What is the role of a general in a democracy? Many of today’s military leaders have a very particular answer: Focus on tactics, carry out orders, and otherwise shut up.
This is not what America’s top officers have always done. The country’s most senior generals and admirals are expected to provide unvarnished military counsel to the president and swear an oath to defend the Constitution.
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
Around the time I turned 15, I was convinced that the only person who really got me was a 17-year-old boy named Holden Caulfield. Although Holden is fictional, the protagonist of J. D. Salinger’s classic novel The Catcher in the Rye felt three-dimensional to me.
A new investigation from the BBC is accusing Instagram of running paid ads in India promoting child sexual abuse material. BBC senior correspondent Divya Arya explains how Instagram’s AI-powered review process frequently fails to flag content suggesting illegal and abusive activity, and how the platform’s profit-driven algorithms boost accounts paying to advertise this content.
This month marks the 60th anniversary of the Freedom of Information Act, the landmark government transparency law that has helped reveal and publicize critical information about everything from the Vietnam War to FBI surveillance to CIA torture. For decades, FOIA has played a crucial role in uncovering and rectifying government wrongdoing.
As a rose-tinted wave of progressives and democratic socialists win Democratic primaries across the United States, we take a look at two of the organizations behind this recent slate of successful electoral campaigns: the Democratic Socialists of America and Justice Democrats.
From Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier in New York to Melat Kiros in Colorado to Janeese Lewis George in Washington, D.C.
Nobel Prize winner Alvin Roth explains what we learn when markets are shaped by big ethical questions.
Comcast splits from NBCUniversal as media companies realize bigger isn’t better.
The A.I. boom and the Iran war are driving demand for chips to unprecedented levels—leading to bigger price tags for your gadgets.
Alan Greenspan died this week at the age of 100, but his legacy lives on with the Fed’s current chairman.
In the face of a financial quagmire, why not throw up a few glow sticks?
But the health secretary has allies among some patient advocates and makers of tests that detect disease.
Survival will be tracked for 28 days after starting treatment
Despite the restoration of Medicaid funding for health care services — but not abortions — dozens of closed clinics are not likely to reopen.
Insurers are embracing the health secretary’s Make America Healthy Again movement as the GOP looks to cut health care costs.
The POLITICO Poll shows that the Make America Healthy Again umbrella includes people with opposing ideologies and different politics.
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.
Mitch McConnell has not been seen in public in almost a month. The senator from Kentucky and former majority leader was hospitalized on June 14, and his staff has declined to elaborate, instead recycling the same statement: “The Senator continues to improve, and is working closely with his staff on Kentucky and Senate matters while the Senate is out of session.
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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.
In late March, I started receiving daily texts from the federal government about AI. “🇺🇸AI is changing how we work and live,” one message read. “You might feel curious, skeptical, or unsure—that’s normal.” I had enrolled in an AI-literacy course from the Labor Department created to help workers succeed in the ChatGPT economy.
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.
In the eyes of its many critics, New York City has always been both too American and not American enough. It’s the place where the pursuit of profit curdles into greed—where hustlers, financiers, and real-estate speculators conjure fortunes out of thin air.
It’s time for your scheduled open-heart surgery. Unfortunately, no one has seen or heard from the surgeon in weeks, since the Incident. The nurse says that she spoke with him at length on a wide variety of important subjects and that he had never been more eloquent. “Will he be along shortly?” you ask. “I hired him to perform a specific job, and I would like him to do that.” The nurse is appalled by this disrespect for the doctor’s privacy.
Plans for a luxury resort in an ecologically sensitive area have set off more than a month of protests in Albania, where thousands have taken to the streets to oppose the megaproject backed by Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. The Flamingo Revolution — named for its feared impact on migratory birds — began as an environmental protest but has now turned into anger at the entire political system, threatening to bring down the government of Prime Minister Edi Rama.
The family of Geraldo Lunas Campos is suing over the 55-year-old Cuban immigrant’s death at an ICE detention center in Texas earlier this year, with a local coroner ruling his death a homicide from asphyxia. The Department of Homeland Security said Lunas Campos had attempted suicide, but witnesses said he died after being restrained by multiple guards. The family’s lawsuit names four guards and multiple private companies overseeing the jail.
Immigration and civil rights advocacy groups are demanding an independent investigation into the fatal shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican immigrant and father of three who was killed by ICE agents in Houston on Tuesday morning. Salgado Araujo, who had been living in the United States for nearly 35 years, worked in construction and was starting his day by picking up other workers in Magnolia Park, a historically Latino neighborhood, when ICE agents targeted him.
We speak with political analyst Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, about the latest events in the Middle East. The United States has bombed Iran for multiple days after President Donald Trump declared the ceasefire between the countries to be “over.” Iran says it has retaliated by attacking U.S. military bases and other strategic sites in Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar.
Nobel Prize winner Alvin Roth explains what we learn when markets are shaped by big ethical questions.