From the daily newsletter: celebrating the milestone birthday of one of the magazine’s most lucid profile writers.

Hailey Benton Gates, the director of the “military-industrial-complex romantic comedy” “Atropia,” recommends a few books that share a kinship with her new film, about actors working in a fake village where U.S. soldiers train.

The director’s great achievement was placing real people, with real senses of humor, into the fantasies of mass culture.

A drawing that riffs on the latest news and happenings.

A foundational 1956 study of the concept, focussed on a U.F.O. doomsday cult, has been all but debunked by new research.