This past December, I was driving down the Trans-Amazonian Highway, near the city of Santarém, in northern Brazil, when the road disappeared into what I thought was fog. When I got out of the car, though, I realized that the haze was smoke, wafting thick and acrid from the burning forest. The week before, Santarém had registered at 581 on the air-quality index—among the worst ratings in the world.
The secretary said better diagnostics and awareness are responsible for a quarter of the increased rate.
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The Trump administration is working hard to convince the public that its mass-deportation campaign is fully under way. Over the past several weeks, federal agents have seized foreign students off the streets, raided worksites, and shipped detainees to a supermax prison in El Salvador using wartime powers adopted under the John Adams administration.
Harvard University has pushed back as President Trump ramps up his attacks on higher education. After Harvard rejected demands by the Trump administration to eliminate all DEI initiatives and further crack down on Palestinian rights protests, including reporting international students to federal authorities, the Trump administration said it’s freezing $2.2 billion in federal grants and $60 million in contracts to Harvard.
In one of its first major actions under the Trump administration, the Federal Trade Commission is arguing Meta has an illegal monopoly in social media and should be forced to divest Instagram and WhatsApp. CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the stand Monday as the highly anticipated antitrust trial kicked off in Washington, D.C. If Meta loses the trial, it could be forced to sell off those platforms.
The Trump administration is now seeking to deport Columbia University student Mohsen Mahdawi, who is being held in a prison in northwest Vermont. He was detained by Homeland Security agents when he went to an immigration services center to take a civics test that is the final step in the process of becoming a naturalized citizen. Mahdawi moved to Vermont from the West Bank in 2014 and has been a legal permanent resident, or green card holder, since 2015.
If Americans must work with their hands, we could at least build something we need.
This kind of volatility is not business as usual.
“Trump is back!” they screamed, apparently unaware that the tariffs were his idea in the first place.
“Medicaid is where most of us think they will go,” he said.
Fired workers and outside experts say the cuts leave the nation more vulnerable to health threats.
The HHS secretary’s remarks shocked staffers at the Food and Drug Administration, prompting some to walk out.
The National Institutes of Health is the latest agency to break from Trump’s billionaire adviser.
Republicans are seeking billions in savings from the insurance program for low-income people to pay for tax cuts.
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.
The president is foreshadowing deals with multiple trading partners in an apparent effort to quell economic anxiety and prove his tariff plan is working.
Recent polls showed Americans were wary of tariffs, even before the president launched his plan to realign the global trade order.
The president’s sweeping tariff plan has thrown markets into chaos and risks sparking a global trade war.
He also said he isn’t worried about stock market turbulence, following the worst week in the market in two years.
The normally bullish Trump over the weekend declined to rule out the possibility of a full-blown recession as his tariff policies threaten to spark a massive global trade war.
Katy Perry climbed aboard Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin rocketship with a smile on her face. She held a daisy, in tribute to her daughter, Daisy.
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In December, Meet the Press moderator Kristen Welker asked Donald Trump about his threats of revenge during the campaign. He demurred. “I’m not looking to go back into the past. I’m looking to make our country successful,” he said. “Retribution will be through success.
Today The Atlantic is announcing three new staff members: Tyler Austin Harper, who was previously a contributing writer, will become a staff writer, and Jenna Johnson and Dan Zak will both be senior editors. Tyler has written for The Atlantic since 2023; before joining the magazine on staff, he was an associate professor at Bates College. Jenna and Dan both come to The Atlantic from The Washington Post, where they have worked for almost two decades.
The Internal Revenue Service may be America’s least-loved government agency, but it is one of the most important. Without the taxes the IRS collects, the United States would essentially have no funds for key services and no creditworthiness, and the nation would rapidly grind to a halt. Ensuring that everyone pays their fair share is also a key component of the social contract: If the wealthiest can skip their obligations, that weakens any shared commitment to the common good.
“At what precise moment had Peru fucked itself up?” So begins the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa’s 1969 masterpiece, Conversation in the Cathedral. What made the opening so famous and effective was the fact that many countries across Latin America, a landscape of shaky democracies, were asking themselves that question about their homeland. The number of people asking this seems to have grown in recent years all over the world. Perhaps you’ve asked it yourself.
