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.Last week, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg announced their plans to duke it out in a cage fight. But this potential feud is less important than what it tells us about how Musk is influencing the rules of engagement in Silicon Valley.

In rejecting the independent state legislature theory, a thoroughly right-wing Supreme Court sent the message that it will not simply accept whatever ludicrous partisan legal theory its comrades in the conservative legal movement come up with. At least, not every single time.

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Last week, I asked readers what subject they would want to see debated and who the participants would be.Replies have been edited for length and clarity.J.E.

Donald Trump is not an articulate speaker, but he is an effective one, because he understands the power of the spoken word and deftly wields tone and inflection. One reason the tape of him boasting about sexual assault was such a bombshell was that you could actually listen to Trump saying it all in his inimitable manner.

Statins, one of the most extensively studied drugs on the planet, taken by tens of millions of Americans alone, have long had a perplexing side effect. Many patients—some 5 percent in clinical trials, and up to 30 percent in observational studies—experience sore and achy muscles, especially in the upper arms and legs.

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.“A short recap of the past 24 hours in Russia reads like the backstory for a fanciful episode of Madam Secretary or The West Wing,” my colleague Tom Nichols wrote yesterday.

Across human cultures and languages, adults talk to babies in a very particular way. They raise their pitch and broaden its range, while also shortening and repeating their utterances; the latter features occur even in sign language. Mothers use this exaggerated and musical style of speech (which is sometimes called “motherese”), but so do fathers, older children, and other caregivers. Infants prefer listening to it, which might help them bond with adults and learn language faster.

Two weeks ago, looking at the burned-out section of I-95 in Philadelphia from above, the safe bet was that this stretch of the East Coast’s most essential arterial would be a traffic nightmare for months to come. The elevated section of the highway had collapsed on June 11 after a tractor trailer flipped over and caught fire.Instead, on Friday, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro unveiled a temporary fix that reopened the six lanes to traffic—albeit at a slower pace for now.