In the final track of Midnights, Taylor Swift confesses to being a “mastermind” who plans so carefully that she can’t possibly lose. The song is addressed to her lover, but she might as well be singing about the meticulous rollout of her new album. Over the course of nearly two months, she posted cryptic videos teasing the music without allowing anyone to hear a single note. She put together a “manifest” that looked like something out of the metaverse.

One of the great literary hoaxes of our time is the book spine. A staggering number of logos stare out from dust jackets, celebrating names including Crown, Vintage, Ballantine, Knopf, and Dial. But the pluralism implied by this diversity of monikers is a sham. In the U.S., nearly 100 of them belong to a single company: Penguin Random House. The rest are owned by a small handful of competitors, one of which is Simon & Schuster.

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.January 6 was not an outlier. Laughing over a hammer attack on an old man, the GOP has completed its transition from a political party to a brutal mob.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

One of the ironies of recent music history is that Migos, the band of Atlanta rappers who reshaped hip-hop in the mid-2010s, is known for something called the “triplet flow.” The term is musicological, describing the convulsive vocal cadence that took over pop thanks to them. But the term is also apt given that Migos were a trio related by blood.

Yasmin Tayag will join The Atlantic’s editorial team this month, when she will become a staff writer. Over the past year, in her work as a freelancer, Yasmin has contributed extensively to The Atlantic, including a number of pandemic-related pieces where she reported on the effects of Americans’ low booster numbers, how we can’t quit hygiene theater, and whether we should be masking again.

Yesterday, an hour and a half into the marathon hearings about whether colleges can use race as a factor in admissions decisions, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson began to rub her temples as she looked down at her notes.“We’re entertaining a rule where some people can say what they want about who they are and have that valued in a system,” she said. “And I’m worried that that creates an inequity in the system with respect to being able to express our identity.

It was December of 1996 when Karen Lips turned up the first bodies—and finally felt an ember of hope. As a graduate student working in the muggy forests of Central America, she’d noticed that an as-yet-unnamed culprit had been stripping the area of its frogs. Regions that had once rung with a chorus of croaks were silent and still, but no one had found the carcasses that could speak to a cause.