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.I spoke with my colleague Sarah Zhang about a breakthrough in CRISPR therapy, and when it is ethical to use the gene-editing technology.

Last week, it seemed that OpenAI—the secretive firm behind ChatGPT—had been broken open. The company’s board had suddenly fired CEO Sam Altman, hundreds of employees revolted in protest, Altman was reinstated, and the media dissected the story from every possible angle.

In a way, the story of American natural gas is a particularly American story, one of entrepreneurial hustle, booms and busts, and a will to find opportunity where nobody’s looked. Of resourceful self-preservation for the sake of self-preservation alone. Of supply needing demand, and of manufacturing that demand through the means at hand, even if the logic is sometimes tough to follow.

Updated at 3:06 p.m. ET on November 28, 2023Last Thursday, C. J. Rice celebrated his 30th birthday at State Correctional Institution–Chester, a Pennsylvania prison just southwest of Philadelphia. Rice has been incarcerated since he was 17, when he was charged with a crime he insists he didn’t commit. But because of a decision yesterday in federal court, he may be free by the time he turns 31. Such an outcome is exceedingly rare in cases like Rice’s.

Since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, the issue of free speech on college campuses has received a new wave of scrutiny. Palestinian student groups have faced threats of censorship for their statements, donors have warned about pulling funding, and employers have blacklisted students who blamed Israel for Hamas’s attack.But as far as free speech is concerned, 2023 has been a relatively normal year for colleges and universities.

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.
Joe Biden is both old and boring. The American voter has come to expect celebrity and excitement from the White House, and they pay little attention to policy.
But first: Last year, Jake Tapper wrote about C. J.

When Victoria Gray was still a baby, she started howling so inconsolably during a bath that she was rushed to the emergency room. The diagnosis was sickle-cell disease, a genetic condition that causes bouts of excruciating pain—“worse than a broken leg, worse than childbirth,” one doctor told me. Like lightning crackling in her body is how Gray, now 38, has described the pain.

To my grandmother, who has lived her entire life in Italy, gluten-free pasta is “una follia”—nonsense, madness. A twirl of spaghetti or forkful of rigatoni should provide a familiar textural delight: a noodle that is both elastic and firm, holding a distinct, springy shape that your teeth can sink into with some, but not too much, resistance. That is all because of the gluten in wheat.

Frank Zappa was an unruly figure of 1960s rock, a free-speech advocate and devout parodist defined by his opposition to authority. His albums assembled the bones of rock and roll into an idiosyncratic style coursing with disbelief at just about every aspect of the American zeitgeist: hippies, cars, college, drugs, California, and, eventually, yuppies.