Lucky no one got hurt when I failed
To notice that another car had entered
The traffic circle before me, but not so lucky
When my car was declared not worth repairing.Lucky my car made no accusations
About the many more years of driving
We might have enjoyed together if only
I’d remembered to look where I was going.No way to explain to a car, which always waits
Just where you leave it, the human capacity
To drift in thought away from the body
Just when the body is in need of guidance.

Psychiatry, from its very inception, has been subject to raised eyebrows if not outright ridicule. Even before Freud came along with his batty theories about infantile sexuality and repressed wishes to kill one’s father, the discipline had struggled to define its methods and objectives.

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.This is my last day writing The Atlantic Daily (for now!), and I’d like to thank you all for reading. I know it’s something of an ask to allow the same fellow into your inbox every evening to opine about the day’s news, and I appreciate it.

About six months have elapsed since the most powerful space telescope in history bid farewell to Earth and took off into the darkness. In that time, the James Webb Space Telescope has deployed its gold-coated mirrors, turned on its instruments, and gotten the hang of operating 1 million miles from Earth.

Ben Dantzer had spent several frustrating days trying to capture a single squirrel when the epiphany arrived. Dantzer, a rodent researcher at the University of Michigan, was standing in the Canadian Yukon, scrutinizing the uncooperative squirrel, which was perched high in a spruce tree. Then, all of a sudden, he felt as though he was looking at an optical illusion: When he viewed the squirrel one way, he saw a squirrel; when he viewed it another way, he saw a rat.

Immediately after the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs came down, anti-abortion groups began distributing press releases celebrating their victory and vowing to get around to something the movement has politically neglected for the past several decades: helping mothers afford children. For so many millions already distraught by the ruling, the ready promises of help on the way came not so much as a comfort but as an insult.

In July of last year, a grown man pulled on a giant bear costume and set out to walk across the country. Under the alias Bearsun, Jessy Larios, then 33, ambled from Los Angeles to New York, sweating and chafing and viewing the world through a mesh peephole. Larios told me that it was “kind of like carrying around your own prison,” and that despite the costume’s whimsical exterior, the interior experience was akin to “getting tortured.