This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
My favorite essays feel like surprising chemical reactions: Their materials combine into something novel and combustible. The French philosopher Roland Barthes’s 1957 essay “The World of Wrestling,” which examines the “amplification of the tragic masks” in professional (fake) grappling, certainly fits this category.
“Another Wasted Life.” That’s the name of a remarkable new song by the Pulitzer Prize-winning, Grammy-winning artist Rhiannon Giddens. She released a video of the song on October 2 to mark International Wrongful Conviction Day. The song was inspired by Kalief Browder, a Bronx resident who died by suicide in 2015 at the age of 22 after being detained at Rikers Island jail for nearly three years, after being falsely accused at the age of 16 of stealing a backpack.
As part of our Juneteenth special broadcast, we feature our interview with pioneering musical artist Rhiannon Giddens, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her opera Omar, about Omar ibn Said, a Muslim scholar in Africa who was sold into slavery in the 1800s.
We feature a special broadcast marking the Juneteenth federal holiday that commemorates the day in 1865 when enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, learned of their freedom more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. We begin with our 2021 interview with historian Clint Smith, originally aired a day after President Biden signed legislation to make Juneteenth the first new federal holiday since Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
Inflation is on the rise, but the Trump administration doesn’t seem concerned.
Is the industry screwed?
Brendan Greeley offers up the surprising origin story of our favorite currency.
Guest host Mary Childs explains why index funds are bending their rules and giving investors little choice but to opt into the AI boom.
The people now running CBS seem really determined to undermine the best thing going.
The World Professional Association for Transgender Health has a leading role in determining how gender-affirming care is provided.
The health secretary has visited four House districts with toss-up races in the last six weeks.
But inside the health department, workers say the dysfunction of the DOGE era persists.
Chris Klomp is working to boost morale and deliver results at the Health Department after a year of upheaval.
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.
The State Department said the country had failed to address the president’s concerns about treatment of its white citizens.
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.
May was a good month for the American labor market. So was April, and so was March. The economy is once again adding tens of thousands of new jobs across a range of industries—just don’t call it a boom.
In January 1865, not long after his march had reached the sea, General William Tecumseh Sherman held a remarkable meeting in Savannah, Georgia. Along with Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, Sherman spoke with a group of 20 Black ministers about slavery, the Civil War, and the world that was to rise from the ashes of both.
In September 1948, a prosperous Jewish businessman in Iraq was publicly hanged in front of a cheering crowd of 12,000. The following day, close-up images of Shafiq Ades’s broken body ran on the front page of Iraqi newspapers in a triumphant and gruesome spectacle that celebrated the punishment of a “Zionist traitor.” Iraq was losing the war that would create the state of Israel, a humiliation that challenged fantasies of Arab unity and conquest.
Yesterday, Donald Trump admitted that he was being crafty when he elevated J. D. Vance to sell the resolution of the war with Iran. “If it works out, I’m going to take the credit,” Trump said of the peace deal. “If it doesn’t work out, I’m blaming J.D.”
Trump was smirking when he said this, but it was not a joke. Judging by the messaging emanating from across the Republican Party, letting the president claim victory while making the vice president own an obvious defeat is the GOP strategy.
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Last year, Steve Yegge started “suddenly getting pounded by nap attacks in the middle of the day.” Without fail, Yegge—a programmer and tech blogger—would “hit a wall, fall over, and sleep for 90 minutes,” he told me. Like many developers, Yegge no longer writes code by hand; instead, he manages a legion of bots to do that for him. His productivity has skyrocketed, but so too has his exhaustion.
The new documentary Shoot the People profiles the Nigerian British photographer and activist Misan Harriman, the first Black photographer to shoot the cover of British Vogue and an outspoken advocate of Palestinian rights. We speak to Harriman in New York City ahead of the film’s U.S.
The Department of Justice has intervened in a legal case involving the world’s first trillionaire, Elon Musk, asking a Mississippi federal court to toss a lawsuit from the NAACP against Musk’s company xAI, a subsidiary of SpaceX. The NAACP says xAI is violating the Clean Air Act by running dozens of unpermitted gas-burning turbines in majority-Black neighborhoods to fuel its data centers in Memphis, Tennessee.
World leaders are returning home from the annual G7 summit, having failed to address issues such as income inequality, climate change and territorial conflict, while entertaining the wealthy executives of the artificial intelligence and fossil fuel industries.
The United States and Iran have officially signed a memorandum of understanding aimed at ending the war in Iran. The 14-point agreement includes an immediate end to fighting on all fronts including Lebanon, an end to the U.S. naval blockade on Iran and the full resumption of maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.
Inflation is on the rise, but the Trump administration doesn’t seem concerned.
Is the industry screwed?