The director Alex Garland’s 2024 film, Civil War, was gritty, realistic, and often horrifying to watch, but it was fundamentally a flight of fantasy. One could debate just how fanciful its near-future depiction of America going to war with itself over a president who refused to leave office was, but for all that movie’s intense effort to depict combat realistically, Garland was only imagining the reasons for it.
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Donald Trump’s trade war has unleashed global uncertainty.
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.
Seed oils—think canola, soybean, corn—have long been “maligned by both the crunchy left and the MAHA right,” Rachel Sugar wrote yesterday. Many consider them to be unhealthy, despite no scientific evidence to back up that claim. (Just don’t use a black plastic spatula to spread oil around.
When Donald Trump launched his tariff war on April 2, lawmakers in Europe struggled to understand the strategy. Was it a bluff, or did he really mean to collapse global trade, stock markets, and the Western alliance in one reckless game of 4-D chess?
On April 9, however, the president discovered something that we in the United Kingdom already know: Against the bond market, there is only 2-D chess, and you always lose. Because the Brits have been here before.
This kind of volatility is not business as usual.
“Trump is back!” they screamed, apparently unaware that the tariffs were his idea in the first place.
He’s turning basic groceries into luxury items.
David Enrich joins to discuss his book on the legal war being waged on journalism.
The National Institutes of Health is the latest agency to break from Trump’s billionaire adviser.
Republicans are seeking billions in savings from the insurance program for low-income people to pay for tax cuts.
The looming possibility of slashing Medicaid spending and not extending ACA subsidies has prompted a legislative scramble from Sacramento to Annapolis.
RFK Jr. also said he’s assembling a task force to focus on the issue.
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 president is foreshadowing deals with multiple trading partners in an apparent effort to quell economic anxiety and prove his tariff plan is working.
Recent polls showed Americans were wary of tariffs, even before the president launched his plan to realign the global trade order.
The president’s sweeping tariff plan has thrown markets into chaos and risks sparking a global trade war.
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.
Nearly three months into President Donald Trump’s term, the future of American AI leadership is in jeopardy. Basically any generative-AI product you have used or heard of—ChatGPT, Claude, AlphaFold, Sora—depends on academic work or was built by university-trained researchers in the industry, and frequently both.
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.
I was recently surprised to learn that my wife is still on Facebook. “I’m not,” she replied. “I’m on Facebook Marketplace.”
Facebook Marketplace has emerged as a major planet within the Facebook universe.
If the United States learned any lesson from HIV, it should have been that negligence can be a death sentence. In the early 1980s, the virus’s ravages were treated as “something that happens over there, only to those people,” Juan Michael Porter II, a health journalist and an HIV activist, told me. But the more the virus and the people it most affected were ignored, the worse the epidemic got.
The HHS secretary’s remarks shocked staffers at the Food and Drug Administration, prompting some to walk out.
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
If someone had no relationships—no colleagues to appease, no parents to make proud, no lovers to impress—how might they behave? With those interactions removed, would you be able to glimpse, as Jordan Kisner wrote in our May issue, an “authentic, independent self”? The author Katie Kitamura, whose new novel, Audition, is the subject of Kisner’s essay, isn’t sure.
The first time I booted up the video game Minecraft, in 2011, it was still in its beta-testing infancy—just a hint of the multimedia, kid-friendly powerhouse it’d one day become. I tooled around with total ineptitude in the pixelated forest environment that my avatar had been dumped into, until the sun set and a zombie ate me.
