Did you think it would all happen this fast? The heat domes, the thousand-year floods, the apocalyptic wildfires, that horrific orange sky? This summer’s convergence of extreme events makes it feel like we’re living in a CGI-laden disaster movie. But those epic blockbusters all offer the same material comfort: an ending. What we’re experiencing is different.First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
It turns out that the debt matters after all.

There’s no such thing as quickly finding a recipe online. Every cooking blog, it seems, is stuffed with paragraphs and paragraphs before you get to an actual recipe, text that might tell you about the history of the dish, or even which of the author’s kids likes it best. It’s not that food writers are categorically long-winded, though. They are just responding to Google’s demands.

Because I am a writer, and because I am a hoarder, my apartment is littered with notebooks that contain a mixture of journal entries and school assignments. Many pages don’t have dates, but I can tell which era of my life they correspond to just by looking at the handwriting. In the earliest examples, from elementary school, my print is angular, jagged; even the s’s and j’s turn sharp corners.

A recurring dynamic of the Trump era is that his opponents warn darkly about his secret motives or actions, and then he bluntly confirms their hunches in public.For years, Democrats insisted that Trump had secret, illicit ties to Russia. Then, in the summer of 2017, Donald Trump Jr. abruptly disclosed a 2016 meeting he’d held with Russians promising “dirt” on Hillary Clinton.

Earlier this year, Google introduced a chat application powered by artificial intelligence—an experimental competitor to ChatGPT and a tool that it hoped, per its marketing copy, would “be a home for your creativity, productivity and curiosity.” Understanding that some potential users might be less sanguine about a technology that blurs the line between the augmentation of human intelligence and the obsolescence of it, Google gave its new bot a canny name: Bard.

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 latest jobs data give a mixed picture of the economy—and raise questions about how America’s workers will fare.First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
Joe Scarborough: “America is doing just fine.

In 1994, Charmaine Simmons, the costume supervisor for Seinfeld, had a problem: People wanted to dress like Kramer, Jerry’s eccentric, ever-interrupting neighbor, played by Michael Richards. This was one of the better problems a television series could have: Seinfeld was the most popular show on American television that year, and its idiosyncratic style and humor had started to influence pop culture far beyond its Thursday-night time slot. But the problem existed nevertheless.

Earth, in most renderings, is a smooth sphere with a glossy complexion—a blue marble, as pictures snapped from space have shown us. Earth scientists know that’s not exactly true. Earth, in fact, is an ellipsoid, a little bit squashed at the poles and fat around the equator, not to mention speckled with mountain ranges. And then you have the geoid people—the ones who think of Earth less as an imperfect sphere and more as a lumpy potato.C. K.

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.The week before last I asked readers for their thoughts on the Supreme Court’s affirmative-action decision.Replies have been edited for length and clarity.R.