It was as if a bottom seed had knocked out the top team in March Madness: At the Sinquefield Cup chess tournament in St. Louis earlier this month, an upstart American teenager named Hans Niemann snapped the 53-game unbeaten streak of world champion Magnus Carlsen, perhaps the game’s best player of all time. But the real uproar came the following day, when Carlsen posted a cryptic tweet announcing his withdrawal that included a meme video stating, “If I speak I am in big trouble.

In the end, it was the knee.Roger Federer has played more than 1,500 matches in 24 years, and has never quit in the middle of one for injury, illness, exhaustion, burnout, or apathy. His most formidable on-court opponents, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic, who have surpassed him in Grand Slam count and are still battling it out for statistical GOAT status, cannot say the same. Nadal has retired (ended play) mid-match nine times, Djokovic thirteen.

Shira Mandelzis fell in love with flag football while playing on her middle-school team. An avid snowboarder and all-around athletic kid, she loved the energy she felt while on the field, and the camaraderie engendered by the intensely physical game. So last summer, heading into her junior year at Riverdale Country School in the Bronx, Mandelzis decided to sign up for football.

Donald Trump will be remembered as one of the most consequential presidents in American history. On a political level, he attempted to overturn an election—an unusual enterprise for a president—and popularized the idea that democratic outcomes can be rejected outright if you don’t like the results. Oddly enough, however, Trump’s impact may prove more distinctive and perhaps even more lasting on an intellectual level.

“The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish … the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature,” Carl von Clausewitz wrote in his landmark treatise On War. “This is the first of all strategic questions and the most comprehensive.

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.Ron DeSantis’s hideous political stunt is a reminder that the GOP’s policies are no longer about achieving results, but gratifying the basest impulses of MAGA voters.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
Nice democracy you’ve got here.

The line between imagination and delusion is thin, as Donald Trump’s initial reaction to an FBI search at Mar-a-Lago in August demonstrated. In the first days afterward, the former president saw the search as a political gift, not a blow: a chance to rally his base, put would-be challengers like Ron DeSantis in their place, and reconsolidate his eroding position as the leader of the Republican Party.

The original iPhone SE is a great little phone, and I love it. It has a headphone jack—remember those? It fits in a butt pocket. It was announced in the Obama era.Sure, the first one I owned, which I purchased in 2017, had only 16GB of storage.

Many works of history are much less about the past than they are about the present. People contemplate past events to understand current problems, and in today’s fractured America, the Civil War would surely be a resonant topic for an eminent documentarian to explore. But Ken Burns has been there and done that.

Quid and I have struck a deal. Every morning she flies up the stairs, leaps onto our bed, and attacks my nose with her sharp little teeth. And I am awakened.Oh wait, no; we don’t have a deal. She just does that. It is vexing and charming at once. Just at the moment of nose-attack I can smell the sleep collected on her breath and fur. It mingles with the odor of the other dogs in the room and is beginning to smell, to me, like home.