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.
Over the past three months, Elon Musk has mobilized his many resources—his exceptional wealth, far-reaching online platform, and time—for a cause that could have profound effects on his personal fortune and American society: electing Donald Trump.

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present, surface delightful treasures, and examine the American idea.
The earliest mention of marijuana I could find in The Atlantic’s pages was from “I Like Bad Boys,” an immersive essay from November 1939 in which J. M. Braude profiles working-class adolescents caught up in the Chicago Boys’ Court system.

The promise of the American food supply is that you can eat anything and not get sick. You can usually assume that whatever you buy from a grocery store or fast-food joint won’t land you in a hospital.
But lately, foodborne-illness outbreaks seem to be distressingly regular. On Tuesday, the CDC reported 49 cases and one death linked to McDonald’s Quarter Pounders tainted with E. coli.

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Growing up, my older brother was a good student, interested in science. We shared a bedroom, so I benefited from his knowledge at night as we lay in our beds and he regaled me with facts of all kinds, with specializations on such topics as the behavior of dinosaurs and the age of volcanoes.

At a gate topped by barbed wire just north of White Sands Missile Range, a miles-long line of vehicles formed before dawn on Saturday. Once or twice a year, the U.S. Army rolls this gate open so that ordinary citizens can set foot upon the precise patch of New Mexico desert where the first atomic bomb exploded. Civilian access to the site was first insisted upon in 1952 by members of a local church.

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.
Yesterday, The Atlantic published another astonishing story by editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg about Trump’s hatred of the military.

Last month, an energy think tank released some rare good news for the climate: The world is on track to install 29 percent more solar capacity this year than it did the year before, according to a report from Ember. “In a single year, in a single technology, we’re providing as much new electricity as the entirety of global growth the year before,” Kingsmill Bond, a senior energy strategist at RMI, a clean-energy nonprofit, told me.