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.Staff writer and Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Anne Applebaum is uniquely qualified to plumb the American influence on Brazil’s “January 6 moment,” the insurrection on Sunday by supporters of the country’s far-right former president, Jair Bolsonaro.

In the two-plus years that COVID vaccines have been available in America, the basic recipe has changed just once. The virus, meanwhile, has belched out five variants concerning enough to earn their own Greek-letter names, followed by a menagerie of weirdly monikered Omicron subvariants, each seeming to spread faster than the last. Vaccines, which take months to reformulate, just can’t keep up with a virus that seems to reinvent itself by the week.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he 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 WeekLast week, Spiegel International reported on a country where carnivores can already legally dine on meat that is produced from the stem cells of animals.

Imagine a fairy-tale city—on the coast, perhaps, with sailboats bobbing in the breeze. This is Ursula K. Le Guin’s Omelas, a fictional utopia where “the air of morning was so clear that the snow still crowning the Eighteen Peaks burned with white-gold fire.”But Omelas holds a horrifying secret: Its continued existence relies on a single malnourished, unloved child being kept in a cellar, alone and uncomforted, in filth and fear.

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.Amid the fight for the House speaker’s gavel, it was easy to forget that George Santos is now actually a member of Congress.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

As familiar as Americans are with the concept of credit, many of us, upon encountering a sandwich that can be financed in four easy payments of $3.49, might think: Yikes, we’re in trouble.Putting a banh mi on layaway—this is the world that buy-now, pay-later programs have wrought.

In the landscape of video-game adaptations, a specific quandary comes up again and again as the medium grows in ambition: How do you translate a game that was itself clearly inspired by film and television? When The Last of Us was released on PlayStation in 2013, I marveled at its cinematic verisimilitude.

The first three books are publishing today from Atlantic Editions, a first-of-its-kind book imprint launched as a partnership between The Atlantic and the independent publisher Zando, with titles from staff writers Megan Garber and Sophie Gilbert (a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Criticism) and senior editor Lenika Cruz. This new line of paperback books features definitive essays by Atlantic authors; each is themed on a single consequential topic.