“We’re so back,” one reporter whispered to another.
All of the chairs in the White House briefing room were filled, and reporters and photographers were crammed into every available nook and cranny. I was standing in the back, squeezed in between a window and a none-too-pleased Secret Service agent.
Shortly after midnight, a few hours after the horrifying collision between an airplane and a helicopter at Reagan National Airport, President Donald Trump felt the time was right for a shocked nation to hear his insights into the tragedy. “It is a CLEAR NIGHT, the lights on the plane were blazing, why didn’t the helicopter go up or down, or turn,” he wrote on Truth Social. “Why didn’t the control tower tell the helicopter what to do instead of asking if they saw the plane.
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.
“Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain,” Nicholas Carr wrote in 2008, “remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think.
In a Massachusetts cellar in 1873, Lydia Pinkham first brewed the elixir that would make her famous. The dirt-brown liquid, made from herbs including black cohosh and pleurisy root, contained somewhere between 18 and 22 percent alcohol—meant as a preservative, of course. Within a couple of years, Pinkham was selling her tonic at $1 a bottle to treat “women’s weaknesses.” Got the blues? How about inflammation, falling of the womb, or painful menstruation? Lydia E.
We speak with Palestinian writer and analyst Muhammad Shehada about the ceasefire in Gaza, which has allowed half a million displaced people to return to what’s left of their homes in the north of the territory, as Israel’s ban on UNRWA goes into effect. Hamas militants released another three Israeli captives Thursday, as well as five Thai nationals, all of whom were taken to Gaza during the October 7, 2023, attack.
Rescue workers in Washington, D.C., have launched a massive recovery operation in the Potomac River after a regional passenger jet and an Army Black Hawk helicopter collided midair late Wednesday, with both aircraft crashing into the water. American Airlines Flight 5342 had 60 passengers and four crew members on board and was en route to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport from Wichita, Kansas. The Black Hawk helicopter had three soldiers on board conducting a training flight.
We continue our conversation with Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, who responds to President Donald Trump’s freezing of trillions in federal funding this week, which the White House walked back just a day later. Wyden helped pressure the administration to abandon the plan after publicizing how it disrupted Medicaid payments in states across the country. “The credit deserves to go to the whistleblowers who brought it to us,” he says.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, was questioned by lawmakers Tuesday in his confirmation hearing before the Senate Finance Committee, which largely focused on his decades of anti-vaccine activism, as well as his views on abortion and other healthcare issues.
Several states are trying to curtail abortion medication by claiming mifepristone could contaminate drinking water.
The tariffs standoff might just be the start of a very pricey mess.
Well before Donald Trump took office, the country was pivoting to a more punitive approach to homelessness.
Professor Harold Pollack discusses the obscene costs of longterm care, and how you can better prepare for your family’s future
Biden warned of a looming American oligarchy but has that ship already sailed?
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.
Supporters of climate, infrastructure, mortgage, tech, health, veterans’ and other projects expressed alarm as tens of thousands of programs appeared possibly at risk.
Joe Biden’s top economic adviser opens up on harrowing moments from her time in the White House, and what makes her nervous about the Trump agenda.
Miran has called for a sweeping overhaul of the Fed to ensure greater political control over the central bank, including giving the president the power to fire board members at will.
Five weeks after the election, the president took his sharpest swing at Trump’s policy plans.
President Donald Trump intended his flood of executive orders to shock and awe his opponents. But on Monday night, a memo from the Office of Management and Budget instead shocked the Trump White House.
That memo, with its call for a “temporary pause” to all federal-government grants and loans, set off widespread panic and confusion within the federal government and among the millions of individuals and institutions reliant on federal funds.
Put on the spot, a lot of Americans might hesitate over the difference between Medicaid and Medicare. People who aren’t affected by one of these programs, which together enroll about 150 million people in the U.S., don’t generally have a need to be well versed in their intricacies, and the two programs sound quite similar.
Mary Holland, head of Kennedy-founded Children’s Health Defense, spoke to POLITICO after attending his confirmation hearing.
Donald Trump spent decades in business gleefully suing and angrily being sued by his adversaries in civil court. But since winning reelection, he has suddenly posted a remarkable string of legal victories as litigants rush to settle their cases. Mark Zuckerberg is the latest.
The internet is growing more hostile to humans. Google results are stuffed with search-optimized spam, unhelpful advertisements, and AI slop. Amazon has become littered with undifferentiated junk. The state of social media, meanwhile—fractured, disorienting, and prone to boosting all manner of misinformation—can be succinctly described as a cesspool.
It’s with some irony, then, that Reddit has become a reservoir of humanity.
Updated at 4:54 p.m. ET on January 29, 2025.
The great federal-grant freeze of 2025 is over, but don’t expect it to be gone for good.
The Office of Management and Budget, which issued a memo freezing grants on Monday, has revoked it, The Washington Post first reported. The whole thing went so fast that many people may have never had a chance to sort out what was happening.
“You won’t go to work for a drug company after you leave HHS, but you and I both know there’s another way to make money,” Warren said.
