Editor’s Note: On the last Monday of each month, Lori Gottlieb answers a reader’s question about a problem, big or small. Have a question? Email her at dear.therapist@theatlantic.com.
Don’t want to miss a single column? Sign up to get “Dear Therapist” in your inbox. Dear Therapist,My stepdaughter is 35 years old and has been in a relationship with a 38-year-old man for five years. He is an only child with odd parents and is a bit odd himself.

America has two national holidays that honor those who have served, Veterans Day and Memorial Day. The former is for the living; the latter is for the dead. How we remember, honor, and judge the dead was on my mind as I wrote Halcyon, a novel that imagines an alternate America in which a scientific breakthrough has allowed a few of those dead to again wander among us.

“The language of escalation is the language of excuse.” That’s how Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, dismisses anxiety that assistance to Ukraine could provoke Russia to either expand the war to NATO countries or cross the nuclear threshold. The country most concerned about Russia expanding its aggression beyond Ukraine is the country least likely to be the victim of it: the United States.The Biden administration has been unequivocal in its policy declarations.

Editor’s Note: Read Cynthia Ozick’s new short story “Late-Night-Radio Talk-Show Host Tells All.” “Late-Night-Radio Talk-Show Host Tells All” is a new story by Cynthia Ozick. To mark the story’s publication, Ozick and Oliver Munday, the associate creative director of the magazine, discussed the story over email. Their conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

Editor’s Note: Read an interview with Cynthia Ozick about her writing process. Do I have rivals? Competitors? Certainly: the sports blatherers with their outer-borough accents, the medicine men and their elixirs, the partisan boosters who stir up primitive rage, the DJs peddling their caterwaulings. From one end of the dial to the other, clamor and cacophony. My mode is otherwise: seduction, consolation, the whisper, the voice that caresses and heals. The voice of a lover.

This story contains spoilers through the Season 4 finale of Barry.After everything he’d somehow survived—the stash-house shoot-outs, the brushes with law enforcement, the prison beatings, the time he’d found himself tied up in a chair opposite someone who was absolutely ready to kill him—even Barry wasn’t surprised by his own death.

Updated on May 29, 2023, at 1:48 a.m. ETThis article contains spoilers through the Season 4 finale of Succession.Talk about a ludicrously capacious feast.

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.Good morning! I’m the senior Books editor at The Atlantic. I’m taking over today’s culture edition of the Daily for something a little different: an exciting update from our Books section, and some recommendations for your summer reading list.

— For DonnaRain comes back to the East River,
never the same riverbut the buildings still toss their lights
on the water like flaming cocktails, the ferrygroans as it docks and then turns
away. Rain returnsto the river and goes
wherever souls go, throngingforward and falling back. Your sister
at the end, flushed with morphine, called outto the gone dog of your childhoods Here
girl, here—Come in from the balcony, honey.
I’ve made you some food.

Sigmund Freud had a rule. However irresistible the temptation to burrow into the inner life of kings, prime ministers, and tycoons, he wouldn’t analyze famous contemporaries from afar. It just wasn’t right to rummage around in the mind of a subject who didn’t consent to the practice. But in the end, he found one leader so fascinating and so maddening that his ethical qualms apparently melted away.