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Recent weeks have seen the introduction of new consumer gadgets whose entire selling point revolves around artificial intelligence.
This weekend, more than 150,000 pastel-wrapped spectators and bettors will descend upon Louisville’s Churchill Downs complex to watch one of America’s greatest competitive spectacles. The 150th running of the Kentucky Derby, headlined by animals whose names (Resilience, Stronghold, Catching Freedom) sound more like Taylor Swift bonus tracks than living creatures, is expected to bring more revenue to the city and venue than ever, with resale tickets reportedly at record highs.
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
Poetry is the art form that most expands my sense of what language can do. Today, so much daily English feels flat or distracted—politicians speak in clichés; friends are distracted in conversation by the tempting dinging of smartphones; TV dialogue and the sentences in books are frequently inelegant.
When Kathleen Walker-Meikle, a historian at the University of Basel, in Switzerland, ponders the Middle Ages, her mind tends to drift not to religious conquest or Viking raids, but to squirrels. Tawny-backed, white-bellied, tufted-eared red squirrels, to be exact. For hundreds of years, society’s elites stitched red-squirrel pelts into luxurious floor-length capes and made the animals pets, cradling them in their lap and commissioning gold collars festooned with pearls.
Friday’s government report showed that last month’s hiring gain was down sharply from the blockbuster increase of 315,000 in March.
Nearly seven months of constant bombardment, siege and obstruction of aid deliveries have annihilated the healthcare system in Gaza. Last week, the Palestinian Health Ministry said that around 600,000 Palestinians in the northern Gaza Strip no longer have access to any kind of healthcare. The World Health Organization has said that Israel is “systematically dismantling” the health system in Gaza. Only 11 hospitals out of 36 hospitals in Gaza are partially functioning.
Democracy Now! speaks with Hala Rharrit, the first State Department diplomat to publicly resign over the Biden administration’s policies backing Israel’s assault and siege of the Gaza Strip. Rharrit is an 18-year career diplomat who served as the Arabic-language spokesperson for the State Department in the region. “I could no longer be a part of the State Department and promote this policy. It’s an inhumane policy.
Federal health officials estimate that roughly 100,000 people enrolled in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program will sign up for subsidized plans through the health insurance marketplace over the next year under the rule.
Dairy cows in nine states are infected and hospitals are looking to the government for guidance.
Anti-abortion and abortion-rights groups fear the Kennedy scion will peel off voters disillusioned with Trump and Biden.
The legislation, which is expected to be soon signed into law by Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs, will preserve access to the procedure for millions of women.
Federal testing and surveillance of the outbreak has so far lagged since initial detection in dairy cows more than a month ago.
Gary Ruskin, founder of U.S. Right to Know, says the government is covering it up.
Lawmakers aren’t willing to meet the president’s budget requests, casting doubt on reaching the program’s ambitious goal.
Biden and Trump are both campaigning on warped economic statistics, cherry-picking weird data from the Covid crisis.
By any measure, it amounted to a strong month of hiring.
The concern is that higher rates are putting pressure on households and businesses looking to borrow, weighing on hiring, investment and the housing market.
Last month’s job growth was up from a revised gain of 229,000 jobs in January.
The president’s team thinks it’s had a historically successful first term, delivering victories on the economy, climate, drug pricing and more. But many Americans aren’t feeling it.
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Updated at 9:47 p.m. ET on May 2, 2024
In a recent interview with Time magazine, Donald Trump once again told Americans what he will do to their system of government.
Milk is defined by its percentages: nonfat, 2 percent, whole. Now there is a different kind of milk percentage to keep in mind. Last week, the FDA reported that 20 percent of the milk it had sampled from retailers across the country contained fragments of bird flu, raising concerns that the virus, which is spreading among animals, might be on its way to sickening humans too.
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.
Before Pauline Kael was Pauline Kael, she was still very much Pauline Kael. When her first essay for The Atlantic ran in November 1964, she had not yet lost it at the movies. She had not yet become Pauline Kael, the vaunted and polarizing film critic for The New Yorker.
For the past couple of weeks, the vortex of campus politics has threatened to suck Joe Biden in. Protesters at colleges have dubbed the president “Genocide Joe” and demanded that he act to stop Israeli actions in Gaza, while conservatives have sought to blame Biden for disorder at colleges and universities.
In 2014, six months before she died, Joan Rivers made a triumphant return to NBC’s The Tonight Show, marking the first time she’d been featured on the show since the 1980s. Regal in black sequins and an obscene amount of emeralds, she carried a doughnut pillow with her as a visual gag and proceeded to reduce Jimmy Fallon to hysterics with jokes about her aging vagina. When Fallon broached the subject of her long absence, she briefly broke character. “I was banned for 26 years,” she said.
Workers around the world rallied Wednesday to mark May Day, with many calling on the labor movement to stand in solidarity with the Palestinian cause. In New York, Democracy Now! spoke to demonstrators who demanded that U.S. unions apply political pressure for a ceasefire in Gaza and to stop their government’s arms trade with Israel. “Workers do have the power to shape the world,” said Palestinian researcher Riya Al’sanah, who was among thousands gathered at a May Day rally in Manhattan.
A new report from Amnesty International finds the sale of U.S.weapons to Israel for use in its indiscriminate assault in Gaza is in violation of U.S. and international law. We speak to Budour Hassan, a Palestinian writer and contributing researcher to the report, who says the U.S. is “complicit in the commission of war crimes” and must “halt all arms transfer to Israel as long as Israel continues to fail to comply with international humanitarian law and international human rights law.
We look at how university administrators have responded to Palestine solidarity protests by students with Frederick Lawrence, former president of Brandeis University and now the CEO of the Phi Beta Kappa Society and a lecturer at Georgetown Law School. Brandeis was founded in 1948 by the American Jewish community in the wake of the Holocaust and named after the first Jewish Supreme Court justice, the celebrated free speech advocate Louis Brandeis.
We get an update from the University of California, Los Angeles, where police in riot gear began dismantling a pro-Palestinian encampment early Thursday, using flashbang grenades, rubber bullets and tear gas, and arresting dozens of students. The raid came just over a day after pro-Israel counterprotesters armed with sticks, metal rods and fireworks attacked students at the encampment. The Real News Network reporter Mel Buer was on the scene during the attack.
Gary Ruskin, founder of U.S. Right to Know, says the government is covering it up.
Lawmakers aren’t willing to meet the president’s budget requests, casting doubt on reaching the program’s ambitious goal.