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.This year, the state of Alabama botched three consecutive executions by lethal injection: One man died after three hours of apparent torture, while two others lived. “The state’s incompetence,” Elizabeth Bruenig wrote last month, is “a civil-rights crisis.

No country has a perfect COVID vaccination rate, even this far into the pandemic, but America’s record is particularly dismal. About a third of Americans—more than a hundred million people—have yet to get their initial shots. You can find anti-vaxxers in every corner of the country.

In 2015, an Israeli police investigation into Jewish extremism uncovered a wedding video that shocked the public. In the clip, a group of far-right revelers were captured celebrating by stabbing a picture of a Palestinian baby who had been murdered in a recent firebombing in the West Bank village of Duma, perpetrated by a settler extremist. The guests at this affair drew from the furthest reaches of the Israeli right, and included a lawyer named Itamar Ben-Gvir.

New York City in the early days of pandemic shutdowns was a horrible place to be. As fatal chaos unfolded in the hospitals, a gloriously noisy soundscape was replaced by terrifyingly constant sirens and the thrum of refrigerated morgue trucks. Anyone on the sidewalk, many of them essential workers who had no choice but to be there, moved away from other passersby in a fearful overshoot of the recommended six-foot separation.

Winter is here, and so, once more, are mask mandates. After last winter’s crushing Omicron spike, much of America did away with masking requirements. But with cases once again on the rise and other respiratory illnesses such as RSV and influenza wreaking havoc, some scattered institutions have begun reinstating them. On Monday, one of Iowa’s largest health systems reissued its mandate for staff.