This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books.
Sometimes the smallest detail can change the way you think about the world. This happened to me in 2009, when I read The Original of Laura—which consists of unedited fragments of Vladimir Nabokov’s unfinished last novel—and noticed that, after 35 years of writing in English, the author had still struggled to spell bicycle.
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People view a light show during a media preview of “Harry Potter: A Forbidden Forest Experience,” at Stanley Park in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, on November 6, 2025. The immersive outdoor event allows visitors to explore a themed trail inspired by the Forbidden Forest from the Harry Potter films.Charlie Riedel / AP
A person walks past a maple tree displaying fall colors on November 7, 2025, in Kansas City, Missouri.
Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani is less than two months away from taking office in New York City. Mamdani’s history-making campaign, grounded in community organizing, propelled the little-known Assembly-member to victory. Candidate Mamdani famously began the campaign polling at just 1% and overcame the intense scrutiny, Islamaphobic attacks, criticism for his support for Palestinian rights, and more.
Democracy Now! speaks to William Hartung about his new book “The Trillion Dollar War Machine” and who profits from the United States’ runaway military spending that fuels foreign wars. Hartung says that U.S. policy is “based on profit” and calls for a rethinking of our foreign entanglements. “We haven’t won a war in this century. We’ve caused immense harm. We’ve spent $8 trillion,” he says.
252 Venezuelan immigrants in the United States were flown to El Salvador in the dead of night and indefinitely imprisoned at the Salvadoran mega-prison CECOT, the Terrorism Confinement Center. The detainees had no ability to communicate to the outside world before they were finally released to Venezuela in a prisoner exchange.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has announced the launch of Operation Southern Spear to target suspected drug traffickers in South America, Central America and the Caribbean. The U.S. now has 15,000 military personnel in the region. Over the past two months the U.S. has blown up at least 20 boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. “80 people have been killed in what are extrajudicial executions under international law,” says Juan Pappier, Americas deputy director at Human Rights Watch.
Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman joins Elizabeth Spiers to discuss her new book The Double Tax: How Women of Color Are Overcharged and Underpaid.
The streaming wars have never been pettier.
Jeff Horwitz breaks down how Meta profits off of the many scammy ads plaguing its platforms.
The president still doesn’t appear to understand a likely reason for Tuesday’s results: the unnecessary, cruelly forced mass hunger unique to the shutdown.
The investment is the latest example of the anti-abortion movement’s resiliency in the face of repeated ballot box losses after Roe v. Wade was overturned.
Republicans say giving health care subsidies as cash to consumers would give Americans more control over their coverage. Critics say it could severely undermine the ACA marketplaces.
A copy of the schedule obtained by POLITICO shows health agencies’ leaders and health tech CEOs speaking at the Wednesday event.
Leaders of the anti-vaccine movement gathering in Texas over the weekend said they want to change America, not just the party.
When a lesbian minister is physically assaulted, the church is galvanized. When it happens again, the city is galvanized.
A gay minister seeks healing with his family and his queer kin, even as he knows he’ll soon die from AIDS.
AIDS helps forge an unlikely friendship between two San Francisco churches from very different neighborhoods with very different views on sexuality.
Two queer religion geeks move to San Francisco. And Easter communion gets real in the age of AIDS.
Troy Perry starts the gay/lesbian Metropolitan Community Church. A young lesbian is a regular at the San Francisco congregation when her friend gets sick.
Democrats running on cost-of-living anxieties outperformed Republicans in Tuesday’s elections by greater-than-expected margins. The president chalked it up to partisan lies.
A recent poll found a majority of Americans feel they’re spending more on groceries than they did a year ago.
The Republican nominee has promised tax cuts and economic growth, but the numbers are fuzzy.
Trump’s strength with Republicans on the economy could prove to be a boon for the GOP.
A survey from the liberal-leaning group Somos Votantes shows Latino voters are souring on the president.
Democracy Now! speaks with the renowned Iranian filmmaker Sepideh Farsi, the director of the new documentary “Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk.” The film is based on regular video calls Farsi made with the Palestinian photojournalist Fatma Hassona in Gaza over the course of a year from April 2024 to April 2025.
Hassona was killed with her family by an Israeli missile that targeted her apartment building in northern Gaza.
Some generations get a nationally televised car chase featuring O. J. Simpson fleeing police in a white Bronco. Others get the communal adrenaline rush of frantically “CTRL-F”-ing a House Oversight Committee trove of Jeffrey Epstein’s emails.
Yesterday, lawmakers released more than 20,000 pages of documents related to Epstein, including thousands of emails between him and his powerful contacts in the government, Silicon Valley, and the British royalty.
Since his return to office, President Donald Trump has missed few chances to flex the power he wields over the nation’s most formidable institutions and its wealthiest people. So when the White House announced that Trump would host the latest in a series of dinners with top business executives, this time including JPMorgan Chase head Jamie Dimon and the chief executive of Nasdaq, reporters in the White House press pool prepared to watch Trump show off.
Nope.
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The bulletins come every few days now. On Tuesday, a U.S. strike in the Caribbean Sea killed four people. On Sunday, two strikes in the Pacific Ocean killed six, and two people died in a November 4 strike. The MO rarely changes: a bellicose announcement from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.
Late in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, one character wonders to another “whether the world is anchored anywhere.” It was a fair question in November 1851, when Moby-Dick was published; it was still an open one in November 1857, when the first issue of The Atlantic Monthly came out. American life felt unmoored.
The window President Donald Trump opened in the Middle East is narrow, but it is real. His intervention helped bring about a cease-fire that many thought impossible. In a region exhausted by endless war, that act alone deserves recognition. But ahead lies a task even more difficult than halting the gunfire: to repair what has been destroyed in Gaza, which is not only infrastructure but trust, both between and among Palestinians and Israelis.