Shortly after House Speaker Kevin McCarthy announced that he had struck a deal with President Joe Biden to raise the debt ceiling, Republican leaders began circulating a fact sheet to their members listing the victories McCarthy had secured. The first bullet point captured what was supposedly the whole point of the negotiations for the GOP: The newly christened Fiscal Responsibility Act would cut spending.

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.As my colleague Matteo Wong noted earlier this month, a hotter-than-usual summer may await many Americans.

Republicans and Democrats have reached a debt-ceiling deal. Republicans will agree not to blow up the global economy if Democrats trim federal spending over the next two years, claw back money from the Internal Revenue Service, speed up the country’s energy-permitting process, and impose new work requirements on the food-stamp and welfare programs, among other changes.Perhaps this is the best deal the two sides could have reached. Perhaps it is not that big a deal at all.

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Replies have been edited for length and clarity.Last week I asked readers if they want Ron DeSantis’s Republican primary campaign to succeed or to fail.

This article contains spoilers through the Season 4 finale of Succession.“The journey we went on with the amniocentesis after what the blood test showed us—everything looks healthy.” With these understated words uttered by a doctor over the phone, we learned in Episode 4 of Succession’s final season that Shiv Roy (played beautifully by Sarah Snook) was pregnant. But in the episodes that followed, the show hardly acknowledged her impending motherhood.

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 weekend, President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy agreed on a bill to raise the debt ceiling. If the bill passes the House Rules Committee vote today, then House Republicans will vote on it later this week.

The last time we saw Happy Valley’s Catherine Cawood, she was trying—and quite magnificently failing—to capture one of her police-force colleagues, the nebbishy John Wadsworth, who’d finally been implicated in the murder of his lover. The pursuit is a bleak comedy of errors: Directed by her superiors not to pursue John down train tracks, Catherine mutters “bollocks” and follows him anyway. The pair end up on a bridge in relentless rain.

Silent observers of our lives, trees are on most peoples’ radar only at moments of transition or death: We mark springtime’s budding and autumn’s flamboyance; note somberly the tree felled by a storm or by the tiny, ravenous ash borer. Although emblematic of nature, they nonetheless are seen with the goggles of our human-centered vision, and thus barely seen at all.