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.Barry Manilow is an American institution. It’s okay if you think so too: I won’t tell anyone.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, who died last night at 90, braved one of the most remarkable political expeditions in American history—and also one of the grimmer spectacles at the end of her life and career.Is it too soon to point this out? Yes, perhaps.

New York City’s sewer system is built for the rain of the past—when a notable storm might have meant 1.75 inches of water an hour. It wasn’t built to handle the rainfall from Hurricane Irene, Hurricane Sandy, or, more recently, Hurricane Ida—which dumped 3.15 inches an hour on Central Park. And it wasn’t built to handle the kind of extreme rainfall that is becoming routine: The city flooded last December, last April, and last July—an unusual seasonal span.

For years now, Hakwan Lau has suffered from an inner torment. Lau is a neuroscientist who studies the sense of awareness that all of us experience during our every waking moment. How this awareness arises from ordinary matter is an ancient mystery. Several scientific theories purport to explain it, and Lau feels that one of them, called integrated information theory (IIT), has received a disproportionate amount of media attention.

This is an edition of the revamped Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.For many who were purged during Stalin’s reign in the Soviet Union, one erasure followed another. After being sent to the Gulag (if they weren’t shot in the basement of the Lubyanka building), the ousted person would suffer the further indignity of having their face crosshatched with frantic pen marks to make them disappear from family albums.

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 president was on the picket line, and the American public is paying attention to unions. This moment of renewed interest in organizing could energize labor activity in the U.S., but it also turns up the pressure on union leaders.

There’s an expression reporters use, that you’ve “reported yourself out of a story.” That is, you had a hunch or a tip about something, but when you checked the facts, the story didn’t pan out. Sometimes, though, reporters stick to the narrative they’ve decided on in advance, and they don’t let facts get in the way.The United Auto Workers union is striking for a better contract.