Exhausted and demoralized, Columbia University agreed last night to pay the Trump administration $221 million in exchange for peace. By early next week, it will deposit the first of three installments into the U.S. Treasury, as part of a settlement that ends the government’s investigations into the school’s failure to protect Jewish students from discrimination.
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.
My facial hair arrived without warning. The real kind, not the middle-school variety, greeted me when I was 21 and returning to college after a year off. I found this development annoying: My face had suddenly assigned me the chore of having to shave it very often.
I should’ve read my Charles Dawson Shanly.
One of the more poorly kept secrets of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that many of those involved would prefer to take all the land and have the other side disappear. A 2011 poll found that two-thirds of Palestinians believed that their real goal should not be a two-state solution, but rather using that arrangement as a prelude to establishing “one Palestinian state.” A 2016 survey found that nearly half of Israeli Jews agreed that “Arabs should be expelled or transferred from Israel.
In a landmark decision, the International Court of Justice found that polluting countries are now legally obligated to address global warming. In a unanimous ruling by a panel of 15 judges, the court said high-emitting countries do have legal obligations under international law to address the “urgent and existential threat” of climate change.
The BBC, Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse have all called on Israel to allow journalists in and out of Gaza as starvation there becomes imminent. In a statement, the news outlets said, “We are desperately concerned for our journalists in Gaza, who are increasingly unable to feed themselves and their families.” We speak with Afeef Nessouli, a journalist who just returned from Gaza, where he volunteered as an aid worker.
As Gazans face mass starvation due to Israel’s blockade, more than 100 humanitarian organizations are demanding action to end Israel’s siege of Gaza. Their warning comes as the Palestinian Ministry of Health announced the number of starvation-related deaths in Gaza has climbed to at least 113 people. We go to Gaza City for an update from Mahmoud Alsaqqa, Oxfam’s emergency food security and livelihoods lead.
They’re risky for the president politically—and for your own bank account.
Chronic venous insufficiency is a common condition that can worsen over time.
The letter from President Donald Trump’s doctor details his new vascular diagnosis.
The expiration of shots the Biden administration promised to send comes after President Donald Trump cut deeply into foreign aid.
The health secretary has said repeatedly he wants to provide better care for Native Americans, but he’s yet to reveal how.
The most painful health care provisions in the new Republican law don’t take effect for years, giving lobbyists plenty of time to undo them.
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.
The president’s approval rating had been ticking upward since its biggest drop in April.
The General Services Administration, which oversees government contracting, is leading a review of more than 20,000 consulting agreements for what is “non-essential.
As the federal government begins to implement some $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts called for in President Trump’s budget bill passed by the Republican-led Congress, a new investigative documentary, Life After, examines the moral dilemmas and profit motives surrounding assisted dying that could increasingly confront members of the disabled community. Reid Davenport, who directed the film, notes the “film is not about suicide.
One night in mid-May, some of the Venezuelan migrants deported from the United States to a prison in El Salvador tried to break the locks on their cells with metal rails from their beds. It was a futile gesture of rebellion; no one thought they could escape. Still, punishment was swift. For six consecutive days, the inmates were subjected to lengthy beatings, three inmates told me.
Earlier today, Donald Trump unveiled his administration’s “AI Action Plan”—a document that details, in 23 pages, the president’s “vision of global AI dominance” and offers a road map for America to achieve it. The upshot? AI companies such as OpenAI and Nvidia must be allowed to move as fast as they can.
As extreme heat becomes deadlier, cities are rethinking trees, awnings, and shaded spaces as essential infrastructure.
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On this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with a warning about President Donald Trump’s escalating attacks on press freedom.
About two hours into the Gen Z influencer Andrew Callaghan’s interview with Hunter Biden, I had a moment of piercing clarity: Here is a Democrat you could put on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Joe Biden’s surviving son became MAGA world’s favorite punching bag because of his suspect business dealings in Ukraine, his infamous laptop, and his presidential pardon for tax and gun offenses. But in temperament and vocabulary, Hunter is MAGA to the core.
For months, no Republican in either the House or the Senate spoke out more forcefully, or more consistently, against cutting Medicaid than Josh Hawley. As President Donald Trump’s “big beautiful bill” was weaving its way through Congress, Hawley argued repeatedly that stripping health insurance from the poorest Americans would be “morally wrong and politically suicidal” for a party that, in the Trump era, has relied on millions of votes from people who receive government assistance.
The top-ranked show on late-night television, CBS’s The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, has been canceled, just days after Colbert skewered Paramount, the parent company of CBS, for settling a lawsuit brought by President Donald Trump. The lawsuit accused another CBS show, 60 Minutes, of biased editing in an interview with Kamala Harris during the 2024 election.
