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.
It’s common, in criminal court, for a defendant’s friends and family to join them in the courtroom as a show of love and support. That’s not exactly what’s happening in Manhattan this week. More, after these three stories from The Atlantic:
Michael Schuman: China has gotten the trade war it deserves.

This is Atlantic Intelligence, a limited-run series in which our writers help you wrap your mind around artificial intelligence and a new machine age. Sign up here.
This week has felt like the early days of the generative-AI boom, filled with dazzling events concerning the future of the technology.
On Monday, OpenAI held a last-minute “Spring Update” event in which the company announced its newest AI model, GPT-4o, in an impressive live demo.

Sign up for The Decision, a newsletter featuring our 2024 election coverage.
Where, exactly, are we in the election cycle right now?
In most election years, figuring this out is fairly easy, but in 2024, it’s not so simple. When Donald Trump locked up the Republican nomination in March, reporters declared that the general election had begun. But what’s going on is not yet a midsummer campaign, nor does it feel like one.

A global trade war is starting, and China is at the center of it. A reckoning for Beijing’s economic model, which is designed to promote Chinese industry at the expense of the rest of the world, has long been coming. China’s trading partners have had enough. The result will be a wave of protectionism, with potentially dire consequences for both China and the global economy.

Because of my reverence for Alice Munro’s work, I was often asked if I’d ever met her. I felt that I had totally met her in her books and said as much. I never desired to meet her in person, for what I loved would not necessarily be there. The one time I was scheduled actually to meet her—at a reading and ceremony in her honor—she canceled. Stupidly, I was relieved.

Earlier today, Google presented a new vision for its flagship search engine, one that is uniquely tailored to the generative-AI moment. With advanced technology at its disposal, “Google will do the Googling for you,” Liz Reid, the company’s head of search, declared onstage at the company’s annual software conference.
Googling something rarely yields an immediate, definitive answer.

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.
New polling shows Joe Biden trailing Donald Trump in five out of six key swing states. Voters there say they want change—which presents a challenge for the candidate who won in 2020 on the promise of normalcy.

On Sunday at Duke University, the comedian Jerry Seinfeld delivered a commencement address that was, bizarrely, overshadowed in the media by a tiny, nondisruptive protest.
Seinfeld gave a compliment and a warning to his Gen Z audience.
First came the compliment. “I totally admire the ambitions of your generation to create a more just and inclusive society,” he said.

America’s young voters are fired up about the war in Gaza—aren’t they? Campus protests and the controversies around them have dominated media attention for weeks. So has the possibility that youth anger about the war will cost President Joe Biden the election. “Joe Biden Is Losing Young Voters Over Israel,” a USA Today headline declared last month. The New York Times columnist Thomas B.