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Americans have two stereotypes of Britain. The first is the cozy, parochial world portrayed in my country’s biggest cultural exports—the “soggy bottoms” of The Great British Baking Show, the boarding-school backdrop of Harry Potter, the aristocratic deference valorized by Downton Abbey.
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.
Travel has a way of making us curious. We wander unfamiliar streets, strike up conversations with strangers, linger in museums, and notice details that we’d otherwise rush past. But that mindset doesn’t need to be reserved for vacations.
Photographs by Klaus Galiano
It was probably inevitable that the Delaney Hall immigration detention center in Newark, New Jersey, would become a battleground in the broader fight over President Trump’s mass-deportation campaign. The privately run jail reopened last year as the only sizable facility of its kind in the New York City metro area, with capacity for 1,000 ICE detainees.
Beth Gardiner explains how we ended up holding the (plastic) bag for Big Oil’s wastefulness.
The rush to build more data centers is driving up electricity costs.
From Chipotle to Chopt, the cyclosporiasis outbreak is causing an implosion of sales—and an explosion of problems elsewhere.
It looks like Bending Spoons’ bet on nostalgia brands like AOL, Vimeo, and Evernote is playing off after its big IPO this week.
A panel of FDA advisers voted this week to broaden access to peptides.
The deferrals are part of a nationwide crackdown on health fraud in government programs.
With drug deaths plummeting, state officials are wary of halting harm reduction initiatives.
The Trump administration said Monday Americans in Congo, where Ebola is spreading, must spend three weeks in a third country before coming home.
John Cornyn, Bill Cassidy and Thom Tillis are leaving the Senate after warring with Trump, but they still can block the president’s appointees.
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.
Filmmaker Juan Carlos Dávila’s new film for PBS, Farmers of the Sea, documents climate change’s threats to the fishing industry and food security in Vieques, Puerto Rico. For islands in the Caribbean, explains Dávila, “we are situated geographically in one of the frontlines of climate change. [We’re] not only facing stronger hurricanes now, [but] we could face food shortages, especially the islands that depend so much on the food that comes from the sea.
After failing to overturn birthright citizenship at the Supreme Court, Republican legislators are turning to new tactics to disenfranchise people born on U.S. soil. Their latest targets are those born to noncitizen or permanent resident parents in U.S. territories like Puerto Rico, where the Supreme Court has said citizenship is granted by statute and full constitutional protections do not apply.
A youth-led protest movement in India is demanding an end to the country’s status quo. Sparked by the leak of national exam questions, tens of thousands of young people have taken to the streets. They are protesting under the banner of the Cockroach Janta (People’s) Party — a new party named to reflect the words of India’s chief justice, who compared unemployed youth to cockroaches and parasites. The movement has only swelled in response to a violent crackdown on protesters.
The status of a newly signed U.S.-Saudi nuclear deal is in question after President Trump made the surprise announcement that the deal is off unless Saudi Arabia normalizes relations with Israel. The deal paves the way for Saudi civil nuclear development, although critics warn that it could lead to the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the politically volatile Middle East.
Suavity is a sorely missed ingredient in the American presidency. The effortless charm of a Roosevelt or a Reagan, a Bush or a Clinton, projected a particular brand of power. Suave means a kind of athletic ease and self-command in difficult, spotlighted circumstances, the assurance that solutions are at hand if only we all hold our composure and act right-headedly.
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.
President Trump weighs escalation of the war with Iran as criticism of the conflict grows. On Washington Week With The Atlantic, panelists joined to discuss some of the frustration from Republican lawmakers, voters, and conservative media.
The only thing anyone can reliably tell you about middle age is that it’s in the middle of life. What’s the middle? Well, it’s after the beginning, and before the end.
Okay, we can do a little better than that: Middle age comes after young adulthood, and before what we used to call “old age” but now might more decorously refer to as “older age” or “late life.” But to get more specific, to figure out when precisely middle age begins and ends, is a daunting challenge.
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.
Over the past two decades, Matt Seaton discovered something about himself: He loves building walls.
In 2010, the National Park Service installed an outdoor exhibit at the President’s House Site near Independence Hall in Philadelphia, which told the stories not just of George Washington but also of those he’d enslaved. One was Ona Judge, who escaped and evaded Washington’s yearslong effort to recapture her. Their names—Judge, Hercules Posey, Christopher Sheels, Austin, Richmond, Giles, Moll, Paris, and Joe—are still carved into a stone wall in huge letters.
Beth Gardiner explains how we ended up holding the (plastic) bag for Big Oil’s wastefulness.
The rush to build more data centers is driving up electricity costs.
From Chipotle to Chopt, the cyclosporiasis outbreak is causing an implosion of sales—and an explosion of problems elsewhere.
It looks like Bending Spoons’ bet on nostalgia brands like AOL, Vimeo, and Evernote is playing off after its big IPO this week.