Don’t you dare go inside the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts! It’s much too dangerous. They have had murders there for 39 straight years—every night, and some matinees too. And they still haven’t caught the culprit. Nightly murders, with groups of middle schoolers sitting there, applauding. Murders in a hair salon, of all places! Sheer madness.
It is not just the murder capital of Washington. Revolutions happen there, frequently.

The world has watched Russia’s war against Ukraine largely through the movement of its front lines. But behind those lines, Moscow is building something more durable: a hidden state inside Ukraine. Across the Russian-occupied parts of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson, Russian institutions are steadily replacing Ukrainian ones and reshaping the routines of everyday life.
Schools teach Russian curricula.

If you could look down at the Pacific Ocean right now, you’d see three hurricanes spinning in a row, between 15 and 20 degrees north. Furthest east is Polo, an unusually strong hurricane that has been churning off the southern coast of Mexico for nearly a week. To its west, Odalys, once a Category 4 hurricane, is slowly weakening in the open ocean.

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Less than two weeks before October 7, 2023, Egypt’s top spy flew to Israel to deliver a dire warning: Hamas appeared to be mobilizing for a major attack. According to officials who spoke with the Atlantic staff writer Vivian Salama, Cairo’s intelligence chief recommended that the Israeli government offer economic concessions to Hamas in order to avert conflict.

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When, exactly, does middle age begin and end? This past summer, my colleague Julie Beck tried to figure it out. Public opinion didn’t exactly offer a consensus: “In one survey, the median response put middle age as lasting from 40 to 60,” Beck writes.

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Chinese President Xi Jinping arrived in Washington, D.C., this week for a state visit.

Donald Trump’s second term represents a new, bolder version of the “imperial presidency” that many feared half a century ago. Trump prefers a maximalist approach to presidential power. And the Supreme Court, by granting presidents immunity from most prosecution and subduing what were once thought of as independent agencies, has lent him some support.