It took me two years to post my first TikTok. I’d press “Record,” mumble into the camera, and hastily hit delete before anyone could see just how awkward I was on video. I took the plunge only after practicing enough to eliminate any telltale signs that I was a near-30-year-old trying to be cool. Or so I thought.Apparently, I’m still guilty of the “Millennial pause.

Cornices overgrown with moss, the stoop
With nettles, flower beds
Hardly discernible beneath brambles and weeds—Next door was a place where drinks
Were sold, so I ordered
A glass of red wine. The Earth?For years it never changed, said the bartender.
Now kids won’t come around at night.
Doors close by themselvesAs if clouds were gathering—bang!
Footsteps climb the staircase, one, two—
I paid the tab.

Late last month, the CDC confirmed that two young children had been diagnosed with monkeypox. Although almost all infections in the United States are associated with men who have sex with men, the virus is spreading rapidly and, through household exposure or other transmission routes, could soon turn up in other populations, such as infants, adolescents, and pregnant people (including their fetuses).

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.Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona said that she’ll sign on to the Democrats’ climate bill—after advocating for a few adjustments that she apparently didn’t care to explain to anyone.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

At first, it was all very exciting. In 1971, a team of Danish researchers stationed on Greenland’s northwest coast found that a local Inuit community had remarkably low levels of diabetes and heart disease. The reason, the researchers surmised, was their high-marine-fat diet—in other words, fish oil. Incidence of heart disease, which once afflicted relatively few Americans, had shot up since the turn of the century, and here, seemingly, was a simple solution.

Not long after the 1989 launch of The Sandman, Neil Gaiman’s groundbreaking comic-book series, came the inevitable question that plagues critically acclaimed smash hits—how best to translate it to the screen? The series’s central family, known as “The Endless,” live in a vividly cinematic world; each member personifies a natural force, including dreams, death, and desire. But Gaiman’s epic story spans eons and an ensemble of dozens.

Reading is hard right now. The pandemic has pushed our already scattered attention spans to a crisis point. But even before 2020, stressors such as political chaos and the allure of our phones made it harder and harder to find the time and focus to get lost in a book. Even when we’re not living through a distracting moment, we will inevitably have personal fallow periods when reading as a habit and a respite just doesn’t happen.