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The political strategist James Carville once joked that if he ended up being reincarnated, he’d like to come back as the bond market. “You can intimidate everybody,” he said.
Not Scott Bessent.
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Today’s AI agents have become exceptional hackers, and they’re already posing a threat to some of the most important infrastructure in modern life: banks.
In both finance and tech, industry leaders are well aware of the dangers, and they’re gearing up for a fight.
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Gasoline prices have been up all summer, as have jet-fuel prices, as have home-heating-oil prices—but nothing has jumped quite like diesel. The average price for a gallon of diesel in the United States just hit an all-time high of $6.27, almost double what it was in late February.
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The crypto industry has always moved in cycles: booms and busts; bull markets and harsh, unforgiving “winters.” We’re in something of a lull right now: Bitcoin, the original cryptocurrency, is worth about two-thirds of what it was last fall.
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The day before Donald Trump’s second State of the Union address, the former Representative George Santos shared a video of himself saying, in no uncertain terms, that he was “going to be there.” The next day, he didn’t show up.
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Three hundred thousand metric tons of ground beef are on their way to the United States. There’s no easy way to visualize 300,000 metric tons of anything (for context, that’s about 12 times the weight of the Statue of Liberty).
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America’s national debt hit $40 trillion last week. That number certainly feels like something worth panicking over—the mind balks at all the zeros. But although the debt has been in the trillions for decades, not everyone has considered it a problem.
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Cory Mills’s reelection campaign was in trouble before it even began. Washington, D.C., police investigated the Florida representative early last year after a woman alleged that he’d assaulted her; later in 2025, a different woman was granted a restraining order against him.
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Over the past nine years, Donald Trump has returned again and again to the concept of steam power. He loves the way that steam propels fighter jets off the decks of aircraft carriers, and he laments that the Navy has pivoted to electromagnetic launchers in its new ships.
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In January, the Trump administration attempted to fundamentally change the way the United States handles childhood immunizations. Following a memo from the Department of Health and Human Services, the CDC updated its vaccine schedule to recommend that some shots no longer be given to all children.
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Over the past few days, the president has continued his crusade against one of the supposed vandals of the Lincoln Memorial’s Reflecting Pool.
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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.
For Donald Trump, social media is a fundamental component of the presidency. He shares his thoughts freely and constantly; world-shaking announcements that other presidents might have reserved for prime-time speeches, he posts online.
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Back in April, Brooke Rollins, the agriculture secretary, wrote an op-ed celebrating the Trump administration’s efforts to get Americans off food stamps.
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An IMAX-film-camera system looks like the kind of device that could give you an X-ray. Weighing hundreds of pounds, it emits a constant, deafening mechanical roar that must be muted with a large encasement known as a sound blimp.
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Yesterday, President Trump wrote on Truth Social that the United States would become the “GUARDIAN OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT,” blockading Iranian ports and ensuring the safe passage of non-Iranian vessels. And in the spirit of “FAIRNESS,” he added, the U.S. would charge vessels a fee for the trouble.
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Donald Trump summoned the National Guard to Washington, D.C., last August in an attempt to “rescue” the city from “crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse.” Since then, the number of soldiers in the capital has ebbed and flowed as states have lent their own Guardsmen to the cause.
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Twice a day, all across the country, the National Weather Service launches a fleet of latex balloons into the stratosphere to collect what’s known as “upper-air data”—detailed measurements of temperature, humidity, and pressure.
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This week, the Supreme Court handed down the final seven opinions of its term. The rulings paint a complicated picture; some broadly affirm the president’s executive power, and others seem to rebuff his agenda.
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If there’s one thing Donald Trump wants Americans to understand, it’s that he knows how to build.
At a Pennsylvania petrochemical plant in 2019, he told workers, “I was a good builder. I built good. I love building.” Talking to reporters in the spring: “What I do best in life is build.
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OpenAI’s CEO signed a letter in 2023 acknowledging that AI might cause human beings to go extinct. More recently, Anthropic’s CEO said that AI will “test us as a species.
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May was a good month for the American labor market. So was April, and so was March. The economy is once again adding tens of thousands of new jobs across a range of industries—just don’t call it a boom.
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The first thing you should know about the New World screwworm is that it isn’t actually a worm; it’s a fly. At the larva stage, it twists into the flesh of its host, devouring it from within.
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On January 6, 2021, 19-year-old Elias Irizarry was among the members of a violent mob that broke into the U.S. Capitol and attempted to overturn the recent presidential election.
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What’s a party without a little music? This year, the National Mall was meant to host a free summer concert series in celebration of the 250th anniversary of our nation’s founding.
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Late last month, a swarm of songs with near-identical names, lyrics, and melodies started to go viral on streaming platforms across the world.
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For months, Donald Trump has been desperate for Iran to loosen its grip on the Strait of Hormuz. Now he says it’s happening; a deal to reopen the waterway “has been largely negotiated,” per a Truth Social post on Saturday.
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Earlier this year, Nicki Minaj asked her fans to “go out there and make some babies.” Sitting onstage at a D.C. auditorium, the rapper and recent MAGA convert wasn’t just talking about the wonders of parenthood—she was plugging President Trump’s new child-savings accounts.
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Yesterday, the Department of Justice announced plans to settle Donald Trump’s personal lawsuit against the IRS over allegations that it had mishandled his tax information.
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Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy owes his celebrity—and his marriage—to a stint on the 1990s reality show The Real World.