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When I was in high school, my classmates and I marveled at the biting sarcasm of our Spanish teacher. (Shout-out to the peerless Señor Householder.
The question “What is a woman?” has haunted politics on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean for a decade. In Britain, where I live, Prime Minister Keir Starmer has given a range of tortured answers, before eventually settling on “an adult female.” This week, the country’s highest court has endorsed that view.
Interpreting Britain’s flagship civil-rights law, the Equality Act of 2010, the Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that the “concept of sex is binary, a person is either a woman or a man.
This is Atlantic Intelligence, a newsletter in which our writers help you wrap your mind around artificial intelligence and a new machine age. Sign up here.
Earlier this week, The Verge reported that OpenAI is developing its own social network to compete with Meta and X. The product may never see the light of day, but the idea has a definite logic to it. People create data every time they post online, and generative-AI companies need a lot of data to train their products.
The past few days have seen a dramatic escalation in the Trump administration’s brawl with universities in general and with Harvard in particular. According to multiple reports, the IRS has begun planning to revoke the university’s tax-exempt status. Losing exemption from income taxation would be disastrous for Harvard.
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
Art Spiegelman, the artist most famous for his novel Maus, makes comix. No, that’s not a typo, as he explains in an article The Atlantic published last week: Comix have a heritage distinct from the humorous strips found in newspapers. They’re a gleeful blend of art and writing with roots in 1960s counterculture, X-rated cartoons, and the alternative press.
Fatma Hassona, the 25-year-old Palestinian photojournalist and subject of the upcoming documentary film Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, was killed with her family Wednesday by an Israeli missile that targeted her building in northern Gaza. The strike occurred just one day after she learned that the film centered around her life and work had been selected to premiere at the ACID Cannes 2025 film festival. Director Sepideh Farsi remembers Hassona for her talent, integrity and hope.
“These were otherwise healthy school-age children who didn’t have to die.” We speak to the world-renowned pediatrician, virologist and vaccine expert, Dr. Peter Hotez, about the dangerous anti-vaccine agenda of Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Amid a growing number of measles cases in the United States, RFK Jr. has promoted skepticism of the efficacy of the MMR vaccine, which protects against measles, mumps and rubella.
Jillian Berman joins Emily Peck to discuss her new book on our dysfunctional student loans system.
If Americans must work with their hands, we could at least build something we need.
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.
The Trump administration is mulling sharp budget cuts at health agencies.
The secretary said better diagnostics and awareness are responsible for a quarter of the increased rate.
“Medicaid is where most of us think they will go,” he said.
Fired workers and outside experts say the cuts leave the nation more vulnerable to health threats.
The HHS secretary’s remarks shocked staffers at the Food and Drug Administration, prompting some to walk out.
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.
Black Mirror has never been subtle. Charlie Brooker’s famously bleak Netflix sci-fi series has skewered the role of technology in our lives—dating apps, surveillance culture, social media—across its seven seasons; it has shown us how our overreliance on the convenience of the digital world can harm the real one. Black Mirror is also often self-referential to a fault, dotting its episodes with Easter eggs to other installments, building a large shared universe.
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.
Many people who contract measles don’t know right away that they have it. Days after infection, the symptoms can feel like the flu, until the tell-tale blotchy red rash emerges—usually near the hairline at first, later traveling down the biceps, abdomen, thighs, feet, hands.
Since early February, when Vice President J. D. Vance posted on X that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” the United States has been inching nearer and nearer to the moment when the White House directly defies an order of the court. So far, that moment doesn’t appear to have arrived—in part because the Trump administration can’t quite commit to its own authoritarian posturing.
Your gadgets might have gotten pricier. Your stocks might have tanked. But Wilbur Ross says it’s all a part of the plan.
