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.
The teen summer job was falling out of favor, until the funky economy of the past few years turned the trend around.
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
Once again, originalism’s hollow core is revealed.
It’s all catching up to Bibi Netanyahu.
The big new character in Pixar’s Inside Out 2 is Anxiety, which makes sense, given how much pressure was being loaded onto the film before its release. In a Time feature, Pixar’s creative head, Pete Docter, candidly admitted as much: “If this doesn’t do well at the theater, I think it just means we’re going to have to think even more radically about how we run our business.
Julian Assange is not a simple man, for all that people wish otherwise. The WikiLeaks founder is portrayed as a transparency hero, an enemy of the United States, a master tactician, and a thin-skinned narcissist. None of those descriptions quite fits the bill. But whatever you think of him, for the first time in almost 14 years, Assange is set to be a free man.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is showing all the signs of heading for an early election, probably next spring. The leaders of coalition parties are already openly campaigning, Netanyahu’s Likud party is beginning to crack, senior military and civil-service figures are clashing openly with the prime minister, and Netanyahu remains broadly unpopular, despite overall public support for the war.
Democratic New York Governor Kathy Hochul has shocked constituents this month with a surprise decision to cancel New York City’s congestion program plan just weeks before it was set to start. Hochul had previously supported the plan, which would have charged drivers $15 to enter parts of Manhattan in order to fund the city’s public transportation budget.
We discuss the plea deal and release of Julian Assange with Australian journalist Antony Loewenstein, and the reaction in Assange’s home country of Australia to his release and WikiLeaks’s legacy, which he says helped open the door to whistleblowers and leakers in the era of digital journalism. Loewenstein, the author of The Palestine Laboratory, also discusses the state of press freedom in Israel’s war on Gaza.
We discuss the plea deal and release of Julian Assange with press freedom advocate Trevor Timm. “Thankfully, Julian Assange is finally going free today, but the press freedom implications remain to be seen,” says Timm, who explains the U.S. espionage case against Assange, which was opened under the Trump administration and continued under Biden. Timm expresses disappointment that Biden chose to continue prosecuting Assange rather than demonstrating his stated support of press freedom.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been freed from Belmarsh Prison in London, where he has been incarcerated for the past five years, after accepting a plea deal with U.S. prosecutors. After a decade-plus of legal challenges, Assange will plead guilty to a single felony count of illegally obtaining and disclosing national security material for publishing classified documents detailing U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan on WikiLeaks.
Vivek Murthy hopes the growing number of victims, both direct and indirect, will persuade Congress to do more.
Mark Lyons, a senior USDA animal health official, said federal officials are “still working closely to understand the breadth” of the bird flu outbreak in the nation’s dairy herds.
Trump’s closed-door advice represents a gamble not only for him, but for the Republicans in Congress.
Here are three takeaways from POLITICO’s discussion of these topics on Thursday.
Four ways the Supreme Court decision could serve the anti-abortion movement.
Friday’s good jobs numbers may be a boost. But boosts haven’t yet materialized into political benefits.
The president is getting more micro in his economic sales pitch as the landscape loses its luster.
Friday’s government report showed that last month’s hiring gain was down sharply from the blockbuster increase of 315,000 in March.
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.
The pro-life movement may have won the battle two years ago today, but they’re losing the war—and turning an entire generation away from their cause.
Over the past two years, a simple but baffling request has preceded most of my encounters with medical professionals: “Rate your pain on a scale of zero to 10.”
I trained as a physician and have asked patients the very same question thousands of times, so I think hard about how to quantify the sum of the sore hips, the prickly thighs, and the numbing, itchy pain near my left shoulder blade. I pause and then, mostly arbitrarily, choose a number.
Netflix is out with a new delectable documentary series, America’s Sweethearts, about tryouts for the 2023 Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. Why should I, someone who’s never reviewed anything other than a book, be the one to review it? For starters, a sick day had granted me the ability to guzzle it down in a single seven-hour stretch.
Over the weekend, at two campaign events, Donald Trump bragged to audiences about another of his big “ideas,” this one presented to his friend Dana White, the head of the Ultimate Fighting Championship.
We go to Gaza to speak with Palestinian journalist Maha Hussaini after the International Women’s Media Foundation came under fire for rescinding its Courage in Journalism Award to her following a smear campaign. Hussaini is an award-winning journalist and human rights advocate who has extensively documented Israel’s war on Gaza since October, including reporting on the mass displacement of Palestinians while being repeatedly displaced herself.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has announced that the Israeli military plans to shift its focus to Lebanon, from where attacks on Israel by Hezbollah have escalated in recent months. “The Lebanon-Israel border is more dangerous than ever because of the capabilities that Hezbollah has,” says Palestinian American journalist Rami Khouri. He explains how the balance of power has shifted in the region, but warns of the potentially “devastating” effects of a full-scale war in Lebanon.
Democratic Congressmember Ayanna Pressley is a founding member of a congressional task force aiming to stop the right-wing Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025,” the moniker given to a Donald Trump-associated political plan to reduce the power of the federal government and push forward socially conservative policies. Pressley calls Project 2025 an “extreme manifesto” and explains why she has made preventing its coming into fruition a top priority during the 2024 election.
Tuesday is the culmination of the most expensive primary race in U.S. history in New York’s 16th Congressional District. Democratic Congressmember Jamaal Bowman, a former Bronx middle school principal and one of the first to call for a ceasefire in Gaza in October, is being challenged by a former corporate executive, George Latimer, who was encouraged to run by the Democratic Majority for Israel PAC.
Leaders of the coalition say they want to make the procedure more accessible and affordable than ever before.
Mark Lyons, a senior USDA animal health official, said federal officials are “still working closely to understand the breadth” of the bird flu outbreak in the nation’s dairy herds.
Trump’s closed-door advice represents a gamble not only for him, but for the Republicans in Congress.
Here are three takeaways from POLITICO’s discussion of these topics on Thursday.
Four ways the Supreme Court decision could serve the anti-abortion movement.
The move may signal the beginning of a broad turn on the right against IVF, an issue that many social conservatives see as the “pro-life” movement’s next frontier.