because I faithfully reply to every email from the absurd
gods of urgency who punish my good deeds by leaving me
empty when I empty my inbox … because I praise hatingmyself, broken into my calendar’s time-slotted tasks, slicing
me thin with the thick duty of being everything yet nothing
to anyone, not even to me … because I remember birthdaysbut forget my own and my mother’s … because she is bitter
sweet as the Cuban coffee she brews after Sunday dinners …

Two months ago, I received a text describing a situation that I could see immediately and with full clarity in my mind’s eye. “All these guys on this bachelor party brought their own Yetis,” my friend David wrote. “We have seven Yetis for ten people.” The party was at a house on Lake Norman, in North Carolina, and although the Yeti-to-bro ratio was later revised down to six Yetis for 12 bros, my vision for what was happening was clear. Sun. Boats. Beers.

The Biden administration’s recently announced plan to reduce student debt for borrowers who earn less than $125,000 is popular, according to recent polls. Unfortunately, the plan has a major legal flaw: The administration’s arguments for its executive power to make such a broad effort under federal law will likely lose—and should lose—in the courts. The good news, for President Joe Biden and for borrowers, is that the administration has time to change those arguments.

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.We’re all parsing The Speech, Joe Biden’s “Soul of the Nation” address about the growing anti-constitutionalism of Republican extremism. But we should first consider how hard it is to evaluate a speech that no president should have to give.

The principles of classical liberalism that underlie the American political system emerged in an era, the late 17th century, when people were exhausted by violent religious wars. The philosophy that eventually created our democracy was therefore designed to “lower the temperature of politics,” as Francis Fukuyama has recently written, to take issues of existential truth off the table so that people could live in safety.

In Corinne Hoex’s Gentlemen Callers, sex is a dream. The book’s protagonist floats between abstract, ethereal trysts. When she visits a gas-station attendant in her sleep, she is a soapy sponge in his hands. Caressed by a pet groomer, she purrs; she’s his cat. Her liaisons are absurd and illicit—yet, crucially, never dangerous. Gentlemen Callers is not a classic romance novel or a straightforward bodice ripper, Zoë Hu points out.