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.
In an era when many of the civil-rights policies enacted in the 1960s face serious threats, I expect there will be a renewed urgency and vigor to the annual goings-on this Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Below are some suggestions for how to use your downtime today.

There comes a time in everyone’s life when they need to stop making excuses, look in the mirror, and confront head-on the gap between who they are and who they want to be. A few months ago, that happened to me. I could no longer put off the full and joyous life I felt I deserved. I decided it was finally time to learn to salsa.
I’m a very good dancer, generally speaking. Get me in a club, and I’ll be in the center of your dance circle.

We live in the age of the short attention span. And yet: Finding a recipe in a blog post requires first scrolling past a novella detailing the chef’s personal experience with the dish. Streaming shows run long, dragging into feature-film territory. Episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience podcast are sometimes longer than Avatar.

One of Aaron Rodgers’s biggest strengths as a Hall of Fame–caliber player is his awareness. At his best, the New York Jets quarterback can anticipate the movements of aggressive defenders and use his legs to create breathtaking plays down the field.
If only Rodgers possessed such sharp awareness away from the football field, where he seems to have a knack for creating unnecessary drama and exposing himself as a fake intellectual who can’t seem to stop showcasing his rampant narcissism.

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.
Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained.

Hamas’s attack on October 7 had the effect of stopping time. Many Israelis and concerned Jews I’ve spoken with describe a day that has not yet ended for them—a continuous nightmare from which they can’t wake, a reality compounded by the knowledge that so many of the kidnapped are still in captivity.

As the 2024 Republican presidential field began to stir three years ago, Fox News tried to make Ron DeSantis happen. From the week of the 2020 election through February 2021, the network invited DeSantis to appear 113 times, or almost once a day, according to the Tampa Bay Times. In an email uncovered by that newspaper, one Fox producer gushed to a member of DeSantis’s staff, “We see him as the future of the party.”
Maybe, but the future isn’t now.

I practice calling up the past for reassurance.
That events outlast themselves. That a day
of no great personal gain or loss inscribes itself
somewhere. The way I keep in my mind
two snakes entwined and falling
to my feet as I walked under an oak tree
one July. The way I ran down the hill
as if the snakes cared enough to chase me.