The kickoff to the college-football season is a few weeks away, but fans are already seeing 2023’s biggest showdown—one that pits the long-term interests of schools and conferences against their own insatiable greed.When a major football power switches from one conference to another—disrupting existing rivalries in favor of new opponents less familiar to fans—it’s always controversial.

Although no one ever taught it to you, odds are that if you solve a lot of crossword puzzles, you’re fluent in the grammar of crosswords. Most crossword enthusiasts could explain that nouns clue nouns, verbs clue verbs, and so on. They also come to know—subconsciously—that answers must be interchangeable with their clues in a sentence, even for categories too particular to have a name.These unspoken tenets can be deceptively complex.

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.Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer reveals what’s keeping them entertained.Today’s special guest is Atlantic associate editor Morgan Ome. Morgan recently reported on the ripple effects of the U.S.

When in the spring of 2017 Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister, made it illegal for the Central European University to offer U.S.-accredited degrees at its Budapest campus, everyone there knew that this was more than an attack on George Soros, the Hungarian American businessman and philanthropist who’d founded the CEU.

held and unheld here in love, having been accused of telling stories, look how violently we fold and tint and follow haze come into branch and spring and gone and breathing armor. come make some garden inside. the scene is everyday let’s see. the situation is fractured arbor. an old dress made new the old way, out of absent extra, starched and pressed in low gravy, come up on not enough again’s invisible veer.

This has been a landmark summer in the world of “floaty rock drama.” Two weeks ago, in a pair of draft papers that have not been peer-reviewed, scientists in South Korea claimed to have found a room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor, and described how to make it. In theory, this magical material could revolutionize our world. It also levitates. The purported discovery became an internet sensation.

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.Boundaries. Gaslight. Attachment style. If you spend any time online these days, you’re likely familiar with a whole slew of jargon that, in another era, you might have only discovered in a niche book or in a therapist’s office.

Across America right now, parents face a possible nightmare: taking a sick child to the doctor, only to be told at the front desk that their health insurance is no longer valid. The reason is that millions of low-income American families have lost Medicaid benefits because they have to jump through an unexpected administrative hoop, resulting in a slow-burning crisis.

A car stopped at a red light, next to a line of people that snaked around the block. The kid in the passenger seat rolled down the window and shouted the obvious question: “What’s this for?” He got a quick reply, if not a full explanation: “It’s the mustard Skittles, man!”This week, to promote its new, limited-edition flavor—a collaboration with French’s mustard—Skittles turned candy into an event in downtown Washington, D.C.

When I was a little girl, I played with Barbie for the most basic reason you can imagine: She was so pretty. The cute outfits, the shiny blond hair, and all the fun she would have going around, looking like that.