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 Trump campaign is trying to turn the electoral process into a moral swamp. Voters are going to have to pace themselves to get to November.
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
Joe Biden lowered drug prices.

Imagine a city of staggering, sometimes menacing beauty. Its history is bloody, but it carries on, becoming more mesmerizingly strange with each era.
Now imagine that the city is sentient. It has agency and consciousness; it decides who gets to stay and who needs to leave. It’s both a physical place and an ambient spirit that constantly inhabits different forms; it can seduce a visitor and twist time backwards.

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.
Cosmically speaking, the alignment of Earth, the sun, and the moon is ordinary. But from our corner of the universe, the occurrence produces something wondrous: a total solar eclipse. On April 8, the moon will pass between the sun and Earth, casting a shadow along a narrow strip of the country, from Texas to Maine.

I frequently ask ChatGPT to write poems in the style of the American modernist poet Hart Crane. It does an admirable job of delivering. But the other day, when I instructed the software to give the Crane treatment to a plate of ice-cream sandwiches, I felt bored before I even saw the answer. “The oozing cream, like time, escapes our grasp, / Each moment slipping with a silent gasp.” This was fine. It was competent. I read the poem, Slacked part of it to a colleague, and closed the window.

In the spring of 1825, Ludwig van Beethoven was struck by a gut ailment so severe that he thought he might die. That summer, after he recovered, he returned to the string quartet he’d been writing before his illness—Quartet No. 15 in A Minor, Op. 132—and added a new segment inspired by his survival.

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.
Pardon the interruption, but I’m breaking into our regular programming to share some good news about The Atlantic.
First, here are three new stories that are worth your time:
The coming birth-control revolution
The politics of gun safety are changing.
There is more good than evil in this country.

For the third consecutive year, The Atlantic has won the top honor of General Excellence for a News, Sports, and Entertainment publication at the 2024 National Magazine Awards.
Below is a list of the stories that received recognition from the American Society of Magazine Editors:
Winner: Profile Writing
“Inside the Meltdown at CNN”
Mark Peterson / Redux for The Atlantic
By Tim Alberta
CEO Chris Licht felt he was on a mission to restore the network’s reputation for serious journalism.

As spring takes hold, the days arrive with a freshness that makes people want to linger outside; the balmy days almost feel wasted indoors. While you’re taking in the warm air, you might as well also be reading. Enjoying a book at a park, a beach, or an open-air café encourages a particular leisurely frame of mind. It allows a reader to let their thoughts wander, reflecting on matters that for once aren’t workaday or practical.

When Upton Sinclair published his novel The Jungle, the reaction was different from what he’d imagined. He had hoped to expose the deplorable working conditions in Chicago’s slaughterhouses, but most readers, instead of championing the workers, came away flinching at the depictions of all the unsanitary ways meat was produced. Of his readers’ response, Upton famously said, “I aimed at the public’s heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach.