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, watch full episodes here, or listen to the weekly podcast here.
This week, The Atlantic reported that Trump officials shared military-attack plans in a Signal group chat and inadvertently included The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg.
Photographs by Kent Nishimura
On the first Sunday of spring, surrounded by row houses and magnolia trees, I came to a horrifying realization: My mom was right. I had been flipped off at least 17 times, called a “motherfucker” (in both English and Spanish), and a “fucking dork.” A woman in a blue sweater stared at me, sighed, and said, “You should be ashamed of yourself.” All of this because I was driving a Tesla Cybertruck.
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.
Trying to get better at relaxing might sound silly. Isn’t the point of relaxing to not work at all? But as Arthur C. Brooks points out in a recent article, “doing leisure well will generate the sort of growth in our well-being that work cannot provide.
At the turn of the 20th century, William Wrigley Jr. was bent on building an empire of gum, and as part of his extensive hustle, he managed to persuade the U.S. Department of War to include his products in soldiers’ rations. His argument—baseless at the time—was that chewing gum had miraculous abilities to quench thirst, stave off hunger, and dissipate nervous tension.
Trump, Musk and the founder of Pirate’s Booty are testing what having authority really means.
As the fast fashion giant declares bankruptcy, we remember what it gave us.
Edward Fishman and Saleha Mohsin join to discuss how the US dollar became a global currency and what that means under Trump.
The cuts sent shockwaves through the department’s sprawling workforce, prompting a scramble among senior agency officials to figure out which employees and policy priorities were affected.
The cuts amount to more than 20 percent of staff.
The State Department sent the list of impacted grants and contracts to Congress, according to a document seen by POLITICO.
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.
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.
“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.
Elon Musk was born in 1971 in Johannesburg, South Africa, and raised in a wealthy family under the country’s racist apartheid laws. Musk’s family history reveals ties to apartheid and neo-Nazi politics. We speak with Chris McGreal, reporter for The Guardian, to understand how Musk’s upbringing shaped his worldview, as well as that of his South African-raised colleague Peter Thiel, a right-wing billionaire who co-founded PayPal alongside Musk.
After spending over a quarter of a billion dollars on Donald Trump’s presidential election campaign, Elon Musk is pouring money into a Supreme Court election in Wisconsin. Musk has spent more than $18 million to support Trump-backed candidate Brad Schimel over liberal Susan Crawford and has been paying Wisconsin voters $100 to help flip the state’s top court.
The departure of Marks leaves the agency without yet another senior regulator.
The departure of Marks leaves the agency without yet another senior regulator.
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.
Americans are feeling anxious about the economy. Amid all the questions—is a recession looming? Will President Trump’s tariffs cause a spike in prices?—one not-so-reassuring prospect exists: You can pay for sandwiches in installments.
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.
This week, OpenAI released an update to GPT-4o, one of the models powering ChatGPT, that allows the program to create high-quality images. I’ve been surprised by how effective the tool is: It follows directions precisely, renders people with the right number of fingers, and is even capable of replacing text in an image with different words.
On March 18, the official White House account on X posted two photographs of Virginia Basora-Gonzalez, a woman who was arrested earlier this month by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The post described her as a “previously deported alien felon convicted of fentanyl trafficking,” and celebrated her capture as a win for the administration. In one photograph, Basora-Gonzalez is shown handcuffed and weeping in a public parking lot.
They expose the fissures in society, between those who have a well-built home, an insurance policy, or somewhere else to go—and those who do not.
Art Kleinschmidt would have a role focused on behavioral health issues.
