Let today’s trivia be the best of times, and more “age of wisdom” than “age of foolishness.” Good luck!
And by the way, did you know that Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers—a novel released over the course of 1836 in serialized form—was so popular in England that it spawned theatrical performances, joke books, bootlegs, and Pickwick-branded canes, hats, soaps, and cigars? 
As was written in The Atlantic in 2015, “‘Literature’ is not a big enough category for Pickwick.

Shower thoughts are typically best left in the shower. Such as: What might Claude the AI chatbot have to say about Claude Monet?
Earlier this month, San Francisco’s de Young Museum unveiled its newest exhibition, “Monet and Venice,” which is dedicated to the impressionist painter’s beautiful and meditative canvases of the floating city. And Anthropic, perhaps having seized on a marketing opportunity, is one of the show’s lead sponsors.

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.
On Friday, after almost a full month of bombing Iran, Donald Trump offered a glimpse of the end. American military operations in the country, he said, could soon be “winding down.

With apologies to baseball, I believe that binge-watching television may have become America’s true pastime. TV sets have ruled living rooms for decades, but gone are the days of viewers exclusively following broadcast schedules. Netflix and its peers have rendered entertainment addictively customizable and hyper-accessible, making entire seasons of shows available at once and commissioning original series of their own.

Today’s trivia is not asserting that loving France makes you lose the presidency, but it’s not not asserting that. See for yourself!
And by the way, did you know—classic fun fact incoming—that thanks to its overseas territories, France technically spans more time zones than any other country? 
The European part of France exists entirely within one time zone.

Sign up for our newsletter about national security here.
Even before his son was in high school, Mylo Simmons told me, there was something about flying that fascinated him. Some days, Simmons and his son, Tyler, would sit in the car together, pulled over on a street with a clear view of an airport runway, watching planes take off and land. Tyler was “looking up at the sky all the time,” his father said. “He wanted to be up there.

Sign up for our newsletter about national security here.
The war in Iran has horrified many inside the country, but some worry that peace could be just as frightening. “I am shit-scared,” Shaghayeh, a 32-year-old living in Tehran, told me last week. “But I won’t cheer if the war ends now. You want to leave us alone with Mojtaba?”
Shaghayeh, a left-wing activist, was referring to the new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, whose regime continues to impose a near-total internet blackout.