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“Summer always overstays its welcome by about a month,” my colleague Elizabeth Bruenig wrote last week. “After the Fourth of July, which has its charms, nothing but a stretch of relentless heat lies ahead, reaching toward Labor Day, and I begin to yearn for fall.

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, watch full episodes here, or listen to the weekly podcast here.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has said that the U.S. could maintain a blockade of Iran “indefinitely.” On Washington Week With The Atlantic, panelists joined to discuss the political consequences of the continued conflict, and more.

The time has come to admit it: The United States has a potty-training problem. In Utah, a law came into effect last year mandating that, with some exceptions, children will not be allowed to enroll in public school without first being toilet trained. Kansas lawmakers introduced a similar bill in January, and at least one district in Florida is considering a policy change that could force kindergartners to stay home until they are out of diapers.

Did Anthony Fauci really get a text from Joan Baez, as his private diary suggests, wishing him a “happy fucking birthday” in the midst of the pandemic? Until now, the answer to that question has remained blessedly unclear. But soon we may have access to the former National Institutes of Health official’s phone. Senator Ron Johnson announced this week that he’d retrieved tens of thousands of messages and hundreds of voicemails from Fauci’s government-issued device and made them fully searchable.

Every dating app, formally or informally, has its thing. Hinge, with its earnest prompts, is wholesome. Tinder, with its quick swipes left or right, is horny. Feeld, with its 30-plus tags for communicating your romantic and sexual desires, is kinky. And Bumble, with its “women message first” rule, was meant from the start to be feminist.
In 2014, Whitney Wolfe Herd launched the platform to solve what she saw as a problem: an epidemic of aggressive men on the apps.

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Last year, I asked The Atlantic’s writers and editors to name a perfect episode of TV, but a perfect finale is especially hard to pull off—and nothing invokes the wrath of fans quite like a bad ending. Here are eight shows that make the most out of their last minutes.

This has been a terrific year for movie theaters. Cinemas are on course for their best financial year since before the coronavirus pandemic, powered by large-scale hits such as The Odyssey and surprise small-budget smashes, particularly Obsession and Backrooms. Fears about the decline of the big-screen experience amid the rise of at-home streaming seem to have begun dissipating.

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
Before his latest book, Marlon James hadn’t written a novel set in Jamaica in more than a decade. In the years following his Booker Prize–winning A Brief History of Seven Killings, the author focused on his Dark Star Trilogy, set in a fantasy universe.

Lintao Zhang / Getty
Szabo Sopov Kristof of Hungary practices ahead of the 2026 IWWF World Cable Wakeboard & Wakeskate Championships at Shunyi Olympic Cable Park on August 9, 2026, in Beijing, China.Nick Wass / AP
Washington Nationals’ Dylan Crews slides into home plate to score on a single by Daylen Lile during the sixth inning of a game against the Cincinnati Reds on August 8, 2026, in Washington, D.C.