Jack Vincent Picone / Fairfax Media / Getty
Delphine Anderson bids farewell to her 6-year-old son Alexis on the first day of school in Australia on February 1, 1989.Andrew Craft / USA Today Network / Reuters
Members of the Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity cheer on students as they arrive for the first day of school at Margaret Willis Elementary School in Fayetteville, North Carolina, on Monday, August 25, 2025.Ronald W.

Last week, a 23-year-old opened fire outside a church at a Minneapolis Catholic school, killing two children and injuring 19 other people before dying by suicide. Just a few hours later, the shooter’s YouTube videos began to circulate online. In one, the shooter shows off an arsenal of weapons and ammunition laid out on a bed. The killer laughs and offers a stream-of-consciousness monologue. “I didn’t ask for life,” they say, the camera focused on the shooter’s vape. “You didn’t ask for death.

The black-and-white video President Donald Trump released yesterday was, in some respects, familiar. The grainy clip, only 30 seconds long and taken from a U.S. aircraft, shows a small boat skipping across the waves, bracketed by crosshairs. The crosshairs move in closer. Seconds later, a missile explodes, engulfing the boat in fire and destroying everything and everyone on board.

This spring, months before the recent dramatic departures from the CDC, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. battled with the agency’s scientists during the very first public-health crisis of his tenure as health secretary. As measles tore through a remote community in West Texas, Kennedy waffled on the vaccine and promoted alternative remedies, such as vitamin A. So the CDC pushed back.

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.
Because the fatal shooting of Ashli Babbitt on January 6, 2021, was caught on camera, what happened isn’t really in doubt.
Babbitt, an Air Force veteran, was part of a crowd that stormed the U.S.

The Atlantic Festival includes Richard Ayoade, Ken Burns, Tom Hanks, Allison Janney, Arvind Krishna, David Letterman, Tekedra Mawakana, and Lt. General H.R. McMaster, plus screenings of The American Revolution, The Diplomat, The Lowdown, Dread Beat an Blood, and Love+War
The Atlantic is announcing new speakers for The Atlantic Festival, happening September 18–20 and located for the first time in New York City.

Derrick Hiebert had planned to stick it out at FEMA. He was an assistant administrator working on hazard mitigation—he specialized in getting communities prepared for disasters—and like many emergency-management experts I’ve spoken with, he thinks that the American approach to administering disasters needed an overhaul, even a radical one. The systems had gotten “clunky over time,” he said. Something needed to change. So Hiebert was open to seeing how President Donald Trump might change it.