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.Every nation needs parties of the left and the right, but America’s conservative party has collapsed—and its absence will undermine the recovery of American democracy even when Donald Trump is gone.

For years after World War II, the “liberal consensus”—the New Deal idea that the federal government had a role to play in regulating business, providing a basic social safety net, and promoting infrastructure—was a true consensus. It was so widely popular that in 1950, the critic Lionel Trilling wrote of the United States that “liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition.”But the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v.

Coca-Cola often experiments with new flavors, and they’re usually flavors you can imagine, having tasted them before: vanilla, cherry, lemon. But the latest is called Y3000, a reference to the far-off year 3000, and one that Coca-Cola says was concocted with the help of, in some way, artificial intelligence. It smells like circus-peanut candies and tastes mostly like Coke.

In the 1989 surrealist satire Chameleon Street, two Black men bicker after one says that he prefers women with light skin and “good hair.” After being criticized for the comment, the man makes a self-deprecating joke: “I’m a victim, brotha. I’m a victim of 400 years of conditioning. The Man has programmed my conditioning. Even my conditioning has been conditioned.

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 U.S. government is on the brink of a shutdown, and the deadline for Congress to pass a new spending bill is September 30.

About 250 million years from now, living on the coast could feel like being stuck inside a hot, wet plastic bag. And that bag would actually be the best home on the planet. Inland areas would be hotter than summer in the Gobi Desert, and up to four times as dry. This is life on Pangea Ultima, the supercontinent that an international group of scientists has predicted will form on Earth in a quarter of a billion years.

Sign up for Kaitlyn and Lizzie’s newsletter here.Kaitlyn: We know it’s not called “the Windy City” because of the wind, but we don’t remember why it’s actually called that. Maybe it’s because, on our eighth annual fall trip, Ashley took me and Lizzie to her hometown of Chicago for a whirlwind tour of its most important sights. Hmm?We went to the Bean.

Editor’s note: This article is part of The Atlantic’s series on Books3. You can search the database for yourself here, and read about its origins here.This summer, I reported on a data set of more than 191,000 books that were used without permission to train generative-AI systems by Meta, Bloomberg, and others.

Editor’s note: This searchable database is part of The Atlantic’s series on Books3. You can read about the origins of the database here, and an analysis of what’s in it here.This summer, I acquired a data set of more than 191,000 books that were used without permission to train generative-AI systems by Meta, Bloomberg, and others.