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.
Yes, the American tax code is complicated. But a web of other forces makes the country’s tax-filing system much trickier than it needs to be.
First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:
Clash of the patriarchs
Israeli rage reaches new levels.
In MAGA world, everything happens for a reason.

The first Fallout game was released in 1997. I was (and am) an avid gamer, and when I played the inaugural entry in what would become a decades-long series, I saw immediately that it was different from almost anything else I’d encountered on the market. Its subtitle labeled it “a post nuclear role playing game,” but this was not the typical, fast-paced, “Radioactive Rambo” shoot-’em-up with an indestructible protagonist roaming a ravaged world to a pulsing electronic soundtrack.

Modern dating can be severed into two eras: before the swipe, and after. When Tinder and other dating apps took off in the early 2010s, they unleashed a way to more easily access potential love interests than ever before. By 2017, about five years after Tinder introduced the swipe, more than a quarter of different-sex couples were meeting on apps and dating websites, according to a study led by the Stanford sociologist Michael Rosenfeld.

Yesterday, a Michigan judge sentenced James and Jennifer Crumbley to 10 to 15 years in prison for failing to stop their son Ethan from murdering four students in 2021. The cases grabbed headlines because prosecutors aggressively charged the parents with the actual killings, as though they had pulled the trigger themselves, rather than pressing lesser offenses such as child neglect and failure to comply with gun-safety laws. Separate juries had convicted them of manslaughter.

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One of the hard-and-fast laws of economics is that people in rich countries work less than their peers in poorer countries. The rule holds across nations. British and Japanese people work less on average than those in Mexico and India. It’s also true across history.

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.
The federal judiciary may turn out to be an endangered democracy’s last line of defense.
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
So you looked directly into the sun.

Cade Haskins averaged just 0.9 points a game this season for one of the worst teams in all of Division I college basketball. And yet he may turn out to be responsible for triggering one of the biggest changes in the sport’s history.
Last month, in a small HR office above the only sports bar in Hanover, New Hampshire, Haskins and his teammates on the Dartmouth College basketball squad voted to form the first-ever NCAA players’ union.

The Federal Trade Commission has just released its long-anticipated report on the major disruptions to America’s grocery-supply chain during the coronavirus pandemic—and it confirmed the worst. According to the report, large grocery companies saw the pandemic as an opportunity. They deliberately wielded their market power amid food shortages, entrenching their dominance and keeping their shelves stocked even as smaller companies had to scramble for goods or simply close up shop.

Updated at 4:12 p.m. ET on April 9, 2024
With less than a week to go before the start of his trial in New York on falsifying records, former President Donald Trump has sued Juan Merchan, the judge presiding over the case. The suit is sealed, but it is reportedly related to a gag order Merchan recently placed on Trump.
The suit seems highly unlikely to succeed, and it’s only the latest in a series of Trump broadsides against the judge.