This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.
Even before the legendary gunslinger Wild Bill Hickok was shot dead holding aces and eights at a Deadwood poker table, the practice of gambling—as a pastime and an enterprise—has been bound up in American identity.
But for as long as some Americans have loved gambling, others have judged it.
Benni Schmidt Pedersen lives on a small farm in Denmark, where it’s quiet and he can hear if anyone is coming down the gravel road to his home. He’s stricken with PTSD from his time as a soldier in Afghanistan, where five members of his 130-person company died in the American-led war against the Taliban.
I called him today to read him a quote from President Trump about America’s NATO allies: “We’ve never needed them,” Trump said in a Fox Business interview at the World Economic Forum, in Davos.
The administration moves, timed around the annual March for Life, may not win back frustrated groups.
Deadly anti-government protests continue to rock Iran in the midst of the country’s spiraling economic crisis. Thousands of civilians are believed to have been shot dead by government forces in the past few weeks. Meanwhile, President Trump continues to threaten military intervention in addition to a harsh new set of economic sanctions that the U.S. introduced this week.
Trump’s deportation machine has touched down in Maine. As the state, home to a significant share of the Somali American community, faces a surge of ICE activity, we’re joined by Safiya Khalid, the first-ever Somali American city councilmember for Lewiston, Maine’s second-largest city. Lewiston’s “streets are completely empty” as residents of all immigration statuses fear harassment and violence from unchecked federal agents.
We speak to Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis about the United States under Donald Trump and its attempts to reshape the post-World War II international consensus.
The disease-fighting alliance will select a new leader next year who could make the case for reuniting.
Joe Salama tells Felix Slamon what money laundering looks like these days and how he fights back.
Prediction markets allow you to bet on just about anything.
The legendary newsroom has become a laughingstock under its new editor in chief.
While generations of fans may have loved “Dilbert,” its creator devolved into something unrecognizable as he embraced the MAGA age.
The president’s feud with the Fed chair has crossed a dangerous line—and it could unravel America’s economy.
Plaintiffs’ lawyers, long Republican adversaries, see a lot to like in Kennedy’s assault on food and pharma.
David Ricks, CEO of the Indiana drugmaker, has cut deals with the president to slash prices and build American. Trump has showered him with praise.
The president pointed the finger at insurers and pharma in calling for price cuts to help stressed voters.
While Republicans believe the plans encourage fraud, Democrats worry that raising premiums will prompt lower-income enrollees to drop coverage.
Amid concerns about the president’s actions, abortion opponents are threatening to redirect or withhold campaign spending and withdraw their volunteer armies in the midterms.
Outward’s hosts sit down with the host and co-creator of When We All Get to Heaven.
The neighborhood changes, the church moves, people forget and remember “the AIDS years,” but AIDS isn’t over.
The AIDS cocktail opens new possibilities. And MCC San Francisco tries to use the experience of AIDS to make bigger social change.
The church’s minister gets sick and everyone knows it.
The church’s “it couple” faces AIDS, caregiving, and loss as part of a pair, part of families, and part of a community.
Sixty-one percent of voters told a CNN poll released Friday that they disapprove of the way Trump is handling the economy.
The vice president fine-tunes Trump’s economic message, but he’s only got so much wiggle room.
Voters who backed Donald Trump in 2024 and swung to Democrats in this year’s Virginia and New Jersey elections did so over economic concerns, according to focus groups conducted by a Democratic pollster and obtained by POLITICO.
In races across the country, Democrats focused on promises to make life more affordable — even as they offered contrasting approaches.
Tensions are escalating between the United States and Europe after President Trump threatened to impose tariffs on eight European allies that oppose his push to take over Greenland, a semiautonomous territory of Denmark. Thousands took part in protests in Greenland and Denmark over the weekend to oppose Trump’s annexation threats.
Julie Rademacher, chair of Uagut, an organization for Greenlanders in Denmark, tells Democracy Now! that Trump’s rhetoric is a threat to everyone.
The U.S. Labor Department is embracing Nazi slogans and tropes, the Pentagon’s research office is deploying neo-Nazi graphic elements in its social-media feeds, and the Department of Homeland Security recently posted lyrics mimicking a popular song by a band with ties to an ethno-nationalist social club.
The official social-media channels of the Trump administration have become unrelenting streams of xenophobic and Nazi-coded messages and imagery.
After several marathon sessions in Room 101 of the Ministry of Trump, the Republican member of Congress was beginning to see the strategic necessity of destroying NATO to add Greenland to the United States. It still came only in flashes. The Republican was strapped to a camp bed surrounded with dials, trying quickly to get his mind right so that he could go back out there and do media and answer the questions about Greenland correctly. He was perspiring heavily, as was his interrogator, O’Brien.
President Trump prosecutes his political opponents; deports immigrants, including some here legally, to foreign prisons without due process; solicits tribute payments from corporations and foreign governments; deploys soldiers to American cities that are not, in fact, in civil-war-level chaos; and puts his name and image on government buildings that quite obviously don’t belong to him.