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.For years, Ivanka Trump has meticulously cultivated her public image. Today, compelled to testify in the Trump Organization’s civil trial, she was thrust back into the spotlight against her will.First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:
Republicans can’t figure it out.

In Linfa Wang’s ideal world, all humans would be just a bit more bat-like.Wang, a biochemist and zoonotic-disease expert at Duke-NUS Medical School, in Singapore, has no illusions about people flapping about the skies or echolocating to find the best burger in town. The point is “not to live like a bat,” Wang told me, but to take inspiration from their very weird physiology in order to boost the quality, or even the length, of human life.

One of my chronically depressed patients recently found a psychoactive drug that works for him after decades of searching. He took some psilocybin from a friend and experienced what he deemed a miraculous improvement in his mood. “It was like taking off a dark pair of sunglasses,” he told me in a therapy session. “Everything suddenly seemed brighter.

Updated at 8:58 p.m. ET on November 7, 2023 The GOP controls nearly everything in Kentucky, a state that Donald Trump carried by 26 points in 2020. Republicans hold both U.S. Senate seats and five of Kentucky’s six House seats; they dominate both chambers of the state legislature.What Republicans don’t occupy—and won’t for the next four years—is Kentucky’s most powerful post.

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 race for second place in the Republican primaries has gotten closer. Nikki Haley has been rising surprisingly quickly in the polls in recent months, becoming a top rival to Ron DeSantis; both are still trailing Donald Trump.

Some days, I wonder if I’m a bot. The problem is CAPTCHAs, those little online challenges that websites require you to pass to prove that you’re a human. When one pops up on my screen, I tend to spend way too much time looking at the grid of nine images and clicking those with a traffic light, or a crosswalk, or a bike … only to miss the one in the bottom-right corner that just barely looks like a bike.

We are a month into Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza. The ferocity of Israel’s response to the murder of more than 1,400 Israeli citizens has been such that international concern for the Palestinians of Gaza—half of whom, or more than 1 million, are children under the age of 15—has now largely eclipsed any sympathy that might have been felt for the victims of the crimes that precipitated the war in the first place.

In another historic first for a former president, Donald J. Trump testified for five hours yesterday in the trial of the civil fraud claims brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James against him, his two sons, the Trump Organization, and other related defendants. Although his testimony probably shifted little for the state’s case against him, it was a sad spectacle for the rule of law and the sanctity of the judicial system in America.