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“When Paul Morphy plays seven games of chess at once and blindfold, when young Colburn gives impromptu solution to a mathematical problem involving fifty-six figures, we are struck with hopeless wonder,” J. Brownlee Brown wrote in 1864. His Atlantic article had a simple headline: “Genius.
Pedro Nunes / Reuters
People look on as a wildfire approaches in Trancoso, Portugal, on August 13, 2025.Patricia De Melo Moreira / AFP / Getty
A man tries to extinguish a wildfire with a tree branch in Trancoso on August 12, 2025.Marcelo Del Pozo / Reuters
A person watches as a helicopter draws water at Atlanterra Beach on August 12, 2025, a day after many locals and tourists were evacuated from Tarifa, Spain, because of wildfires.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s ‘Make America Healthy Again’ movement is taking off in red — and blue — states, even as health experts condemn some of his actions.
Former Colombian President Álvaro Uribe was recently sentenced to 12 years of house arrest after he was found guilty of bribing imprisoned members of paramilitary groups to coax them into retracting damaging testimony exposing Uribe’s ties to U.S.-backed, right-wing paramilitary groups. Uribe was a staunch U.S.
As President Trump threatens to use U.S. special forces against drug cartels abroad, a new book, The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces, reveals some of the most secretive and elite special forces in the Army are heavily involved in narcotrafficking themselves.
A well-connected drug company and Laura Loomer wanted Kennedy ally Vinay Prasad gone. Trump chief of staff Susie Wiles got his job back.
Are the feds really sending in the troops because of “Big Balls”?
It started with a cheese pull.
If you’re seeking the profound, here’s the best way to travel nationally and internationally
Agency Director Susan Monarez tried to soothe staff at a Tuesday meeting, but some employees said the all-hands call was lacking.
Agency employees said HHS’s response has been lackluster.
The Waves also discusses the Riverside Church controversy and the case of Sarah Milov.
What we say matters, especially depending on whom we say it to.
The Waves also discusses the case against Jeffrey Epstein and Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Fleishman Is in Trouble.
Bill Beach said the president’s suggestions that the jobs report was rigged betrayed a misunderstanding in how those numbers are assembled.
The monthly jobs report showed just 73,000 jobs in July, with big reductions to May’s and June’s numbers
Global condemnation is mounting over the assassination of one of the most prominent journalists in Gaza, Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif, along with four of his colleagues at the network and a sixth journalist — the freelance reporter Mohammed al-Khalidi.
The killing of al-Sharif and his colleagues is “really murder,” says Irene Khan, U.N. special rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression. “It is not killing in the context of war.
President Trump secretly signed a directive approving the Pentagon’s use of military force on foreign soil to target Latin American drug cartels, according to a New York Times report. The order gives the Pentagon authority to direct military operations at sea and on foreign soil against cartels designated by the Trump administration to be terrorist organizations.
After announcing the federal takeover of law enforcement in D.C. in the White House briefing room, President Trump painted a grim picture of the capital — including “roving mobs of wild youth” — that contrasts with crime figures showing D.C. reached a 30-year low in violent crime last January.
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Nine years after Canada legalized assisted death—known formally as Medical Assistance in Dying, or MAID—doctors are struggling to keep up with demand, Elaina Plott Calabro reports in a feature for our September issue.
There’s a quiet revolution in how millions of Americans decide what’s real. Trust is slipping away from traditional institutions—media, government, and higher education—and shifting to individual voices online, among them social-media creators. The Reuters Institute reports that this year, for the first time, more Americans will get their news from social and video platforms—including Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, and X—than from traditional outlets.
He’s right that there’s a problem. He’s wrong about what causes and fixes it.
Brian Blase has pushed the GOP to make deeper cuts to the safety-net health program.
Thank goodness the National Guard is being called in. Lawlessness in D.C. is rampant, and someone needs to take a stand!
Stephen Miller was correct to point out that D.C. is awash in crime. Everywhere he looks: criminals. He can barely take three steps without running into one. From the moment he arrives at work in the morning until the second he leaves, one crime after another, piling horrendously high.
In 2013, ahead of a scheduled visit from President Vladimir Putin to the small Russian town of Suzdal, local officials worried that he would be disappointed by the dilapidated buildings. In a modern revival of Grigory Potemkin’s possibly apocryphal deception of Catherine the Great, they slapped exterior wallpaper onto buildings, hoping to hide the decaying concrete behind illustrations of charming village homes. It was intended as a comforting myth to keep Putin happy.
Four and a half years ago, fresh off the success of Operation Warp Speed, mRNA vaccines were widely considered—as President Donald Trump said in December 2020—a “medical miracle.” Last week, the United States government decidedly reversed that stance when Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. canceled nearly half a billion dollars’ worth of grants and contracts for mRNA-vaccine research.
The ruling overturned a district judge’s injunction that had directed the administration to restore the flow of the grants.
