Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings or watch full episodes here.
Although how the country is going to change after Donald Trump takes office remains uncertain, it’s clear that he will be one of the most powerful—and emboldened—U.S. presidents.
Athletes, coaches, and choreographers are facing the fact that they’ve been unintentionally breaking the law nearly every day.
This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.
In 2019, Sophie Knight reflected on the unusual way she and her husband tried to deal with the imbalance of time spent on home chores: He paid her for housework.
In 1783, George Washington faced a potential mutiny of the Army. Two years after Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, Congress still hadn’t paid American servicemen and was repudiating promised pensions. Alexander Hamilton, then in Congress, encouraged soldiers to rebel, because he thought the pressure would lead Congress to approve the taxing authority he sought. Washington reproached Hamilton in a letter: An army is “a dangerous instrument to play with,” he wrote.
For Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, strength is everything. At home, that means repressing minorities and co-opting the press. Abroad, it means responding to any criticism of New Delhi with anger—and even, it seems, with political assassinations on friendly soil.
On September 18, 2023, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau alleged that the Indian government had killed Hardeep Singh Nijjar in British Columbia over his useless push for Sikh separatism.
He used caps lock, so you know he means it.
It takes work to get empty bottles and cans to the right spot.
The national spare-bedroom supply could be put to better use.
There’s still time to save ourselves from the loneliness remote life ushered in five years ago.
The Stanford University physician and economist, known for opposing Covid-19 lockdowns, has been tapped to lead the $47 billion biomedical research agency.
If his nomination is approved, the longtime associate of Peter Thiel will work alongside Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
A close adviser to Peter Thiel with ties across Silicon Valley, O’Neill reentered the mix in recent days for the No. 2 HHS job.
Makary emerged during the Covid pandemic as a critic of the FDA.
At least three informal advisers connected to the anti-vaccine movement are assisting Kennedy in filling out his staff as he prepares to lead HHS.
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.
A pair of POLITICO|Morning Consult polls, one conducted in the final days of the election and the other conducted after Trump won, show how public opinion has changed.
The final paid messages: Economy, culture wars and character.
Harris has ratcheted up her warnings about the dangers of a second Trump term in recent weeks.
The Democratic nominee isn’t campaigning much on the Biden administration’s bigger, slower-moving policies.
As the war on Gaza spans a second year, we continue our conversation with the acclaimed writer Ta-Nehisi Coates. His new book, The Message, is based in part on his visit last year to Israel and the occupied West Bank, where he says he saw a system of segregation and oppression reminiscent of Jim Crow in the United States. “It was revelatory,” says Coates.
We spend the hour with the acclaimed writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose book The Message features three essays tackling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, book bans and academic freedom, and the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade. The Message is written as a letter to Coates’s students at Howard University, where he is the Sterling Brown Endowed Chair in the English department.
Lakota historian Nick Estes talks about the violent origins of Thanksgiving and his book Our History Is the Future. “This history … is a continuing history of genocide, of settler colonialism and, basically, the founding myths of this country,” says Estes, who is a co-founder of the Indigenous resistance group The Red Nation and a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe.
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Google is taken for granted as a dominant force in the generative-AI market—so it’s easy to forget that, in the initial frenzy following the release of ChatGPT, the search giant was caught flat-footed. The company raced to catch up with OpenAI, and its early models made some basic and highly publicized errors.
Doctors have long taken for granted a devil’s bargain: Relieving intense pain, such as that caused by surgery and traumatic injury, risks inducing the sort of pleasure that could leave patients addicted. Opioids are among the most powerful, if not the most powerful, pain medications ever known, but for many years they have been a source of staggering morbidity and mortality.
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
An alarming phenomenon has sprung up over the past few years: Many students are arriving at college unprepared to read entire books. That’s a broad statement to make, but I spoke with 33 professors at some of the country’s top universities, and over and over, they told me the same story.
