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.
In 2023, Chris Heath noted in an Atlantic article that Tom Hanks is a curious person. “Hanks is at his most animated when the words coming out of his mouth are something along the lines of ‘I just learned recently why there’s so many covered bridges in America.
Updated at 10:00 a.m. on June 22, 2024
Hours after my Washington Post colleagues and I published the first of several articles in 2017 about the Alabama U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore’s history of pursuing teenage girls, the Republican nominee’s powerful allies launched an elaborate campaign seeking to discredit the story.
The best-known of these efforts was an attempt carried out by the far-right activist group Project Veritas to dupe us into publishing a false story, an operation we exposed.
Summer has only just officially begun, and the world is already sweltering. This week, two counties in northwestern Maine were under their first-ever excessive-heat warning—part of a record-breaking “heat dome” that has settled on the eastern part of the country. Washington, D.C., might hit its first triple-digit high since 2016. Globally, the temperatures this spring have been even more shocking. Last week, the Sonoran Desert hit 125 degrees, the highest recorded temperature in Mexican history.
They run toward Stonehenge in white shirts. Just Stop Oil is emblazoned on the front, marking them as emissaries of a British climate-activism group. The pair—one of them young, the other older—carry twin orange canisters that emit a cloud of what looks like colored smoke (we later learn it’s dyed corn flour). A bystander in a gray coat and baseball hat chases them, screaming, then grabs the man and tries to pull him away from the historic monument in a failing bid to protect it.
Mark Lyons, a senior USDA animal health official, said federal officials are “still working closely to understand the breadth” of the bird flu outbreak in the nation’s dairy herds.
Trump’s closed-door advice represents a gamble not only for him, but for the Republicans in Congress.
Here are three takeaways from POLITICO’s discussion of these topics on Thursday.
Four ways the Supreme Court decision could serve the anti-abortion movement.
The move may signal the beginning of a broad turn on the right against IVF, an issue that many social conservatives see as the “pro-life” movement’s next frontier.
Friday’s good jobs numbers may be a boost. But boosts haven’t yet materialized into political benefits.
The president is getting more micro in his economic sales pitch as the landscape loses its luster.
Friday’s government report showed that last month’s hiring gain was down sharply from the blockbuster increase of 315,000 in March.
Democratic Congressmember Delia Ramirez of Illinois says “big money in politics” is a threat to U.S. democracy, pointing to Jamaal Bowman’s primary race as an example of how deep-pocketed interest groups can impact election contests.
President Joe Biden’s latest executive order on immigration gives legal protections to about half a million undocumented immigrants who are married to American citizens, preventing their deportation and providing a streamlined pathway to citizenship for them and their children. The announcement is being welcomed by immigrant rights groups, but comes just weeks after Biden signed another order giving himself far-reaching power to shut down the U.S. border with Mexico to limit asylum requests.
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.
The mall isn’t what it used to be. But that doesn’t mean it’s dead.
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
Aileen Cannon is who critics feared she was.
This is Atlantic Intelligence, a limited-run series in which our writers help you wrap your mind around artificial intelligence and a new machine age. Sign up here.
Readers of this newsletter have no doubt wondered how the generative-AI wave will affect their lives. Will the bots take your job? Is it all right—you know, ethically—to use ChatGPT to write an email? Should you listen to Google’s searchbot and eat rocks? (No.
Every meal I make begins with a single choice: extra-virgin olive oil or canola? For as long as I’ve cooked, these have been my kitchen workhorses, because they’re versatile, affordable, and—most of all—healthy. Or so I thought.
These days, every trip to the grocery store makes me second-guess myself. Lined up next to the bottles of basics such as canola, vegetable, and corn oil are relatively exotic—and expensive—options: grapeseed oil, pumpkin-seed oil, walnut oil.
The men dominating the Billboard Hot 100 this summer are doing traditional male things: picking fights, playing guitar, bellowing about being saved or sabotaged by the opposite sex. Meanwhile, what are the women of popular music up to? Being brats.
Brat may sound like an insult; Hollywood’s “Brat Pack” certainly didn’t appreciate the term in 1985.
It’s troublingly hot in June, which means the United States is entering the heat-death zone for workers again. We’ve been here before. In San Antonio, on a blisteringly hot June day in 2022, Gabriel Infante, a 24-year-old construction worker, died in his first week on the job, after he entered a state of delirium while laying fiber-optic cable; medics measured his temperature at 109.8 degrees Fahrenheit. That same month, Esteban Chavez Jr.
The new film Green Border, from acclaimed Polish director Agnieszka Holland, dramatizes the humanitarian crisis facing millions of migrants seeking refuge in Europe. It tells the true story of how refugees from the Middle East and Africa became trapped in 2021 at the so-called green border between Poland and Belarus, through the perspectives of refugees, border guards and refugee rights activists.
The Night Won’t End, a new documentary from Al Jazeera English, takes an in-depth look at attacks on civilians by the Israeli military in Gaza and the United States’ role in the war.
Mark Lyons, a senior USDA animal health official, said federal officials are “still working closely to understand the breadth” of the bird flu outbreak in the nation’s dairy herds.
Trump’s closed-door advice represents a gamble not only for him, but for the Republicans in Congress.
Here are three takeaways from POLITICO’s discussion of these topics on Thursday.
Four ways the Supreme Court decision could serve the anti-abortion movement.
The move may signal the beginning of a broad turn on the right against IVF, an issue that many social conservatives see as the “pro-life” movement’s next frontier.
Friday’s good jobs numbers may be a boost. But boosts haven’t yet materialized into political benefits.
The president is getting more micro in his economic sales pitch as the landscape loses its luster.
Friday’s government report showed that last month’s hiring gain was down sharply from the blockbuster increase of 315,000 in March.
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.
Donald Trump’s reported idea to replace the income tax with huge tariffs on imports exposes the hollowness of his populism.
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
The 1970s movie that explains 2020s America
Trump dreams of a swifter death penalty.