Jon M. Chu always knew that the second Wicked film wouldn’t fully resemble the first. The director’s adaptation of the blockbuster musical brought theatergoers back to Oz last year, capturing the fizzy glamour found in the stage show’s first act. The movie was a smash hit, winning two Oscars and entering the words holding space into the cultural lexicon. Yet its sequel, Wicked: For Good, has to translate the musical’s notoriously knotty second act, which weaves the story of L.

Women are ruining the workplace. Before women, of course, the workplace was perfect. It was full of trees. There was no need to labor with your hands. You didn’t have to wear pants, or any form of clothes. Every kind of animal was there. You could just sit around all day and call, “Quiet. Quiet, piggy!” and nobody batted an eye, except for the pigs. It was your job to name them. There were all kinds of fruits, and they were all free, and you could eat approximately 99.

President Donald Trump’s administration has been embroiled in scandal and sloppiness. His own party has defied his political pressure. His senior staff has been beset by infighting. He has sparred with reporters and offered over-the-top praise to an authoritarian with a dire human-rights record. A signature hard-line immigration policy has polled poorly. And Republicans have begun to brace themselves for a disastrous midterm election.
That was 2017. But it’s also 2025.

A bill in Congress demanding the release of the Epstein files now has the official, albeit reluctant, endorsement of the president himself. And so the question naturally arises: If Donald Trump supports the bill calling on the president (i.e., him) to release the files, why not simply … release them?
Trump reportedly hasn’t given his advisers or allies a rationale for why he won’t do so, leaving them to invent reasons of their own.

Updated with new questions at 3 p.m. ET on November 19, 2025.
If I have provided you with any factoids in the course of Atlantic Trivia, I apologize, because a factoid, properly, is not a small, interesting fact. A factoid is a piece of information that looks like a fact but is untrue. Norman Mailer popularized the term in 1973, very intentionally giving it the suffix -oid. Is a humanoid not a creature whose appearance suggests humanity but whose nature belies it? Thus is it with factoid.

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On this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with his thoughts on the recent gifts given to President Donald Trump by the Swiss government.

The literary landscape of the 21st century seems more and more divided when it comes to one particular aspect: plot. Some books have it; others don’t. The have-nots have gotten a lot of critical attention in recent years: Think of novels that read like an extended internal monologue, describing in intimate detail the thoughts, feelings, and impressions of a protagonist.