American minds are not ready to think about how fast democracy could disintegrate.

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.Before Pauline Kael was Pauline Kael, she was still very much Pauline Kael. When her first essay for The Atlantic ran in November 1964, she had not yet lost it at the movies. She had not yet become Pauline Kael, the vaunted and polarizing film critic for The New Yorker. She had not yet inspired a movement of imitators, the “Paulettes,” or established herself as one of the most influential film writers ever. But the stylistic verve, the uncategorizable taste, the flamethrowing provocation—they were all there. “There’s a woman writer I’d be tempted to call a three-time loser,” she wrote in her Atlantic essay. “She’s Catholic, Communist, and lesbian.”The only unusual thing about this assault is that Kael does not name her target. Elsewhere in the essay, she doesn’t hesitate to do so. And no one is beyond reproach—not Luis Buñuel, not Michelangelo Antonioni, not Ingmar Bergman. She assails about a dozen notables in the course of a few thousand words, firing off zingers at machine-gun rate. Her appetite for pugilism and reservoir of snark are seemingly inexhaustible. Academics are cultural vampires. The critic Dwight Macdonald is a “Philistine.” The writer Susan Sontag is a “semi-intellectually respectable” critic who, unfortunately, has “become a real swinger.”Kael’s Atlantic essay, which ran under the headline “Are Movies Going to Pieces?,” is a broad lament about the state of the industry and the art form, published at a moment when French New Wave and experimental art films were upending conventional assumptions about what a movie could or should be. Most audiences “don’t care any longer about the conventions of the past, and are too restless and apathetic to pay attention to motivations and complications, cause and effect,” she fretted. “They want less effort, more sensations, more knobs to turn.” In short, they’ve “lost the narrative sense.” Critics and art-house audiences weren’t any different. They’d been bamboozled into venerating pseudo-intellectual mumbo jumbo as high art. They’d come to accept “lack of clarity as complexity, [accept] clumsiness and confusion as ‘ambiguity’ and as style,” she wrote. “They are convinced that a movie is cinematic when they don’t understand what’s going on.”Sixty years later, although Kael’s writing crackles as much as ever, much of her argument reads stodgy and conservative. She tries her best to preempt this charge—“I trust I won’t be mistaken for the sort of boob who attacks ambiguity or complexity”—and it’s true that her disdain for the new cinema is not uniform. She holds certain specimens in high regard, such as Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless and François Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player. But even so, she sometimes sounds like another old fogey grumbling about kids these days.Her broader prognosis, though, is spot-on. In one sense at least, movies really were going to pieces. In the late 1950s and early ’60s, a gulf was opening between mass entertainment and high art, between movies and cinema. For the latter, Kael had boundless disdain. “Cinema,” she wrote, “is not movies raised to an art but rather movies diminished, movies that look ‘artistic.’” And its rise was a tragedy, a scourge that would over time kill what she loved about the form: “Cinema, I suspect, is going to become so rarefied, so private in meaning, and so lacking in audience appeal that in a few years the foundations will be desperately and hopelessly trying to bring it back to life, as they are now doing with theater.” It would become merely “another object of academic study and ‘appreciation.’”Kael believed in movies as pop culture, believed their mass appeal was what gave them life. She wanted them to be something about which you could have an opinion without having any special expertise, something that regular people could talk about. And so she wrote about movies like a regular person—an extremely eloquent, extremely opinionated, extremely entertaining regular person, but a regular person all the same.Whether or not you share Kael’s view that the movie-cinema schism was a disastrous development, her predictions have largely come to pass. Sixty years later, there are the films that win at the box office, and there are the films that win at the Oscars. (Not to mention the films that critics like best, which constitute a third category entirely.) Last summer’s Barbenheimer phenomenon was a notable exception, but the overall trend is clear. This year, the Golden Globes codified the divide with the introduction of a new award for Cinematic and Box Office Achievement—an award reserved for movies because the standard categories now primarily recognize cinema. And Kael saw it all coming back in 1964.

Like Nixon before him, Trump could use campus protests to further stoke an already polarized electorate.

A new abortion ban has providers there scrambling—and clinics in other states preparing for a crush of new patients.

She may have forgotten that Americans love dogs more than they love politicians.

Culture and entertainment musts from Walt Hunter

Culture and entertainment musts from Walt Hunter

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.My colleague Derek Thompson has written about Americans’ social isolation and anxiety. But this week, he writes, “I thought I’d turn things around for a change. What matters most for happiness—marriage, money, or something else entirely?”Reading about the key to happiness can sometimes feel like a trick: Could it really be as simple as a given expert makes it out to be? As Derek notes, “Clever sociologists will always find new ways of ‘calculating’ that marriage matters most, or social fitness explains all, or income is paramount.” But his research leads him to what he calls a “subtler truth”—a “happiness trinity” of which “finances, family, and social fitness are three prongs” rising together and falling together.Today’s newsletter explores some subtler truths about American happiness.On HappinessThe Happiness TrinityBy Derek ThompsonWhy it’s so hard to answer the question What makes us happiest?Read the article.Take a Wife … Please!By Olga KhazanWhy are married people happier than the rest of us?Read the article.A Happiness Columnist’s Three Biggest Happiness RulesBy Arthur C. BrooksA good life isn’t just about getting the details right. Here are some truths that transcend circumstance and time.Read the article.Still Curious? Ten practical ways to improve happiness: For when you need advice that goes beyond “Be Danish” What the longest study on human happiness found is the key to a good life: “We neglect our connections with others at our peril,” Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz write. Other Diversions Sphere is the mind-killer. We’re all reading wrong. A dentist found a jawbone in a floor tile. P.S. Courtesy of Karolina L. Last week, I asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. Karolina L., 26, in Warsaw, wrote: “I always look up at the moon when I’m walking at night. No matter where I am, it makes me feel at home—like I have a friend watching over me.”I’ll continue to share your responses in the coming weeks. If you’d like to share, reply to this email with a photo and a short description so we can share your wonder with fellow readers in a future edition of this newsletter or on our website. Please include your name (initials are okay), age, and location. By doing so, you agree that The Atlantic has permission to publish your photo and publicly attribute the response to you, including your first name and last initial, age, and/or location that you share with your submission.— Isabel

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.More than 200 years ago, Alexander Hamilton defied partisanship for the sake of the country’s future; if he hadn’t done so, American history might have taken a very different course. Today, Republicans face the same choice.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic. The Trumpification of the Supreme Court “No one has a right to protest in my home.” Columbia University’s impossible position A Red LineAlexander Hamilton loathed Thomas Jefferson. As rivals in George Washington’s Cabinet, the two fought over economics, the size and role of government, and slavery. They disagreed bitterly about the French Revolution (Jefferson was enthralled, Hamilton appalled). Hamilton thought Jefferson was a hypocrite, and Jefferson described Hamilton as “a man whose history … is a tissue of machinations against the liberty of the country.”But starting in late 1800, Hamilton broke with his fellow Federalists and provided crucial support that put Jefferson in the White House. He was willing to set aside his tribal loyalties and support a man whose policies he vigorously opposed—a choice that saved the nation from a dangerous demagogue but likely cost him his life.“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes,” Mark Twain probably never said. The quote’s attribution is apocryphal, but the point seems apt, because about 220 years later, Republicans face the same choice Hamilton did. They now have to decide whether felony charges, fraud, sexual abuse, and insurrection are red lines that supersede partisan loyalty.Alexander Hamilton’s red line was Aaron Burr, whom he regarded as a dangerous, narcissistic mountebank and a “man of extreme & irregular ambition.” Burr was Jefferson’s running mate in the 1800 election, in which he defeated the Federalist incumbent John Adams. But under the original Constitution, the candidate with the most electoral votes became president, and the second-place finisher became vice president. Bizarrely, Jefferson and Burr each got 73 electoral votes, and because the vote was tied, the election was thrown to the House, which now had to choose the next president. Many Federalists, who detested and feared the idea of a Jefferson presidency, wanted to install Burr instead.The result was a constitutional crisis that threatened to turn violent. “Republican newspapers talked of military intervention,” the historian Gordon Wood wrote in Empire of Liberty. “The governors of Virginia and Pennsylvania began preparing their state militias for action. Mobs gathered in the capital and threatened to prevent any president from being appointed by statute.”Hamilton was faced with a difficult choice. He was a leading figure among Federalists; Jefferson was the leader of the faction known as Democratic-Republicans. And the 1790s were a historically partisan era. Yet “in a choice of Evils,” Hamilton wrote, “Jefferson is in every view less dangerous than Burr.” Washington, in his Farewell Address (which Hamilton helped draft and which Donald Trump’s lawyers misleadingly quoted this week), sounded the alarm about the growing partisan factionalism that he thought was tearing the country apart. Political parties, he said, could become “potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people, and to usurp for themselves the reins of government.” Hamilton was convinced that Aaron Burr was exactly the sort of cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled man that Washington had warned against.Even though Jefferson was “too revolutionary in his notions,” Hamilton was willing to swallow his disagreements, because Jefferson was “yet a lover of liberty and will be desirous of something like orderly Government.” In contrast, “Mr. Burr loves nothing but himself—thinks of nothing but his own aggrandizement—and will be content with nothing short of permanent power in his own hands.”Defying his fellow Federalists, Hamilton waged a vigorous and ultimately successful campaign to derail the scheme to install Burr. Jefferson was elected president on the 36th ballot after a group of Federalist congressmen flipped their votes for Burr, choosing to abstain instead.Hamilton’s career in politics, already badly damaged by scandal, was effectively over. Burr, who became vice president, never forgave Hamilton, and on July 11, 1804, he fatally shot Hamilton in a duel in Weehawken, New Jersey. Burr was charged with murder but served out his term as vice president, immune from prosecution. Three years later, he was arrested and charged with treason after he allegedly plotted to seize territory in the West and create a new empire. He was acquitted on a technicality, and fled the country in disgrace.But for Hamilton’s willingness to defy partisanship, American history might have taken a very different course.Like Hamilton, we live in an age of fierce loyalties that make crossing party lines extraordinarily difficult. If anything, it is even harder now, especially for Republicans living with social pressures, media echo chambers, and a cult-like party culture compassed round, in the words of John Milton. Many public figures in the GOP have shown that they cannot break free of partisanship even in the face of rank criminality.For example: Former Attorney General Bill Barr and New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu acknowledge Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, and his culpability in the January 6 attack on the Capitol. But both men have said they would vote for Trump. Sununu has said that he would do so even if Trump is convicted of multiple felonies, suggesting that his crimes would be less important than his political differences with the Democrats. Former Vice President Mike Pence has said he would not endorse Trump, but he has also ruled out voting for Joe Biden.Even former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who declared that Trump “is wholly unfit to be president of the United States in every way you think,” cannot bring himself to support the Democratic incumbent. We’re still waiting for Nikki Haley to say how she will vote in November.So far, only Liz Cheney seems to be taking a position that rhymes with Hamilton’s choice two centuries ago. “There are some conservatives who are trying to make this claim that somehow Biden is a bigger risk than Trump,” she said. “My view is: I disagree with a lot of Joe Biden’s policies. We can survive bad policies. We cannot survive torching the Constitution.” Alexander Hamilton would, I think, approve.Related: Trump’s willing accomplice The validation brigade salutes Trump. Today’s News ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, released a statement yesterday asserting that it has no plans to sell the social-media app, in light of the potential national ban. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced that the U.S. will give Ukraine additional Patriot missiles as part of a $6 billion aid package. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Beijing. Blinken indicated that Chinese leaders had not made any promises about the U.S. demand that China cut its support for Russia’s defense industry. Dispatches The Books Briefing: The author Adam Hochschild recommends books that vividly illustrate moments of great change. Atlantic Intelligence: As a technology, AI is “quite thirsty, relying on data centers that require not just a tremendous amount of energy, but water to cool themselves with,” Damon Beres writes. Work in Progress: Derek Thompson explores why it’s so hard to answer the question What makes us happiest? Explore all of our newsletters here.Evening Read Tony Evans / Getty We’re All Reading WrongBy Alexandra Moe Reading, while not technically medicine, is a fundamentally wholesome activity. It can prevent cognitive decline, improve sleep, and lower blood pressure. In one study, book readers outlived their nonreading peers by nearly two years. People have intuitively understood reading’s benefits for thousands of years: The earliest known library, in ancient Egypt, bore an inscription that read “The House of Healing for the Soul.” But the ancients read differently than we do today. Until approximately the tenth century, when the practice of silent reading expanded thanks to the invention of punctuation, reading was synonymous with reading aloud. Silent reading was terribly strange, and, frankly, missed the point of sharing words to entertain, educate, and bond. Even in the 20th century, before radio and TV and smartphones and streaming entered American living rooms, couples once approached the evening hours by reading aloud to each other. Read the full article.More From The Atlantic A new sweetener has joined the ranks of aspartame and stevia. Trump is getting what he wants. Bad Bunny has it all—and that’s the problem. Culture Break Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures Watch. Challengers (out now in theaters) is a sexy sports thriller with plenty of moody intrigue.Read. These are six cult classics you need to check out.Play our daily crossword.P.S. Photo by my wife, J. F. Riordan I’m hoping to spend some quality time this weekend with Auggie and Eli, who still think they are lapdogs. That’s me under there.— CharlieStephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

The author Adam Hochschild recommends books that vividly illustrate moments of great change.

This is Atlantic Intelligence, a limited-run series in which our writers help you wrap your mind around artificial intelligence and a new machine age. Sign up here.In last week’s newsletter, I described artificial intelligence as data-hungry. But the technology is also quite thirsty, relying on data centers that require not just a tremendous amount of energy, but water to cool themselves with.Karen Hao, a contributing writer at The Atlantic, recently visited one such data center in Goodyear, Arizona. Microsoft owns the facility, which may eventually use an estimated 56 million gallons of drinking water each year—“equivalent to the amount used by 670 Goodyear families,” Karen notes. No one’s at risk of going thirsty, but as Karen writes, “the supply of water in the region is quite limited, and the more that’s taken up by data centers, the less there is for, say, supplying tap water to new housing.”I followed up with Karen to ask about AI’s growing demands on our environment. It’s still a matter of debate whether the technology is truly worth its immense costs, even as tech companies commit more and more resources to it. How should we be thinking about all of this? “Companies are laying down data centers faster than ever in the race to build generative AI, but there has been very little accounting of their impacts on the environment,” Karen told me. “There’s a narrowing window in which the public should be asking: Is this what we want? Once the facilities have been built, it will be much more difficult to reverse the decision.”— Damon Beres, senior editor Illustration by Erik Carter AI Is Taking Water From the DesertBy Karen Hao One scorching day this past September, I made the dangerous decision to try to circumnavigate some data centers. The ones I chose sit between a regional airport and some farm fields in Goodyear, Arizona, half an hour’s drive west of downtown Phoenix. When my Uber pulled up beside the unmarked buildings, the temperature was 97 degrees Fahrenheit. The air crackled with a latent energy, and some kind of pulsating sound was emanating from the electric wires above my head, or maybe from the buildings themselves. With no shelter from the blinding sunlight, I began to lose my sense of what was real. Microsoft announced its plans for this location, and two others not so far away, back in 2019—a week after the company revealed its initial $1 billion investment in OpenAI, the buzzy start-up that would later release ChatGPT. From that time on, OpenAI began to train its models exclusively on Microsoft’s servers; any query for an OpenAI product would flow through Microsoft’s cloud-computing network, Azure. In part to meet that demand, Microsoft has been adding data centers at a stupendous rate, spending more than $10 billion on cloud-computing capacity in every quarter of late. One semiconductor analyst called this “the largest infrastructure buildout that humanity has ever seen.” I’d traveled out to Arizona to see it for myself. The Goodyear site stretched along the road farther than my eyes could see. A black fence and tufts of desert plants lined its perimeter. I began to walk its length, clutching my phone and two bottles of water. According to city documents, Microsoft bought 279 acres for this location. For now, the plot holds two finished buildings, thick and squat, with vents and pipes visible along their sides. A third building is under construction, and seven more are on the way. Each will be decked out with rows of servers and computers that must be kept below a certain temperature. The complex has been designated partly for OpenAI’s use, according to a person familiar with the plan. (Both Microsoft and OpenAI declined to comment on this assertion.) And Microsoft plans to absorb its excess heat with a steady flow of air and, as needed, evaporated drinking water. Use of the latter is projected to reach more than 50 million gallons every year. Read the full article.What to Read Next Would limitlessness make us better writers?: “AI embodies hypotheticals I can only imagine for myself,” Rachel Khong writes. “But I believe human impediments are what lead us to create meaningful art.” Neal Stephenson’s most stunning prediction: “The sci-fi legend coined the term metaverse, but he was most prescient about our AI age,” Matteo Wong writes. P.S.Earlier this week, President Joe Biden signed legislation that could result in a TikTok ban if the app isn’t divested from its Chinese parent company. As Charlie Warzel writes for The Atlantic, this will be a more complicated process than it seems—particularly when it comes to the app’s powerful AI algorithm.— Damon

Why it’s so hard to answer the question What makes us happiest?

Many Americans are reporting that they’d feel better if they slept more, but finding the right remedy isn’t always simple.

The dark legacy and ongoing body count of an ancient anti-Semitic myth

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.For the past couple of years, scientists have watched with growing concern as a massive outbreak of avian flu, also known as H5N1 bird flu, has swept through bird populations. Recently in the U.S., a farm worker and some cattle herds have been infected. I spoke with my colleague Katherine J. Wu, who covered the virus’s spread in North America, about the risk of human infection and how, for animals, this has already been “a pandemic many times over.”First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic: Welcome to the TikTok meltdown. The Republicans who want American carnage Columbia has resorted to pedagogy theater. Not a Five-Alarm FireLora Kelley: How does this bird-flu outbreak compare with previous ones?Katherine J. Wu: When we’re considering the toll on nonhuman animals, this is the largest, most deadly H5N1 outbreak that has been recorded in North America. It has been unfolding slowly for about two and a half years now, but it’s become a gargantuan wave at this point.Lora: Wow—how alarmed are you by that?Katherine: I’m medium concerned—and I have been medium concerned for a couple of years now. It’s difficult to gauge the amount of alarm to feel, because it’s so unprecedented. Still, most H5N1 outbreaks in the past have totally fizzled without much consequence, especially in this part of the world.I am worried because so many species have been getting sick. A huge number of wild birds have been infected, including species that haven’t been affected in the past. And we’ve seen these massive outbreaks in domesticated chickens, which are packed together in farms.Avian flu is known to be a bird problem. Beyond that, we’ve been seeing these outbreaks in mammals for a couple of years now, which is more concerning because, of course, we are also mammals. Humans seem to be potentially susceptible to infection, but at the same time, it would take quite a lot for this to become another big human-flu pandemic.Lora: Should we be concerned about getting sick?Katherine: People should be vigilant and paying attention to the news. But right now, as you and I are talking, there is still not a huge risk to people. You don’t get a pandemic unless you have a pathogen that spreads very, very easily among people, and there’s no evidence so far that this virus has mutated to that point.There have been some human cases globally so far, but it’s a very small number. They seem to have been cases where someone was highly exposed to the virus in domesticated animals. People got sick, but they didn’t pass it to someone else.I’m definitely not saying that person-to-person transmission can’t happen eventually, but there’s a pretty big chasm between someone getting infected and someone being able to efficiently pass the virus on. It is concerning that we continue to see more mammal species affected by H5N1, including species that have a lot of close contact with humans. But this is not a five-alarm fire so far.Lora: How will people’s lives be affected?Katherine: The virus has already affected our lives. Egg prices went completely bonkers in 2022 and early 2023, and over the course of this outbreak, more than 90 million domestic poultry have died. It’s not that all of those birds got sick—when this virus breaks out on chicken farms, it’s generally considered good practice to cull the chickens to halt the spread. Still, when you have that many chickens dying, egg prices are going to go up.We’re probably not on track to see that with cows anytime soon. Even though this virus has now been detected in dairy cows, they aren’t getting wildly sick, and transmission doesn’t seem as efficient. I don’t think we’re going to be in a situation where we’re killing all of our dairy cows and no one can get milk.Lora: The FDA announced yesterday that genetic evidence of this bird-flu virus had been found in samples of pasteurized milk. Is it still safe to drink milk?Katherine: So far, the answer is: generally, yes, if it’s been pasteurized. Pasteurization is a process by which milk is treated with heat so that it will kill a whole bunch of pathogens, including bacteria and viruses, and H5N1 is thought to be vulnerable to this. Also, researchers have been working to test cows so they can figure out which ones are sick. Only milk from healthy cows is authorized to enter the general food supply, though the trick will be finding all the cows that are actually infected. For now, the main ways that this virus will affect us will be indirect.Lora: Is there anything that can be done to curb the spread among wild animals?Katherine: For the animal world, this has already been a “pandemic” many times over. It has been truly devastating in that respect. So many wild birds, sea lions, seals, and other creatures have died, and it’s difficult to see how people can effectively intervene out in nature. There have been very few cases in which endangered animals have received vaccines because there’s a real possibility that their populations could be 100 percent wiped out by this virus.For most other animals in the wild, there’s not a lot that can be done, except for people to pay attention to where the virus is spreading. The hope is that most animal populations will be resilient enough to get through this and develop some form of immunity.Lora: Responses to COVID became very politicized. How might the aftermath of those mitigation measures shape how people respond to this virus, especially if it becomes a greater threat to humans?Katherine: We’re so fresh off the worst days of COVID that if people were asked to buckle down or get a new vaccine, I suspect that a lot of them would be like, Not again. There is still a lot of mitigation fatigue, and many people are sick of thinking about respiratory viruses and taking measures to prevent outbreaks. And, certainly, people have lost a lot of trust in public health over the past four years.That said, H5N1 is still a flu, and people are familiar with that type of virus. We have a long history of using flu vaccines, and the government has experience making a pandemic vaccine, keeping that stockpile, and getting it out to the public. That gives me hope that at least some people will be amenable to taking the necessary preventative measures, so any potential bird-flu outbreak among humans would not turn into COVID 2.0.Related: Bird flu leaves the world with an existential choice. Bird flu has never done this before. Today’s News President Joe Biden signed into law a bipartisan foreign-aid package that includes aid for Ukraine, Israel, and U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific, and a measure that forces TikTok’s parent company to sell the social-media app or face an outright ban. The U.S. Supreme Court seems divided over whether a federal law can require hospitals to provide access to emergency abortions and override state-level abortion bans. George Santos, the embattled former New York representative facing multiple charges of fraud, ended his independent bid for a U.S. House seat on Long Island. Dispatches The Weekly Planet: Tesla is not the next Ford, Matteo Wong writes. It’s the next Con Ed. Explore all of our newsletters here.Evening Read Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani Why Did Cars Get So Expensive?By Annie Lowrey Inflation, finally, has cooled off. Prices have increased 2.5 percent over the past year, down from increases as high as 7 percent during the early pandemic. Rents are high but stabilizing. The cost of groceries is ticking up, not surging, and some goods, such as eggs, are actually getting cheaper. But American consumers are still stretching to afford one big-ticket item: their cars. The painful cost of vehicle ownership doesn’t just reflect strong demand driven by low unemployment, pandemic-related supply-chain weirdness, and high interest rates. It reflects how awful cars are for American households and American society as a whole. Read the full article.More From The Atlantic A Democrat’s case for saving Mike Johnson How baseball explains the limits of AI Culture Break Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Source: Ashok Kumar / Getty. Listen. Taylor Swift’s music often returns to the same motifs: pathetic fallacy, the passing of time, the mythology of love. Her latest album shows how these themes have calcified in her work, Sophie Gilbert writes.Look. Take a photo tour of several of Chile’s national parks, which protect many endangered species, wild landscapes, and natural wonders.Play our daily crossword.Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Students are bearing the brunt of the disastrous FAFSA overhaul. That may affect where they go to college—and whether they enroll at all.