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 idea that millions of dead Americans are receiving Social Security checks is shocking, and bolsters the argument that the federal bureaucracy needs radical change to combat waste and fraud. There’s one big problem: No evidence exists that it’s true.
This is Atlantic Intelligence, a newsletter in which our writers help you wrap your mind around artificial intelligence and a new machine age. Sign up here.
President Donald Trump’s administration is embracing AI. According to reports, agencies are using the technology to identify places to cut costs, figure out which employees can be terminated, and comb through social-media posts to determine whether student-visa holders may support terror groups.
The automated future just lurched a few steps closer. Over the past few weeks, nearly all of the major AI firms—OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, Amazon, Microsoft, and Perplexity, among others—have announced new products that are focused not on answering questions or making their human users somewhat more efficient, but on completing tasks themselves.
At his confirmation hearing to run Medicaid, Oz brushed off Democrats’ concerns about cuts Republicans are planning.
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
Not long after COVID lockdowns began in the U.S. five years ago this week, many readers and writers started to wonder, with a mix of trepidation and curiosity, what the literature about the time period would look like. Half a decade on, we now have at least a small body of work that takes on the pandemic.
Finding someone whose politics you don’t like and using some flimsy excuse to put him in handcuffs is the kind of thing dictators do.
Don’t wear leggings. Do keep your shoes on.
A pair of federal judges have ordered the Trump administration to reinstate thousands of fired federal workers at the departments of Veterans Affairs, Agriculture, Defense, Energy, Interior and Treasury. The White House vowed to fight what it called an “absurd and unconstitutional order.” This comes as the White House and its allies have increasingly targeted judges who rule against the administration.
We speak with the acclaimed Russian American writer M. Gessen, who says Donald Trump has entered his second term prepared to enact his radical Project 2025 agenda, including a crackdown on LGBTQ rights and dissent. Gessen, who has spent decades writing about authoritarianism at home and abroad, argues that while he was something of an “accidental president” in his first term, “Trump has been transformed by power” and is now increasingly “imperialist” and “totalitarian.
Over 300 protesters with the group Jewish Voice for Peace flooded the lobby of Trump Tower in New York on Thursday wearing red shirts saying “Not in Our Name.” They demanded the immediate release of Mahmoud Khalil and held banners reading “opposing fascism is a Jewish tradition.” About 100 protesters were arrested and face charges of trespassing, obstruction and resisting arrest. Democracy Now! was at the protest.
Neither of these companies needs to have its hand in another industry.
This was supposed to be the college presidents hearing redux. It didn’t work out that way.
The only thing holding this country together is the promise of a little treat, and these tariffs may just take them away.
My quest to understand the 5,600-square-foot architectural curiosity that appeared next door.
The move is likely to tighten the Trump administration’s control over the public health agency.
The workers have until 5 p.m. on Friday to submit a response for the so-called voluntary separation offer.
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 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.
“I hate to predict things like that,” Trump said when pressed about the possibility of a recession during a recorded interview that aired on “Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo.
Trump imposing new tariffs on top of broader policy uncertainty will mean a hit to growth. The question is how large of a hit it will ultimately be.
Lina Khan and her allies tried to remake antitrust law. Trump’s team is likely putting an end to that.
Look for a more emboldened president compared to the Trump of 2017.
As the details of Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest by U.S. immigration agents first emerged this week, attorneys I spoke with were so astonished that they wondered if the government had made a mistake. President Donald Trump and other administration officials had been threatening to punish protesters by taking away student visas, but Khalil was a legal permanent resident with a U.S.-citizen spouse. The Palestinian activist and former Columbia University student hadn’t been charged with a crime.
The effort is part of the Trump administration’s plan to shrink the federal government.
He denounced the European Union as “hostile” and “abusive” while threatening to ratchet up tariffs on some of its most famous goods by 200 percent. He openly mused about annexing Greenland while sitting in the Oval Office across from the head of the military alliance that would be called to defend it. He vowed to escalate a trade war with Canada while threatening its very right to exist as a sovereign nation.
