Life in Barbie Land, the utopian pink paradise that’s home to life-size versions of every Barbie doll that has ever existed, is one long party. Barbie (played by Margot Robbie) wakes up in her dream house every morning, hangs at the beach all day with the other Barbies and many admiring Kens, then hosts a girls’ night that’s one long choreographed dance sequence.

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, the roughly 160,000 members of SAG-AFTRA went on strike, joining the Writers Guild of America, which has been on strike since May. As my colleague Xochitl Gonzalez put it, “The Hollywood machine … has officially ground to a halt.

In the early days of the pandemic, it became harder for us to see one another. The human face, the ultimate marker of individuality, what the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas called “the first disclosure,” was suddenly sheathed in fabric. Strangers encountered on the street were even stranger—and the masks that covered their visage became a screen on which to project anxious thoughts.

Though Donald Trump has sometimes been called “Teflon Don”—a label that connects not just to his own name but to his modus operandi—the truth is not that he has escaped consequences for everything, just his most egregious behavior. He has lost defamation cases, his company got dinged for tax evasion, and he has been charged with byzantine business crimes. But his biggest sins—especially trying to steal the 2020 presidential election—have gone unpunished.

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 physical space in which a person works, or hopes to work, intersects with their most personal choices. Today we’re checking in on the remote-work debate and why it remains so heated.First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:
The businessmen broke Hollywood.

The Hollywood machine—from script writing, to shooting and production, to late-night talk-show PR—has officially ground to a halt.On Thursday, the actors went on strike. The 160,000 members of SAG-AFTRA, led by Fran Drescher, the fearless sitcom nanny, stopped working after talks with the studios collapsed. They join the ranks of the Writers Guild of America, whose members (myself included) have been on strike since May.Our two unions have not been on strike together since 1960.

It’s not that hard to say my name, Saahil Desai. Saahil: rhymes with sawmill, or at least that gets you 90 percent there. Desai: like decide with the last bit chopped off. That’s really it.More often than not, however, my name gets butchered into a menagerie of gaffes and blunders. The most common one, Sa-heel, is at least an honest attempt—unlike its mutant twin, a monosyllabic mess that comes out sounding like seal. Others defy all possible logic.

Last year, the state of Alabama made history by botching three consecutive executions in its death chamber. Two of the condemned men survived their own executions: Alan Miller and Kenneth Smith. Both were pierced repeatedly with needles in an attempt to set IV lines until the midnight expiry of their death warrants forced their executioners to halt further attempts to kill them.