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.Politics is already a performance. Why also sing?First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
Is Mississippi really as poor as Britain?
Make the collabs stop.
Give invasive species a job.
A Risk to Their DignityLive music has the power to connect, to make people feel.

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 WeekWhat do you think of the viral hit song “Rich Men North of Richmond”?Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.

Updated at 2:36 p.m. ET on August 18, 2023.This is an edition of the revamped Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.Lydia Kiesling’s new novel, Mobility, is about a woman who spends her life trying not to see the harm her work is doing to the Earth. The main character, Bunny Glenn, has fallen almost unwittingly into a career in the oil industry.

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.Earlier this year, while waiting for the subway, I encountered one of the most revolting pairs of shoes I’ve ever seen on the feet of a fellow commuter. They were the unholy spawn of a Gucci loafer and an Adidas sneaker.

In the ’90s, being a low-income student of color in the Ivy League was hard. Our population was minuscule. We were inside a place of privilege, but not fully part of it. The institution wasn’t built for us, and we knew it. We weren’t like the wealthy white kids whose alumni parents came to visit their favorite haunts in their favorite old college sweatshirts. But we were, we believed, part of a different future.

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.Some Democrats, echoing GOP narratives about Joe Biden’s age, are invested in the idea of challenging the president’s renomination. But how would that actually work?First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
Trump discovers that some things are actually illegal.

At the Boulder County Recycling Center in Colorado, two team members spend all day pulling items from a conveyor belt covered in junk collected from the area’s bins. One plucks out juice cartons and plastic bottles that can be reprocessed, while the other searches for contaminants in the stream of paper products headed to a fiber mill. They are Sorty McSortface and Sir Sorts-a-Lot, AI-powered robots that each resemble a supercharged mechanical arm from an arcade claw machine.

Anoles have always been happy in the heat. The svelte little lizards, a group some 400 species strong, thrive in the Americas’ warmest parts—from the balmy rainforests of South America up through the United States’ Sun Belt—where they spend their days basking on boulders and scurrying out to the sun-soaked tips of twigs, or even scampering over the blistering metal of exposed city pipes.