Over the past week, my breakfast routine has been scrambled. I have had overnight oats, beans on sourdough, corned-beef hash and fried rice, and, on a particularly weird morning, leftover cream-of-broccoli soup. Under normal circumstances, I would be eating eggs. But right now, I’m in hoarding mode, jealously guarding the four that remain from a carton purchased indignantly for six dollars. For that price—50 damn cents each!—my daily sunny-side-up eggs will have to wait.

On Sunday, I had my first Lunar New Year celebration in New York City’s Chinatown. At one point, after I had released my confetti popper and my friend had left, I stood in a park, alone in the crowd. I dug the tips of my black boots into the piles of festive red and pink paper shreds, fake flower petals, and tiny imitation $100 bills on the ground. And then I inhaled, holding the breath in my lungs for a few extra seconds before releasing it back into the cold air.

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.The American economy is doing fine. So why are tech companies laying off tens of thousands of workers?But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
The trillion-dollar coin might be the least bad option.

For once, the Academy Award nominations seemingly arrived without too much existential panic about the entire enterprise. The latest slate of honorees, announced this morning by Riz Ahmed and Allison Williams, includes two of the most commercially successful films of the year, a bunch of crowd-pleasing word-of-mouth hits, and some genuine indie and foreign surprises.

It shouldn’t be hard to persuade people to take a sip of yerba mate. It’s completely natural. It makes you feel simultaneously energized and relaxed. You can drink it all day without feeling like your stomach acid is burning through your esophagus. It’s the preferred caffeine source of Lionel Messi, Zoe Saldaña, and the pope.

They’re making their lists, checking them twice, trying to decide who’s in and who’s not. Once again, it’s admissions season, and tensions are running high as university leaders wrestle with challenging decisions that will affect the future of their schools. Chief among those tensions, in the past few years, has been the question of whether standardized tests should be central to the process.

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 NATO nations are wavering about sending tanks and other advanced weapons to Ukraine. I understand fears of escalation, but if Russia wins in Ukraine, the world will lose.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

Photographs by Lenard SmithOn an early-December morning in California’s Mojave Desert, the Geoscience Support Services geohydrologist Logan Wicks squats in the sand and fiddles with a broken white pipe. Here on a sandy road off Route 66, past miles of scrubby creosote and spiny mesquite, Wicks monitors the pumps and pipes of a promising desert extraction project.But he’s not looking for oil or gas.