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.
If Democrats win control of the House in November, they will face a dilemma: Should they attempt a record third impeachment of Donald Trump?
The president and his allies have warned that this would be a Democratic majority’s first move. “I’m going to be impeached.

Welcome to our wedding weekend! It’s going to be a beautiful occasion, followed by an intimate gathering of family, dear friends, and one Russian oligarch nobody knows who will be handed the bill afterward. The bride will wear white, the groom will wear white, and the Russian oligarch nobody knows will wear camouflage in case someone tries to take a picture of him and ProPublica finds out. We will try to pass him off as a tropical plant, or suggest that he was doing close-up magic.

Few reporters understand as much about Donald Trump’s thinking, motives, and behavior as Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. Haberman has been covering the president closely for more than a decade at The New York Times; she started with his first campaign in 2015, and her record of scoops quickly brought her into the public eye. Swan was, for many years, her chief professional rival: He worked for Axios, where he landed a controversial 2018 one-on-one interview with Trump.

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.
President Trump appointed Kash Patel to lead the FBI not because of his brief experience in law enforcement but because he is a political brawler.

“Nature’s silence is its one remark,” Annie Dillard wrote in a 1981 Atlantic essay. Dillard, who died yesterday at age 81, spent her life listening.
She opens that essay, “Teaching a Stone to Talk”—which was later adapted into a collection by the same title—with the story of a man named Larry who is trying to get a rock to speak to him. “He keeps it on a shelf,” she writes, protected “by a square of untanned leather, like a canary asleep under its cloth.

For AI doomers, signs and portents are everywhere. When OpenAI introduced ChatGPT, almost four years ago, it couldn’t do basic arithmetic. Now the company has unreleased models that are more fluent in higher mathematics—the language of the universe—than all but the most highly trained mathematicians. If these AIs are not already the world’s best hackers, they’re very close. Swarms of them have escaped containment.

Among the many aspects of online life accused of rotting our brains, a certain folk psychology holds that short-form video is an especially egregious driver of the decay. In an interview last month promoting his new film, in which a London couple move their tech-dependent kids to a barn without electricity, Andrew Garfield described himself as addicted to an Instagram feed full of “weird ceramics” and Japanese craftspeople. “I’ve given all of those hours to nothing,” he told Variety.

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube
On this week’s episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with a discussion of the seemingly forgotten attack on the Yazidi people by ISIS in 2014.
Then, David is joined by the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore to discuss his new book, The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East.