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.
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.
The Atlantic is announcing six early-career journalists who have been selected for a yearlong editorial fellowship program: Laney Crawley, Catherine Goodman, Nora Lowe, Jack Rodriquez-Vars, Jacob Smollen, and Katherine Weyback. This is The Atlantic’s first class of fellows since 2020; the six joining next month were selected from a pool of more than 1,300 applicants.
There is, for me, an out-of-time quality to the recent string of crazy, wonderful Knicks playoff games. I find myself lying awake night after night reviewing jump shots made, fouls committed, and shots blocked, always anxious for what lies ahead. Half a century ago, this routine had a certain age-appropriate insanity to it. Now, though, I’m on the distinctly long side of middle age, yet here I am, fitfully trying to sleep and clearing my calendar for each game night as if for a devotional event.
Philosophy has long suffered an unfortunate reputation as pedantic and abstruse. In one of the most prominent debates of the 20th century, philosophers spent a great deal of energy arguing over what the means. Paul Graham, the legendary tech investor, studied philosophy as a college student, which seemed “an impressively impractical thing to do,” as he later wrote. “Sort of like slashing holes in your clothes or putting a safety pin through your ear.
We continue our coverage of the fallout from the dropped federal case against the “Broadview 6,” six people who attended a protest outside Chicago’s Broadview ICE jail in September. They were later indicted for conspiracy to impede a federal agent, despite many not having met prior to appearing together in court.
Calls are growing for the interim U.S. attorney in Chicago, Andrew Boutros, to resign over his handling of the “Broadview 6” case — six individuals charged with federal crimes for protesting outside Chicago’s Broadview ICE jail in September. The remaining charges against four of the Broadview 6 were recently dismissed after the case collapsed in court due to widespread prosecutorial misconduct.
In “yet another deeply alarming appointment,” President Donald Trump has picked major Trump campaign donor Bill Pulte to replace former Congressmember Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, the nation’s top spy chief who reports directly to the president. Pulte is “not somebody who has any of the requisite experience for this incredibly important office,” says Matt Platkin, a former attorney general for New Jersey.
After widespread bipartisan outcry, the Justice Department says it is permanently abandoning plans for a $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund. Widely branded as a “slush fund,” it was expected to reward President Donald Trump’s supporters, including those who attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021. The fund was announced in May as part of a settlement in Trump’s personal lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his tax data.
The new EV from the iconic Italian sportscar maker is so underwhelming it had to be memed.
Author David Epstein breaks down the powerful effect of limitations.
Donald Trump’s investment portfolio’s frenzied stock trading is highly unusual to say the least.
The new Fed Chair is inheriting an inflation conundrum: appease Trump or hold out on rates?
The health secretary appeared at a Wisconsin dairy farm with embattled Rep. Derrick Van Orden.
States dealing with budget shortfalls are facing tens of millions of dollars in new costs ahead of the federal Jan. 1 deadline.
The Trump administration has implemented some of the United States’ most stringent travel restrictions for infectious disease ever.
Tim Sheehy’s request comes after a monkey with Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever bit a researcher at the Rocky Mountain Laboratories.
Outward’s hosts sit down with the host and co-creator of When We All Get to Heaven.
The neighborhood changes, the church moves, people forget and remember “the AIDS years,” but AIDS isn’t over.
The AIDS cocktail opens new possibilities. And MCC San Francisco tries to use the experience of AIDS to make bigger social change.
The church’s minister gets sick and everyone knows it.
The church’s “it couple” faces AIDS, caregiving, and loss as part of a pair, part of families, and part of a community.
“We have to take care of ourselves because we can’t rely on one foreign partner,” Mark Carney said in a video address. “We can’t control the disruption coming from our neighbors.
A federal jury last week convicted three people on felony conspiracy charges over their involvement in an anti-ICE protest in Spokane, Washington, last June. The “Spokane Three” are awaiting sentencing and face up to six years in prison for conspiracy to impede or injure ICE officers. They had attempted to block the transfer of a group of detained immigrants by sitting in front of a bus.
Employed at a National Institutes of Health lab in Montana, the two allegedly brought deactivated virus from the Republic of the Congo without a permit.
For months now, the White House has hinted that it may try to rein in the AI industry. Just two weeks ago, the nation’s top tech executives—including Sam Altman and Dario Amodei—were invited to attend a ceremony for the signing of a long-anticipated executive order on AI. But just hours before the ceremony, Donald Trump scrapped it. America is leading the world in the AI race, the president told reporters at the time, “and I don’t want to do anything that’s going to get in the way of that lead.
President Trump’s critics would have you believe that William John Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, is not qualified to serve as the director of national intelligence, the job that Trump gave him on an acting basis this morning.
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.
A few years ago, Ken Schumacher was working for a technology company. Part of his job involved assessing potential hires: hopping on a Zoom call, giving an applicant an engineering test (kind of like a crossword puzzle with code instead of words), and going on “mute for an hour” as the applicant struggled through it.
Except many of the candidates weren’t struggling. The firm’s exercises were getting posted on sites such as Glassdoor.
On the northwestern shore of Africa, some 150 miles south of the Canary Islands, the coastline slightly bulges in a pimple known as Cape Bojador. For Europeans in the early 15th century, Cape Bojador marked the boundary between the known and the unknown. North of the cape was civilization and the cities of light. South were the mystical lands of Africa and the Mare Tenebrosum, the “Sea of Darkness.
FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez explains the administration’s First Amendment shakedown—and how ABC is fighting back.