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.

Our editors compiled seven great reads. Spend time with stories about the risks of trying to raise successful kids, an alarming trend affecting the job market, the top goal of Project 2025, and more.

Stop Trying to Raise Successful Kids

And start raising kind ones. (From 2019)

By Adam Grant and Allison Sweet Grant

Something Alarming Is Happening to the Job Market

A new sign that AI is competing with college grads

By Derek Thompson

The Top Goal of Project 2025 Is Still to Come

The now-famous white paper has proved to be a good road map for what the administration has done so far, and what may yet be on the way.

By David A. Graham

What the Press Got Wrong About Hitler

Journalists accurately reported that the führer was a “Little Man” whom the whole world was laughing at. It didn’t matter.

By Timothy W. Ryback

Quaker Parents Were Ahead of Their Time

The nearly 375-year-old religion’s principles line up surprisingly well with modern parenting research.

By Gail Cornwall

The Aftermath of a Mass Slaughter at the Zoo

Last year, a fox broke into a bird enclosure in D.C. and killed 25 flamingos. The zoo refused to let him strike again. (From 2023)

By Ross Andersen

The Sociopaths Among Us—And How to Avoid Them

You’re bound to come across the “Dark Triad” type of malignant narcissists in life—and they can be superficially appealing. Better to look for their exact opposite. (From 2023)

By Arthur C. Brooks

The Week Ahead

1. Final Destination: Bloodlines, the sixth movie in the horror franchise about people marked for death (in theaters Friday)
2. Volume 4 of Love, Death & Robots, an animated anthology series featuring strange and darkly funny short stories (premieres Thursday on Netflix)
3. The Emperor of Gladness, a novel by Ocean Vuong about a desperate 19-year-old who becomes the caretaker of an elderly widow with dementia (out Tuesday)

Essay

The Not-at-All-Funny Life of Mark Twain

By Graeme Wood

In his last, most pathetic years, Mark Twain threw himself behind the crackpot theory that the true author of Shakespeare’s plays may have been Francis Bacon … The literary critic Northrop Frye, who dismissed the Bacon theory, nevertheless had a wry aside of his own about extrapolating too freely from scattered biographical details and the unflattering portrait that is the only surviving image of Shakespeare. “We know nothing about Shakespeare,” Frye wrote, “except a signature or two, a few addresses, a will, a baptismal register, and the picture of a man who is clearly an idiot.”

Ron Chernow’s Mark Twain forces a similar conclusion about its subject: clearly an idiot, and a born sucker.

Read the full article.

More in Culture

• We’re all living in a Carl Hiaasen novel.
• The comic who’s his own worst enemy
• Gregg Popovich’s life lessons
• David Sims: “The oddball British comedy show I thought I’d hate (and learned to love)”
• The catharsis in re-creating one of the worst days of your life
• What kind of questions did 17th-century daters have?

Catch Up on The Atlantic

• Why this India-Pakistan conflict is different
• Airport detentions have travelers “freaked out.”
• The conclave just did the unthinkable.

Photo Album

Take a look at these photos of the week, showing a new pope, artistic swimming in Ontario, a bun-scrambling competition in Hong Kong, and much more.

Explore all of our newsletters.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.