The national security adviser seemed at a loss.
It fell to Michael Waltz to explain to handpicked members of his staff this month why the president had ordered their dismissal after a meeting with Laura Loomer, the far-right activist who rose to prominence by making incendiary anti-Muslim claims and who last year shared a video that labeled 9/11 an “inside job.”
“He was upset and couldn’t explain it,” a person familiar with Waltz’s reaction told me.

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.
After Donald Trump won in November, I sat down to read all 922 pages of Project 2025. As I write in my new book, what I discovered was more radical and more interesting than I’d expected.

Hong Kong Supermarket looked exactly as it always had. When I visited the store in Manhattan’s Chinatown last week, buckets of live crabs were stacked precariously next to bags of sweet-potato starch and shrink-wrapped boxes of dried shiitake mushrooms. The instant noodles took up two walls, where I quickly found my beloved and gloriously weird cheese-flavored kind.

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.
“Jazz has absorbed whatever was around from the very beginning,” the writer Francis Davis told Wen Stephenson in a 1996 interview. The same might have been said of Davis, who died last week at 78. Nate Chinen, writing for NPR, called Davis “an articulate and gimlet-eyed cultural critic who achieved an eminent stature in jazz.

Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.
I wish you were here, dear,
I wish you were here.
I wish I knew no astronomy
when stars appear
Yes! I thought, as I read these lines from the Russian American poet Joseph Brodsky in a 1989 love poem, “A Song.” There’s something about the ineffable beauty of life that formal knowledge misses. So it seemed to the 25-year-old me, a bohemian musician and hopeless romantic.