Corby Kummer

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.

Yesterday, I discussed the shambolic attempt under way in Russia to conscript hundreds of thousands of men. Today, one of Vladimir Putin’s minions again threatened the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine. What do these threats mean?

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

• Teachers, nurses, and child-care workers have had enough.
• Maybe we won’t end up like the dinosaurs.
• Why quitting is underrated.

‘The Most Fearsome Weapon’

One of Russian President Vladmir Putin’s cronies renewed Putin’s nuclear threats against NATO today. Dmitry Medvedev, in a post on Telegram, said that the West would not intervene even if “Russia is forced to use the most fearsome weapon against the Ukrainian regime,” because the “demagogues across the ocean and in Europe are not going to die in a nuclear apocalypse.”

Dear Therapist,

How do I talk about estrangement with my young children? Over the past year my husband and I have gone through a horribly painful estrangement from his parents. We were once very close and our children enjoyed nice relationships with them. As far as we know, our children have only warm, happy memories with their grandparents.

However, after struggling with alcoholism, anxiety, and depression for many years, my husband disclosed to me abuse that took place in his home when he was a young child. His parents have refused to listen, have said his memories are false, and have been completely unable to maintain basic decency when my husband has attempted to speak with them. I feel strongly that it is not safe for my children to have a relationship with them moving forward.

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. And yes, I was forced to stop using it after a terrifying incident in which it refused to update to the latest iOS, even after I deleted nearly everything on it, which prevented me from installing the Ticketmaster app that I needed to enter a Harry Styles concert that I had flown to California by myself to attend. (Would you believe someone at the arena simply agreed to print the ticket out? I was crying.) After that, I bought a refurbished iPhone SE with 64GB of storage for $165. I eventually stopped using this one, because the camera was so bad that it was upsetting my friends. Also, a small part of the screen stopped working—right in the spot I had to press to switch the keyboard from letters to numbers, which meant I had no access to punctuation and came off, via text, as very cold. And I couldn’t log in to my bank account.

“Can you believe these are my customers?” Donald Trump once asked while surveying the crowd in the Taj Mahal casino’s poker room. “Look at those losers,” he said to his consultant Tom O’Neil, of people spending money on the floor of the Trump Plaza casino. Visiting the Iowa State Fair as a presidential candidate in 2015, he was astounded that locals fell in line to support him because of a few free rides in his branded helicopter. In the White House, he was sometimes stunned at his own backers’ fervor, telling aides, “They’re fucking crazy.” Yet they loved him and wanted to own a piece of him, and that was what mattered most.

Almost immediately after his defeat in 2020, Trump began fundraising off his claims of fraud, turning to his ardent fans for support. Plenty of people donated small amounts of money to continue a fight he swore was valid and building toward action. It was difficult to discern, though, whether Trump actually believed what he was saying about the election.

The country is in the midst of a burnout crisis. In a recent American Psychological Association Work and Well-Being Survey, large proportions of American workers said that they felt stressed on the job (79 percent), plagued by physical fatigue (44 percent), cognitive weariness (36 percent), emotional exhaustion (32 percent), and a lack of interest, motivation, or energy (26 percent). Such measures are up significantly since the pandemic hit.

Nowhere is this burnout crisis worse than in the caring professions. An untold number of nurses, teachers, and child-care workers are asking themselves Is this worth it? and deciding that it is not. Nurses are walking off their jobs and quitting in droves, while those still at the bedside are experiencing high rates of depression. Shortages of teachers are prompting some school districts to institute four-day weeks and hire educators without a college degree, and more than half of educators report wanting to quit. The child-care workforce is shrinking, spurring parents to camp out overnight to win coveted day-care spots and pushing mothers out of the workforce.

Siobhan O’Keeffe, one of tens of thousands of runners in the 2019 London Marathon, noticed that her ankle started hurting four miles into the race. According to a news report at the time, she kept running despite the worsening pain. Another four miles later, her fibula bone snapped. Medics bandaged her leg and advised her to quit, but O’Keeffe refused. She actually finished the marathon, running the last 18 miles in nearly unbearable pain and risking permanent injury.

Running 18 miles on a broken leg stretches the limits of believability. Even her orthopedic surgeon remarked as much. But what might be more unbelievable is that this story is not uncommon. In fact, that same day, at the same distance into the race, another runner, Steven Quayle, broke his foot. He, too, kept running, through pain so bad that during the final 10 miles, he had to make several stops for medical assistance. But like O’Keeffe, he finished the race.

Creative artificial intelligence is the latest and, in some ways, most surprising and exhilarating art form in the world. It also isn’t fully formed yet. That tension is causing some confusion.

If you’re familiar at all with the use of creative artificial intelligence, you probably know it through one of the popular text-to-image AI applications, which use sprawling databases of existing imagery to convert a written prompt into a new picture. DALL-E 2 from OpenAI is the best known, but more recent and arguably cooler applications include Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. Their products can be astonishing: realistic street scenes, strawberry-covered ice-cream mountains in space, abstract concepts such as “hurt feelings” and “reminiscence” rendered in a way that feels visually accurate, if not entirely coherent. The best way to get a sense of their power is to test them yourself, and many are. Stable Diffusion reportedly has a million users just a month after its release, and at least that many people are using DALL-E 2.

For about 60 years, health authorities in the United States have been championing a routine for at least some sector of the public: a yearly flu shot. That recommendation now applies to every American over the age of six months, and for many of us, flu vaccines have become a fixture of fall.

The logic of that timeline seems solid enough. A shot in the autumn preps the body for each winter’s circulating viral strains. But years into researching flu immunity, experts have yet to reach a consensus on the optimal time to receive the vaccine—or even the number of injections that should be doled out.

Each year, a new flu shot recipe debuts in the U.S. sometime around July or August, and according to the CDC the best time for most people to show up for an injection is about now: preferably no sooner than September, ideally no later than the end of October. Many health-care systems require their employees to get the shot in this time frame as well. But those who opt to follow the CDC current guidelines, as I recently did, then mention that fact in a forum frequented by a bunch of experts, as I also recently did, might rapidly hear that they’ve made a terrible, terrible choice.

Everything’s so smart now. Smartphones, smart speakers, smart lamps, smart plugs, smart doorbells, smart locks, smart thermostats. Smart things are smart not because they have smarts, but because they connect to the internet. Online connectivity allows them to be controlled, either locally or from afar—and in ways both visible and invisible.

The sales pitch for smart devices typically focuses on convenience. Rather than needing to fumble with a physical switch, you can turn a smart bulb on and off from bed (or from Bed Bath & Beyond), for example. A smartphone allows you to do work or doomscroll while you watch television and ignore your children. A smart thermostat allows you to tweak your home’s temperature from wherever. But why?

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.

Vladimir Putin’s massive conscription of Russian men is yet another calamity of his own making.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

• Three conversations with Donald Trump
• Italians didn’t exactly vote for fascism.
• Long COVID has forced a reckoning for one of medicine’s most neglected diseases.

A Darker Motive?

Russia continues to lose in Ukraine. A dramatic Ukrainian counteroffensive, according to President Volodymyr Zelensky, has recaptured about 2,000 square miles of territory and sent Russian forces reeling. Putin, like many authoritarians, relies on an image of personal invulnerability, and so he rightly fears the political risks of military defeat. At home, even his most loyal sycophants are demanding that he do something to stem the losses in Ukraine.