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.Elon Musk has a long history with the letter X. What does it signify?First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:
Moralism is ruining cultural criticism.
The 2024 election could be the end of the cases against Donald Trump.
The wrath of Goodreads
American girlhood culture is really strange.

Earlier today, three witnesses came before Congress to testify about their experiences with unidentified flying objects. A former Navy pilot spoke of the mysterious objects that he has seen with his own eyes and through radar, and how frequently pilots encounter them in the air. A retired Navy commander described the time he pulled his jet up to a Tic Tac–shaped object hovering over the ocean, then watched it suddenly speed up and vanish.

Eran Schwartz looks like a fighter pilot. The 40-something appeared last week on the Israeli television show Ofira and Berkowitz—a black V-neck T-shirt over his trim, athletic chest; his black hair cut short—to defend his decision to end his service in the air-force reserves. “We’re not the ones who tore up the social contract,” he said. “We swore to serve a state that is Jewish and democratic.

Last week, at a Fox News town hall (where else?), former President Donald Trump called China’s despot, Xi Jinping, a “brilliant” guy who “runs 1.4 billion people with an iron fist.” Lest anyone doubt his admiration, Trump added that Xi is “smart, brilliant, everything perfect. There’s nobody in Hollywood like this guy.”Trump is not alone.

If, as seems likely, Donald Trump is the Republican presidential nominee next year, the 2024 elections will be a referendum on several crucial issues: the prospect of authoritarianism in America, the continuation of a vibrant democracy, the relationship between the executive branch and the other two branches of government, and much else of grave significance.It will also be a referendum on whether Trump will ever be held legally accountable for his actions.

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.Attendance at an elite college increases a student’s chances of joining America’s most elite ranks, according to a new study.

Hollywood has always had a short memory. Industry analysts will predict doom for the future of cinema for months, then exult when a new release defies expectations. This summer has been no exception: A few blockbusters such as The Flash and Indiana Jones underperformed, and hand-wringing quickly ensued. But last weekend brought a colossal turnaround, thanks to Barbenheimer—the head-to-head releases of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer.

This article contains spoilers for the film Barbie.As soon as I asked a question about Ken, my call with Greta Gerwig dropped. When the writer-director of Barbie returned, she had no idea what happened. I suggested that of course merely mentioning Ken—the pining and overlooked doll played by Ryan Gosling—would cause a failure of some sort. Gerwig agreed. “The world was like, I don’t care,” she joked.But the world cares very much about the movie he’s in.

The Knesset’s passage of legislation yesterday to curtail the authority of Israel’s Supreme Court marks a new era for the state of Israel. The disjuncture comes not because of the legal implications alone, although they are substantial. Nor because of the economic, diplomatic, and security damage wrought in the short time since Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu returned to office, although it is considerable.

In February of 1949, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the former director of Los Alamos Laboratory under the Manhattan Project, took to the pages of this magazine to write about a terrible defeat. Nearly four years had passed since the Manhattan Project had detonated the first atomic bomb in New Mexico. The explosion had flashed purple light onto the surrounding mountains and raised a 40,000-foot pillar of flame, smoke, and debris from the desert floor.