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.
If Kristi Noem never actually met the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, then how did that anecdote make it into her memoir? The answer, after these three stories from The Atlantic:
It’s not a rap beef. It’s a cultural reckoning.
Trump flaunts his corruption.

It used to be that whenever someone on TV or in a movie fell off the roof or had a skiing mishap or got into any sort of auto accident, the odds were pretty good that they’d end up in a neck brace. You know what I mean: a circlet of beige foam, or else a rigid ring of plastic, spanning from an actor’s chin down to their sternum. Jack Lemmon wore a neck brace for a part. So did Jerry Seinfeld, Julia Roberts, and Bill Murray.

In 2017, Rihanna posted a photo of herself on Instagram in which she appeared to have an extra thumb. It was, in retrospect, the thumb-shaped canary in the coal mine. Although far from the first celebrity “Photoshop fail,” it just so happened to predict the era of faux-finger drama we now live in: AI image generators are universally, horrifically bad at rendering human hands. Today, an extra finger is a telltale sign of digital manipulation.
Flaws aside, faking it has never been easier.

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.
Some 50 years ago, the architect and writer Peter Blake put himself on trial in the pages of The Atlantic.

Late last month, the Federal Trade Commission issued what’s called a final rule—a new regulation—banning noncompete clauses in contracts for nearly all American workers. Once the rule goes into effect, it will have a dramatic impact on the U.S. labor market. Workers will have an easier time starting new companies and bringing new products to market.

Earlier today, The New York Times broke some startling news about a presidential candidate. According to a 2012 deposition, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. once suffered from, in his own words, “a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died.” The vague yet alarming description could apply to any number of parasitic ailments, among them angiostrongyliasis, baylisascariasis, toxocariasis, strongyloidiasis, and trichinosis.

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.
Donald Trump is in his third week on trial in New York, where he faces 34 counts of falsifying business records in the first degree.

Nearly 20 years ago, my high-school calculus teacher introduced me to a book that would, although I didn’t realize it at the time, permanently reframe the way I thought about music. Written by the journalist Michael Azerrad, Our Band Could Be Your Life was a study of the 1980s independent-music landscape—of bands that had unconsciously responded to the commercialism found on MTV and mainstream rock radio by going underground, and by getting very weird.

Here is a nonexhaustive list of objects Apple recently pulverized with a menacing hydraulic crusher: a trumpet, a piano, a turntable, a sculpted bust, lots and lots of paint, video-game controllers.
These are all shown being demolished in the company’s new iPad commercial, a minute-long spot titled “Crush!” The items are arranged on a platform beneath a slowly descending enormous metal block, then trash-compactored out of existence in a violent symphony of crunching.

Scapegoating is one of humankind’s primal rituals, dating back to the Book of Leviticus, in which God commanded the prophet Aaron to lay hands on a goat, confess the sins of his tribe, and then send the animal into the desert. Throughout centuries and across cultures, the historian René Girard once argued, warring factions have settled disputes by agreeing upon a figure to collectively blame—a resolution that is ugly and unfair but, more than anything, cathartic.