In March of 2002, Milly Dowler, age 13, left her home in Walton-on-Thames for the last time. After she disappeared, her parents called the police. A search began. Blanket news coverage followed. In those days, probably a dozen British tabloids and half a dozen higher-brow broadsheets all chased the same stories. In an effort to beat his newspaper’s rivals, an investigator employed by News of the World, one of those tabloids, hacked into Dowler’s cellphone.

This article originally appeared in Hakai Magazine.
In India, severe water shortages in one part of the country often coincide with acute flooding in another. When these dual tragedies occur, Indians are often left wishing for a way to balance out the inequities—to turn one region’s excess into a salve for the other.
Soon, they may get their wish.

Even in the 1990s, at the peak of free-trade fever in Washington, Congress knew that globalization would be rough on some folks. Opening the economy up to cheap imports from Canada, Mexico, and China was bound to undercut domestic industries and cost many American workers their jobs. On top of that, welfare reform eliminated or sharply cut benefits for many families.

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.
Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained.

I thought it was too late. I did not yet know that the molecules in a body of water go in any direction. Imagine Orlando’s surprise when he wakes up a woman after living decades as a man. Imagine mine when, on the Friday before my 42nd birthday, I inject T for the first time. It’s the color of something that a wasp—not a bee—might make.

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 or watch full episodes here.

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.
In 2023, Chris Heath noted in an Atlantic article that Tom Hanks is a curious person. “Hanks is at his most animated when the words coming out of his mouth are something along the lines of ‘I just learned recently why there’s so many covered bridges in America.

Updated at 10:00 a.m. on June 22, 2024
Hours after my Washington Post colleagues and I published the first of several articles in 2017 about the Alabama U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore’s history of pursuing teenage girls, the Republican nominee’s powerful allies launched an elaborate campaign seeking to discredit the story.
The best-known of these efforts was an attempt carried out by the far-right activist group Project Veritas to dupe us into publishing a false story, an operation we exposed.

Summer has only just officially begun, and the world is already sweltering. This week, two counties in northwestern Maine were under their first-ever excessive-heat warning—part of a record-breaking “heat dome” that has settled on the eastern part of the country. Washington, D.C., might hit its first triple-digit high since 2016. Globally, the temperatures this spring have been even more shocking. Last week, the Sonoran Desert hit 125 degrees, the highest recorded temperature in Mexican history.

They run toward Stonehenge in white shirts. Just Stop Oil is emblazoned on the front, marking them as emissaries of a British climate-activism group. The pair—one of them young, the other older—carry twin orange canisters that emit a cloud of what looks like colored smoke (we later learn it’s dyed corn flour). A bystander in a gray coat and baseball hat chases them, screaming, then grabs the man and tries to pull him away from the historic monument in a failing bid to protect it.