the obsolescence of it, Google gave its new bot a canny name: Bard.