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 of President Joe Biden’s critics argue that he did not have the authority to launch yesterday’s strikes in Yemen, but America’s presidents have significant constitutional powers regarding the use of military force.

When the writer Ryan Broderick joined Substack in 2020, it felt, he told me, like an “oasis.” The email-newsletter platform gave him a direct line to his readers. He did not have to deal with the chaos and controversy of social media. Substack was far from perfect, he knew—COVID conspiracies flourished, and on at least one occasion, trans writers on the platform were doxxed and harassed—but compared with the rest of the internet, he found the conditions tolerable. Until they weren’t.

ChatGPT has certainly captured the world’s imagination since its release at the end of 2022. But in day-to-day life, it is still a relatively niche product—a curiosity that leads people to ask questions that begin “Have you tried … ?” or “What do you think about … ?” Its maker, OpenAI, has a much more expansive vision. Its aim is seemingly to completely remake how people use the internet.

Ever since C. Auguste Dupin pinned the death of a Parisian mother and daughter on an escaped orangutan, the murder mystery has remained one of mainstream culture’s most enduring, flexible, and popular narrative formats. The lonesome detective—with a stern constitution, hair-trigger nonsense detector, and endearing alcohol dependency—is a reliably compelling protagonist, capable of crossing legal lines and meting out justice.

Welcome to the Books Briefing, our weekly guide to The Atlantic’s books coverage. Join us Friday mornings for reading recommendations.
A century and a half after they were writing, authors such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky still rule the canon of Russian literature.

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.
Snow is an essential part of how people in cold climates experience the winter, and a key source of water in many parts of the world. But new research shows that the snowpack—snow that stays on the ground in cold weather—is disappearing at an alarming rate as temperatures rise.

For years now, health experts have been warning that COVID-era politics and the spread of anti-vaxxer lies have brought us to the brink of public-health catastrophe—that a Great Collapse of Vaccination Rates is nigh. This hasn’t come to pass. In spite of deep concerns about a generation of young parents who might soon give up on immunizations altogether—not simply for COVID, but perhaps for all disease—many of the stats we have are looking good.

Donald Trump was determined to make one more scene in his fraud trial in New York today, and he succeeded.
After a Fox News town hall last night in Iowa, Trump flew to Manhattan, where he rose to speak during closing arguments in the trial—or perhaps more accurately, to rant.
“There wasn’t one witness against us,” Trump said, as The New York Times reported. He called the case a “political witch hunt” and said he was “an innocent man.” He said his financial statements were (naturally) “perfect.

Earlier this week, the Telegraph reported a curious admission from OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. In a filing submitted to the U.K. Parliament, the company said that “leading AI models” could not exist without unfettered access to copyrighted books and articles, confirming that the generative-AI industry, worth tens of billions of dollars, depends on creative work owned by other people.