Beyoncé herself might admit that her seventh solo album, Renaissance, is a mess. Conventional songwriting rules, polite-taste paradigms, and the best practices for headache avoidance were clearly not priorities here. The songs clatter, wobble, and lurch into one another while Beyoncé wavers between singing and doing silly voices, in multitrack. Listening to her past albums felt like being whisked in a luxury sedan through a landscape of mountains, valleys, and meadows.

For scientists, publication in Nature is a career high-water mark. To make its pages, work must be deemed exceptionally important, with potentially transformative impact on scientific understanding. In 2006, a study of Alzheimer’s disease by the lead author Sylvain Lesné met those criteria: It suggested a new culprit for the illness, a molecule called Aβ*56, which seemingly caused dementia symptoms in rats.

When the monkeypox outbreak was first detected in the United States, it seemed, as far as infectious-disease epidemics go, like one this country should be able to handle. Tests and antivirals for the virus already existed; the government had stockpiled vaccines. Unlike SARS-CoV-2, monkeypox was a known entity, a relative softball on the pathogenic field.

Vacations are often depicted as escapes in which one leaves the stresses of home and travels to a blissful paradise, unburdened by worry. Yet, as the best literature about tourism makes clear, there’s a cost to believing that any destination could be uncomplicated.Sarah Stodola’s The Last Resort, which traces the ocean-side hotel over time, easily exposes the dark side of this fantasy.

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.Well, folks, it looks like Congress still has the capacity to surprise us.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
The January 6 hearings are changing Republicans’ minds.
Is this a recession? Wrong question.

Intellectual sports lovers, to borrow from Martin Amis, are “a beleaguered crew,” fated to be “despised by intellectuals and [sports]-lovers alike.” Yet, across literature, scenes depicting heartstopping goals, impossible tennis shots, thundering bowling strikes, and last-minute baskets abound. Sometimes, these games are only offhand events in characters’ lives. At other moments, they signify something greater—an entry into a protagonist’s interior.

The U.S. economy shrank for the second consecutive quarter, guaranteeing a robust news cycle of people shouting the word recession back and forth at each other. President Joe Biden has assured the public that the U.S. economy is not actually in a recession, while conservative media will surely use today’s report to state confidently that it is.So are we in a recession, or not? That’s the wrong question to ask. But before explaining why, let me try to answer it.

A shock awaited Drake’s fans when they first hit “Play” on his latest album. A gentle instrumental intro lulled the ears for 37 seconds. Then the second track, “Falling Back,” cut in, the audio equivalent of a jump scare in a horror movie.