Salman Rushdie has had a price on his head for 33 years. He is a writer who has lived with the fear of being killed for his words. Whatever other opinion one might have about Rushdie and his skills as a novelist or his public persona, this much is true: He has understood what it means to be targeted and hated—burned in effigy—forced to hide and, even in recent years, to continue to look over his shoulder. All because he wrote a book.
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.Everything that crosses a president’s desk is valuable intelligence to our adversaries. Why were boxes of such materials in Donald Trump’s home in Florida?But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
The HHS secretary faces renewed White House criticism over his ability to manage a public health crisis
Almost every social-media platform offers its users an option to privatize their account—a way for people to control who engages with their content, often to avoid the judgment, schadenfreude, bullying, and snark that are ubiquitous online. Many of these options aren’t terribly helpful, though. Facebook seems to constantly adjust its privacy settings, and it can be difficult to tell what information your friends have access to.
It’s not illegal to get an abortion off the Gulf coast or in a van in Colorado, critics and lawyers seem to agree. But other challenges remain.
The executive branch’s system of classification is among the weirdest aspects of the American government, and sometimes it seems as if those best equipped to understand it are people with a background in obscure religious practices—say, Roman Catholic sacramental theology—rather than journalists or lawyers.
We speak to Walden Bello, the longtime Filipino activist and former vice-presidential candidate. He was arrested Monday on “cyber libel” charges, which he says was just a tactic by the new administration to suppress his vocal criticism of them. The arrest took place just weeks after the inauguration of Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the son of the former U.S.-backed dictator. Bello says people are “worried that this is a foretaste of things to come.
A jury in California has convicted a former worker at Twitter of spying for Saudi Arabia by providing the kingdom private information about Saudi dissidents. The spying effort led to the arrest, torture and jailing of Abdulrahman al-Sadhan, who ran an anonymous satirical Twitter account. His sister, Areej al-Sadhan, and the lawyer for the family, Jim Walden, are calling on the Biden administration to push for his release.
One year after the Taliban seized power again in Afghanistan, we look at the new government’s crackdown on women’s rights while millions of Afghans go hungry. We speak to journalist Matthieu Aikins, who visited the capital Kabul for the first time since the U.S. evacuation one year ago. He writes the country is being “kept on humanitarian life support” in his recent article for The New York Times Magazine.
Democrats are widely expected to lose control of one or both chambers in November, and members are aware that today’s vote on the Inflation Reduction Act may be their last chance for some time to enact major reforms to the U.S. health system.
The Biden administration is amid negotiations with several companies to bottle millions of new monkeypox shots. But officials say it could take months for those doses to be ready.
While prices have been stable compared to other sectors, rising costs have squeezed health care providers’ balance sheets.
Providers for intellectually and developmentally disabled struggle to recruit and retain staff amid soaring inflation, pandemic burnout.
Lawmakers introduced a measure mirroring a proposal written by one of the nation’s largest dialysis providers.
As the U.S. central banks raises interest rates, the rest of the world is feeling the squeeze.
Suddenly, overnight, real progress has been teed up for the White House.
Republicans are poised to cast aside all the economic technicalities and bash Democratic candidates up and down the midterm ballot over an economy that is already deeply unpopular with voters in both parties.
Trump posted the request hours after the Justice Department asked a court to unseal the warrant.
“This is not a partisan or political issue. It is a matter of public safety and basic decency,” said a statement by FBI Agents Association President Brian O’Hare.
The bill was also touted as lowering the deficit, but by how much is uncertain.
Since the search by FBI agents at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home on Monday, Trump, the Republican Party, and its media allies—when not viciously demonizing the Department of Justice and the FBI—have insisted that it was a political fishing expedition, and there was nothing to be found beyond mementoes of Trump’s years in the White House. Darn near the makings of a future scrapbook.
After several days of relentless attacks on the FBI from Fox News hosts, Republican partisans, and countless Republican lawmakers, an attack on the FBI field office in Cincinnati, Ohio, today has all the hallmarks of domestic terrorism. Immediately after that attack, U.S.
Attorney General Merrick Garland is making a statement at 2:30 PM ET on Thursday, following days of public silence since the FBI searched Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property on Monday. That search was reportedly for classified documents Trump had taken with him when he left White House, and it has given rise to huge amounts of Republican conspiracy theories, as well as broader public pressure for the Justice Department to offer up information.
The big news yesterday remained Ukrainian’s massively successful attack on a Russian airbase in Crimea, but in the early evening hours an explosion at another airfield Russia’s been relying on for its campaign against Ukraine was reported, and this one’s also a doozy.
At 9 AM Thursday morning, the FBI office in Cincinnati, Ohio, says that an armed man attempted to “breach the Visitor Screening Facility” at their headquarters. An alarm was set off and the suspect then fled the scene. He has reportedly engaged law enforcement personnel in a chase and there has been a lockdown of Clinton County.
As of the writing of this post, the man remains unidentified, as are his motives.
“Garland is playing chess. Donald can only play checkers,” Donald Trump’s niece said.
“We owe you big, man. We owe you big,” Biden told the former “Daily Show” host.
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.In a recent Atlantic article, Xochitl Gonzalez, the author of our Brooklyn, Everywhere newsletter, argues that the sound of gentrification is silence. I called Xochitl to talk about the article and the New York she once knew.
The agency has lifted guidance that led to quarantining of students exposed to, but not infected with, the coronavirus.
The president is terrifying! He has laser eyes, or he has laser eyes and he’s screaming, or he has laser eyes and he’s commanding bolts of lightning, like God. He is drinking Republican tears with a splash of lime. He is eating Mitch McConnell’s head?Although Joe Biden has often been the subject of memes related to his friendship with Barack Obama or his obsession with ice cream, he has lately become a different sort of internet figure, known as “Dark Brandon.