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By killing her dog, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem may have also killed her chances of becoming Donald Trump’s vice president.

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.
Recent weeks have seen the introduction of new consumer gadgets whose entire selling point revolves around artificial intelligence.

This weekend, more than 150,000 pastel-wrapped spectators and bettors will descend upon Louisville’s Churchill Downs complex to watch one of America’s greatest competitive spectacles. The 150th running of the Kentucky Derby, headlined by animals whose names (Resilience, Stronghold, Catching Freedom) sound more like Taylor Swift bonus tracks than living creatures, is expected to bring more revenue to the city and venue than ever, with resale tickets reportedly at record highs.

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Poetry is the art form that most expands my sense of what language can do. Today, so much daily English feels flat or distracted—politicians speak in clichés; friends are distracted in conversation by the tempting dinging of smartphones; TV dialogue and the sentences in books are frequently inelegant.

When Kathleen Walker-Meikle, a historian at the University of Basel, in Switzerland, ponders the Middle Ages, her mind tends to drift not to religious conquest or Viking raids, but to squirrels. Tawny-backed, white-bellied, tufted-eared red squirrels, to be exact. For hundreds of years, society’s elites stitched red-squirrel pelts into luxurious floor-length capes and made the animals pets, cradling them in their lap and commissioning gold collars festooned with pearls.

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.
Updated at 9:47 p.m. ET on May 2, 2024
In a recent interview with Time magazine, Donald Trump once again told Americans what he will do to their system of government.

Milk is defined by its percentages: nonfat, 2 percent, whole. Now there is a different kind of milk percentage to keep in mind. Last week, the FDA reported that 20 percent of the milk it had sampled from retailers across the country contained fragments of bird flu, raising concerns that the virus, which is spreading among animals, might be on its way to sickening humans too.

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.
Before Pauline Kael was Pauline Kael, she was still very much Pauline Kael. When her first essay for The Atlantic ran in November 1964, she had not yet lost it at the movies. She had not yet become Pauline Kael, the vaunted and polarizing film critic for The New Yorker.

For the past couple of weeks, the vortex of campus politics has threatened to suck Joe Biden in. Protesters at colleges have dubbed the president “Genocide Joe” and demanded that he act to stop Israeli actions in Gaza, while conservatives have sought to blame Biden for disorder at colleges and universities.