Recently, an old friend of mine from elementary school ran a hand over my bookshelf, stopped, and said, “You stole this.”
“I did not!”
“Yes, you did. You totally stole it from school.”
She pulled out my copy of The Once and Future King, and showed me the inside of the front cover. It was stamped: Board of Education, City of New York.
Okay, so I stole it. But I had a good reason. I loved that book so much; I couldn’t bear to return it to the school library.

Professional athletes are now playing sports in a gamblers’ world, and it isn’t going well for them. In April, the NBA banned Jontay Porter, a 24-year-old role player for the Toronto Raptors and a younger brother of the Denver Nuggets star Michael Porter Jr., for allegedly wagering on NBA games, including his team’s, and throwing his own performances to influence prop bets.

In July 2020, Lisa Lucas was hired as the publisher of Pantheon and Schocken Books, prestigious imprints of Penguin Random House. She was the first person of color to hold the post. Black Lives Matter was resurgent after the murder of George Floyd. Demand for books by Black authors had spiked. Publishing employees had organized a day of action to protest the industry’s ongoing “role in systemic racism.

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For Juneteenth, three Atlantic writers and editors share their recommendations for what to listen to, read, and watch.

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.
As a heat wave spreads across America, the whirring of air conditioners follows close behind. AC has become an American necessity—but at what cost?
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
The rise of a new, dangerous cynicism
David Frum: The most dangerous bias in today’s America
J. D.

Updated at 2:18 p.m. ET on June 18, 2024
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A lot can change in eight years. In the summer of 2016, J. D. Vance, writing in this magazine, characterized Donald Trump as “cultural heroin.” On Sunday morning in Michigan, Vance made his pitch to be Trump’s next vice president—by showing his fealty to the former president and sounding as much like him as possible.

In 1957, Ladies’ Home Journal printed a letter from a reader, identified solely as “Registered Nurse,” imploring the publication to “investigate the tortures that go on in modern delivery rooms.” She cited examples of the “sadism” she’d witnessed in an unnamed Chicago hospital: women restrained with cuffs and steel clamps; an obstetrician operating without anesthetic.

Many teens and adults use the word addictive when describing social-media sites, as if the apps themselves are laced with nicotine. The U.S. surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, wants to drive that point home as glaringly as possible: In an op-ed published by The New York Times yesterday, he writes that the country should start labeling such sites as if they’re cigarettes.

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Donald Trump is running neck and neck with Joe Biden, and might even be taking the lead in the 2024 race. Yet Republicans and their media ecosystem seem to be in a panic about their candidate.

Alex Jones couldn’t help himself. On Friday, just before a federal judge was set to decide the fate of Infowars, his conspiracy-media empire, Jones spun up yet another conspiracy.
He was on his way into a Houston courthouse as part of the ongoing saga over lies he told about the Sandy Hook school shooting. After six years of litigation, Jones owes $1.5 billion in defamation damages.