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 reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is our staff writer Olga Khazan.

in the throat before a cry. It is my father,
changing his god because my mother asked.
After the baptism, his curly hair wet and
cold like an animal caught out in the snow.
Fleeing from my grandmother, who rushed
after him with butcher knives not yet wiped clean
of pigeon meat, the untucked bits of herhijab licking the air behind her like a shadow.
You need to go back to Egypt, she had said.
Sometimes, home is not a home, but a claw
lodged inside you.

This article originally appeared in Hakai Magazine.Two weeks after Hurricane Fiona made landfall in Atlantic Canada on September 24, 2022, Jeff Ollerhead found himself staring at an upended boardwalk in Prince Edward Island National Park. Damaged by the storm—one of the strongest cyclones ever recorded in Canada—Greenwich Beach was still closed to the general public.

Here they come, two by two, the classic cars of America. The 1970s muscle cars, the ’60s coupes, and the ’50s sedans—“kandy-kolored” (to borrow Tom Wolfe’s phrase) beauties that came off the line in the golden age before the catalytic converter, when rich black smoke pooled above the beach lot where the boys gathered.

Has Taylor Swift ever been more popular, more all-powerful, more white Beyoncé than she is right now? She’s in the middle of an era-defining tour that is literally called the Eras Tour. A concert-film version of the show is about to arrive in theaters nationwide—she dropped the news a few weeks ago, and within hours, Hollywood studios were scrambling to get their movies out of her way. The bracelets are everywhere.

Updated at 9:02 p.m. ET on September 30, 2023For weeks, Speaker Kevin McCarthy seemed to face an impossible choice as he haggled over spending bills with his party’s most hard-line members: He could keep the government open, or he could keep his job. At every turn, McCarthy’s behavior suggested that he favored the latter option.

Editor’s Note: Washington Week with The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings or watch full episodes here. The American government on the brink of shutdown: With the federal government about to run out of money, we explore how the country got to this point, who will be affected, and how U.S. support for Ukraine has become a divisive political issue.

In the aftermath of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, both Facebook and Twitter decided to suspend lame-duck President Donald Trump from their platforms. He had encouraged violence, the sites reasoned; the megaphone was taken away, albeit temporarily. To many Americans horrified by the attack, the decisions were a relief. But for some conservatives, it marked an escalation in a different kind of assault: It was, to them, a clear sign of Big Tech’s anti-conservative bias.

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.Saturn is the best planet. Hard seltzer is an abomination. Milk chocolate is better than dark. The “fun fact” should die.My colleagues at The Atlantic are skilled in the art of making a bold, well-researched argument.

This article was originally published by Undark Magazine.Back at the turn of the 21st century, valley fever was an obscure fungal disease in the United States, with fewer than 3,000 reported cases a year, mostly in California and Arizona. Two decades later, cases of valley fever have exploded, increasing roughly sevenfold by 2019.And valley fever isn’t alone.