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.
Back in 2016, before he converted to the MAGA cause, J. D. Vance was deeply wary of Donald Trump. He wrote to a law-school classmate that he went “back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.

Presidents have generally treated their pardon power like an embarrassing secret, closely held among only a few trusted aides and exercised quietly in the final days of an administration. Some have signed clemency warrants just hours before boarding Marine One for their final flight.
But not Donald Trump.
Since returning to the White House for his second term, Trump has wielded his authority to grant clemency with abandon.

Are Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce getting married at Madison Square Garden? Will Stevie Nicks be performing? Will the wedding be on July 3, as some reports suggest? Or is that just a red-herring date that Swift gave out to see who would leak it to the media? Is Swift, in fact, planning two weddings—one real, one a decoy? Are Kelce and Swift actually already married—and did they somehow manage to hide the entire event from the public?

The Kennedy Center was ready for a night of comedy yesterday. But before guests even reached the red carpet, the building presented a setup of its own. A large tarp was still hanging across the building’s facade, blocking any view of the spot where Donald Trump’s name had been added and then taken away following a court order. Inside, the punch lines practically wrote themselves.

No one knows what it is.
No one you’d count on
knowing has a clue, which is true
mystery, not obfuscation,
a question contending
with the topsoil of time.
Desire’s what’s the matter
with our lives, a sea parting
to reveal another sea.
Its command renews,
swells and beckons:
You’d be a fool not to love                                     
until the last second.

This summer, the transatlantic culture war has fixated on an unlikely flash point: air-conditioning.
Last weekend, I arrived in Paris at the beginning of the heat wave, or canicule, that has stifled the country and much of Europe. Temperatures in France have soared to record-breaking highs, reaching nearly 112 degrees Fahrenheit in certain parts of the country.

There is such a thing as too much history. Although this may be a strange reflection for a historian who has just finished a world history in a time of European and Middle Eastern war, the fetishistic obsession with curated versions of nations and empires in the past can blind one to the present and what really matters: how people and their families today wish to live. Yet history is a deathless arsenal of stories and facts that teaches us how humans lived and also sometimes how we should live.

Are Americans one people, or many? Our national motto, “e pluribus unum,” seems to offer the definitive answer to the question: We are many, but one. Even on the verge of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln insisted in his first inaugural address that Americans were united by “the mystic chords of memory” stretching back to Revolutionary battlefields and Patriot graves.

A couple of years ago, an old flame of mine had the nerve to start dating a new woman. He had posted a photo with her on Instagram; they were wrapped around each other, smiling, with a cheeky caption that I took to be some sort of lovers’ inside joke. I clicked on her username. She had a public Instagram account, so I was free to peruse her photos until I reached her high-school graduation, or until I made myself cry, whichever came first. I noticed she’d posted an Instagram story that day.