Today's Liberal News

Trump Should Stop Hosting Summits

State visits are a normal and necessary part of diplomacy. National leaders should, from time to time, sit with one another in person and have candid conversations. Summit meetings between the American president and his counterparts from Moscow and Beijing are particularly tricky because of the innately tense relationship between two adversaries.

The Doomed Midterm Strategy Some Republicans Are Trying

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With the midterm elections just 40 days away, Republicans are running hard—many of them away from President Trump.

Why Female Fans Can’t Win

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.
As far as journalism assignments go, Margaret Pratt Allen was handed a fun one: Investigate whether women can be sports fans.

Another Female Democrat Is Mean, Apparently

In February 2024, according to a former staff member who told the story to The New York Times, Representative Mary Peltola, an Alaska Democrat running for the Senate, pushed an aide. As the Times put it in a report published yesterday, Peltola “shoved a male employee in the chest with one hand, causing him to stumble backward.”
You might wonder why the paper of record is reporting this detail.

“Gilded Rage”: Jacob Silverman on How a Radicalized Silicon Valley Shapes Trump’s AI Policies

“One of the features we see in … a lot of the billionaire tech elites is a real kind of anger,” says Jacob Silverman, author of Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley. “They’re angry at what they see as the excesses of woke culture and liberal and lefty politics. … And they’re angry that they don’t have free rein to enact the world they want to enact, and that includes areas like AI.

“Colonial AI”: African Countries Seek Tech Sovereignty But Fear a New Digital Colonialism

Seydina Moussa Ndiaye is a member of the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence, working on a strategy with the African Union to address the risks and benefits of AI for the continent. African countries face the threat of “colonial AI,” says Ndiaye. “When we talk about colonialism historically, that involves the control of resources, the control of knowledge and the control of terms of exchange, and we see that in Africa when we talk about AI.

Should U.N. Help Set Global AI Rules? AI Tech Billionaires Address Security Council

Leaders of top artificial intelligence firms, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, testified to the U.N. Security Council on Wednesday, urging nations to adopt international standards on the development of AI. This comes after AI agents at OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and Google have gone rogue in recent months, hacking into other companies’ corporate systems and, in the case of OpenAI, into the portal of Australia’s public health insurance program.

Nobel Laureate Maria Ressa on Trump’s Media Ban, Regulating AI & the “Tech Coup in Plain Sight”

A federal judge has temporarily blocked President Trump’s ban on CNN, MS NOW and Politico, ordering the administration to restore their White House access for two weeks. CBS, Fox News and NBC had suspended their coverage of President Trump Monday after he expelled CNN from the White House TV press pool. “People are standing up for press freedom,” says Filipino American journalist Maria Ressa, who won the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize.

AI’s Risk to Financial Systems

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.
Today’s AI agents have become exceptional hackers, and they’re already posing a threat to some of the most important infrastructure in modern life: banks.
In both finance and tech, industry leaders are well aware of the dangers, and they’re gearing up for a fight.

China Has No Use for AI Doomerism

AI is everywhere in China. In Hangzhou, humanoid police robots wearing fluorescent-yellow vests patrol tourist hot spots, gently admonishing jaywalkers. The Chinese AI chatbot Doubao is such a popular source of medical advice that citizens have begun to call the service “Doctor Doubao.

My Night at the Reindeer-Sausage Buffet

Food is like dance: a language, but not one you’d want to use in an emergency. Food can say I love you or Congratulations (it helps if you are able to use icing on top of the food to make its message clearer) or even something slightly more subtle: I am proud of the seafood offerings of my region. It cannot say Look out! There is a projectile flying at your head! or Please stop trying to invade Greenland.

The Makings of a Prewar World

Donald Trump offered perhaps the clearest summation yet of his worldview in an otherwise discursive address to the United Nations General Assembly yesterday. Defending the American takeover of Venezuelan oil, he invoked an old maxim: “To the victor belongs the spoils.” He then presented Iran with a choice between accepting his terms and being driven “into hell with no chance of survival.”
These remarks are the latest sign that world politics is entering an era when might makes right.