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Many of us spend our teenage years working tirelessly to avoid becoming our parents. But sooner or later, we discover that we didn’t stray quite as far as we thought.
On a recent episode of Saturday Night Live, the cast member Sarah Sherman dropped by the “Weekend Update” desk in character as the accountant Dawn Altman, the latest in her repertoire of high-strung weirdos. Altman was theoretically there to give one of the co-anchors, Colin Jost, some bad news about his tax returns.
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This week, Donald Trump returned from the first major foreign trip of his second term.
Hollywood trade publications often call attention to how the film industry is in danger: If a hotly anticipated movie bombs at the box office, it’s evidence of people not going to theaters anymore; if a studio shelves a completed film in exchange for a tax write-off, it’s a sign of diminished optimism in cinema both commercially and artistically.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s anti-vaccine activism is not what you’d call subtle. For decades, he has questioned the safety and effectiveness of various childhood vaccines, insisting that some of them cause autism, lying about their ingredients, and dismissing troves of evidence that counter his views. However much he might deny it, Kennedy is “an old-school anti-vaxxer,” Dorit Reiss, an expert in vaccine law at UC Law San Francisco, told me.
One thing you can predict is that the stock market is unpredictable.
The UK has struck a deal with the US to avoid bigger tariffs but keeps the 10% blanket tariff in place.
It had been around since Trump’s first term. Maybe the paper finally had enough.
There’s a simple reason why this deadline never sticks.
Bill Cassidy, the senator who secured Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s promise to protect vaccines, will question the health secretary at a hearing Wednesday.
The move reinstates some employees at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health — which lost more than 90 percent of its workforce.
The Energy and Commerce Committee chair is about to be put to the test.
An internal MAHA battle is breaking out between an HHS employee who co-founded a health care payments company and a CEO of a rival company.
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 crowded contest in the Garden State shows how hard it is to address pocketbook issues.
Earlier, Buffett warned Saturday about the dire global consequences of President Donald Trump’s tariffs.
Trump has blamed shaky economic numbers on his predecessor.
Following its latest round of focus groups, Navigator Research is urging Democrats to proactively push their own economic policies.
Trump’s winning issue is becoming one of his biggest liabilities as multiple polls this week reveal growing disapproval numbers on the economy.
Israel has imposed a complete block on humanitarian aid into Gaza since March 2, with hundreds of trucks with lifesaving aid waiting at the border. Now many of Gaza’s kitchens have closed, and Palestinians face mass starvation as rations run low. We speak with Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University, author of Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine.
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.
You don’t hear a lot of good news these days, and you hear even less good news about crime. In fact, this is a consistent structural problem with crime reporting. When crime is rising, it gets a great deal of attention—following the old newsroom adage that “if it bleeds, it leads.
Forty-six minutes into the Supreme Court’s oral argument in the birthright-citizenship litigation, Solicitor General D. John Sauer got a question he couldn’t answer. Arguing on behalf of the government, Sauer wants the Court to prohibit nationwide injunctions, allowing President Donald Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship—along with many of his other policies—to go into effect.
Doomers thought cities would collapse post-pandemic. The numbers tell a much different story.
Updated at 2:50 p.m. ET on May 16, 2025
Earlier this week in Saudi Arabia, President Donald Trump delivered what the White House billed as a “major address,” which is a long-standing way to signal that a particular speech is meant to lay down a historical marker communicating the president’s values. Or, in this case, the lack thereof. Trump’s message was that, unlike interventionist Americans of the past, he did not take account of democracy or human rights when dealing with foreign states.
Yesterday, during an oral argument spanning nearly two and a half hours, the Supreme Court justices grilled the newly installed Solicitor General D. John Sauer over the Trump administration’s request that it be allowed to enforce a flagrantly unconstitutional executive order ending birthright citizenship. Sauer repeatedly refused to say how the case could be swiftly resolved.
