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.
Good news: If you’re worried you might be a phony, there’s a good chance you’re the real deal. “The true phony is convinced they’re not one,” Arthur C. Brooks explained earlier this summer.
Since at least the 11th century in Europe, when troubadour musicians crisscrossed the continent singing songs of love and chivalry, one thing has remained fairly consistent: The artist travels; the audience stays put. Of course, there have been exceptions, in which fans made pilgrimages to see their favorite musicians live.
Trump’s brand new Fed appointee is already going against the grain.
Gary Rivlin joins Elizabeth Spiers to discuss his book on Silicon Valley’s race to cash in on AI.
ICE raided a new Hyundai plant in Georgia detaining hundreds of workers from South Korea.
Layoffs are spreading and unemployment is rising—and one kind of worker is being hit the hardest.
It’s called modular construction, and it could allow apartments to be constructed within a week.
A trillion dollars will come in handy if you want to colonize Mars.
The panel voted to recommend against the combined measles, mumps, rubella and chickenpox vaccine for young children. It postponed to Friday a vote on a recommendation to drop universal newborn vaccination for hepatitis B.
Make America Healthy Again groups are planning rallies from coast to coast in defense of the health secretary after some lawmakers denounced him.
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 survey from the liberal-leaning group Somos Votantes shows Latino voters are souring on the president.
Privately, aides concede voters remain uneasy about prices but argue their policies are beginning to turn things around.
Bill Beach said the president’s suggestions that the jobs report was rigged betrayed a misunderstanding in how those numbers are assembled.
The monthly jobs report showed just 73,000 jobs in July, with big reductions to May’s and June’s numbers
A powerful new documentary produced by Fault Lines on Al Jazeera English tells the story of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, the Palestinian pediatrician and director of the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza whom Israel has detained with virtually no contact to the outside world for almost nine months.
We speak with the secretary general of Amnesty International about the human rights group’s new report on the “global political economy enabling Israel’s genocide, occupation and apartheid” against Palestinians. Agnès Callamard says Israel’s “24 months of genocide” since October 2023 would not be possible without international support and the continued supplying of Israel’s war machine by major arms makers, technology firms and other companies. The report names the U.S.
The health secretary’s CDC panel wants to stop recommending Covid vaccines but left bigger debates unresolved.
As far as sticker price goes, the recommended vaccines for kids in the United States do not come cheap. The hepatitis-B shot, given within the first hours of life, can be purchased for about $30. The rotavirus vaccine costs $102 to $147 a dose. A full course of the vaccine that protects against pneumonia and meningitis runs about $1,000.
Virtually all children receive these shots for free.
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.
When a person is naturalized as a U.S. citizen, they receive not just a new citizenship but also typically a few other objects: an American flag, a copy of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and a greeting from the president.
After a deadlock, the vaccine panel voted not to advise states to require a prescription for Covid shots.
Robert Redford ruled the golden-boy category, whether he was twirling a Colt revolver or directing a camera’s glance. He sure looked like one of life’s winners. As others have pointed out in their remembrances of the actor and director, he was a “quintessential leading man” who possessed “near-iconographic physical beauty.” But the sheen was slippery, as he was well aware.
Sarah Topol is the winner of the 22nd annual Michael Kelly Award for “The Deserter: An Epic Story of Love and War,” published last year by The New York Times Magazine. Topol’s moving, five-part feature is about a combat officer who deserted from the Russian army and, together with his wife, defected to the West; Topol also spoke with 18 other Russian defectors for her reporting.
The award was announced this morning at the 16th annual Atlantic Festival in New York City.
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books.
Book publishing has, let’s say, a complicated relationship with artificial intelligence. Earlier this month, Anthropic settled a lawsuit brought by authors and publishers, agreeing to pay $1.5 billion after training its chatbot, Claude, on pirated text; hundreds of such copyright lawsuits against data-scraping tech companies are still making their way through the courts.
The panel also revisited a Thursday vote related to coverage for a different vaccine.
Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman sat down with longtime political prisoner and Indigenous activist Leonard Peltier for his first extended television and radio broadcast interview since his release to home confinement in February. Before his commutation by former President Joe Biden, the 81-year-old Peltier spent nearly 50 years behind bars. Peltier has always maintained his innocence for the 1975 killing of two FBI officers.
