Earlier this year, the Pentagon swooped in to give Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s Democratic governor, the perfect reason to veto a valuable bill. The proposed Arizona Starter Homes Act sought to legalize smaller dwellings to address the affordability crisis straining the fast-growing state. After the state legislature had already passed the bill, a regional Navy official wrote a letter to Hobbs opposing it. The intervention seemed bizarre, as I noted in an article at the time.

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.
Republican leaders are scrambling to avoid a government shutdown after the House failed to pass a funding bill this week. These events have led to renewed questions about Speaker Mike Johnson’s leadership and his ability to keep his party members in line.

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.
White lies can pop up pretty regularly in our everyday social lives. I myself am a recovering white liar: In my teens and early 20s, I found it much easier to fib that I wasn’t feeling well or that I had a family obligation rather than tell an acquaintance I was just too busy to see them.

A growing number of Americans are pointing to immigration as a top concern heading into the election. But a substantive debate on the issue has become impossible, given that Donald Trump and his vice-presidential candidate, J. D. Vance, are only escalating their use of outright lies and xenophobia in lieu of anything resembling fact-based policy solutions.

Photographs by Iva Sidash
For six years, Vladimir Soldatov has been the custodian of Ukraine’s time. He oversees a laboratory in the city of Kharkiv that contains about a dozen clocks and several distributive devices: gray boxes, humming in gray racks and connected via looping cables, that together create, count, and communicate his country’s seconds. The lab is located within the Institute of Metrology, a cluster of cream-colored buildings now scarred by Russian artillery.

When the Three Mile Island power plant in Pennsylvania was decommissioned in 2019, it heralded the symbolic end of America’s nuclear industry. In 1979, the facility was the site of the worst nuclear disaster in the nation’s history: a partial reactor meltdown that  didn’t release enough radiation to cause detectable harm to people nearby, but still turned Americans against nuclear power and prompted a host of regulations that functionally killed most nuclear build-out for decades.