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Not long after Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth read his opening statement and began fielding questions from the Senate Armed Services Committee, I began thinking: I hope neither America’s allies nor its enemies are watching this. The hope was, of course, completely unreasonable.

Pete Hegseth, President-Elect Donald Trump’s choice for secretary of defense, was initially considered one of his most endangered nominees. But after the MAGA movement organized a campaign to threaten Republicans who expressed reservations about Hegseth’s fitness, criticism dried up quickly. “We gave the Senate an attitude adjustment,” Mike Davis, a Republican operative known for his florid threats to lock up Trump’s political targets, told Politico.

Photographs by Alex Welsh
Michael Gollner studies fire and how it behaves at UC Berkeley’s Fire Research Lab. His research is focused on fires that spread from wildlands to urban areas––work that gives him insights into the fires ravaging Pacific Palisades, Altadena, and other areas near Los Angeles. On Friday, I interviewed him about the fires and how to rebuild the communities they’ve destroyed in a way that makes them more resilient. What follows is an edited version of our conversation.

Influenza cases have been surging. RSV activity is “very high.” Signs of COVID have been mounting in sewer water, and norovirus, too, is spawning outbreaks like we haven’t seen for at least a dozen years. You might even say that America is in the midst of a “quad-demic,” although I really hope you don’t, because “quad-demic” is not a word that anyone should say.
With that in mind, here are The Atlantic’s tips and tricks for steering clear of any illness during this year’s terrible quad-demic.

Early this morning, the Department of Justice released the report of Special Counsel Jack Smith on his investigation of Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election. The saga of the U.S. criminal-justice system’s effort to hold the coup instigator accountable is thus closed. No prosecution will take place. Compared with the present outcome, it would have been better if President Joe Biden had pardoned Trump for the January 6 coup attempt.

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.
Over the next several days, many of Donald Trump’s Cabinet selections will appear before the Senate for confirmation hearings.

My parents spend half of the year on an island off the coast of North Carolina where many of the residents speak a distinct and alienating dialect of English—the Ocracoke or “Hoi Toider” brogue, which the BBC describes as “a mix of Elizabethan English, Irish and Scottish accents, and pirate slang.” The other half, they spend around their four children, who are in their 20s and early 30s and also speak in a manner that can be perplexing.

For the past three years, Russia has used missiles and drones to locate and destroy vital infrastructure in Ukraine—power plants, dams, electrical-transmission lines. Everyone understands that these attacks are acts of war, no matter how steadfastly President Vladimir Putin describes them as part of a “special military operation.” When Russia targets other European neighbors, though, the West resorts to its own euphemisms to avoid directly acknowledging what Putin is doing.