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.
American diplomats are supposed to represent the nation, advocate for the interests and policies of the U.S. government, and stay on generally good terms with the country to which they’re assigned.
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
When did literary fiction get so prudish? my colleague Lily Meyer asked in The Atlantic this week. Although raunchy romances are as popular as they’ve ever been, she writes, many realist novels are “evading sex” between men and women.
The Trump administration wants to tackle fraud. Oz, a famed television host, has put his skills to the task.
Cori Bush is running for Congress again. Bush previously served two terms as a Democratic congressmember for Missouri, until she was unseated in 2024 following a multimillion-dollar attack campaign run by pro-Israel groups. Bush, a community activist who participated in the 2014 Ferguson uprising over the police killing of Michael Brown, was an outspoken critic of Israel in Congress and introduced a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza in October 2023.
The funeral for 56-year-old Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a disabled Rohingya refugee from Burma who was found dead after he was abandoned by Border Patrol agents miles away from his home, was held yesterday in Buffalo, New York. Local reporter J. Dale Shoemaker, who first reported on Shah Alam’s disappearance for the Buffalo news organization Investigative Post, explains what we know about the case.
Federal agents detained a Columbia University student early Thursday after Department of Homeland Security officers allegedly gained access to a university-owned residence by presenting a fake missing person poster of a 5-year-old. As news broke of the student, Ellie Aghayeva, and her detention, students and community members rallied en masse demanding her release and an end to immigration enforcement on campus.
As fallout from the Epstein files continues, we speak with investigative journalist Barry Levine, author of The Spider: Inside the Tangled Web of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. Recordings of the House Oversight depositions of Bill and Hillary Clinton are set to be released today and tomorrow.
When the city needed digging out, it called its emergency shovelers. One Queens resident describes the pay, the crosswalks, and the yellow snow.
No one knows what happened. That explains what’s unfolding just north of Tucson.
Our friends at Planet Money have written a book! Author Alex Mayyasi takes us through a few of the best chapters.
If you’re hoping for grocery prices to go down, I’ve got some bad news.
Mariana van Zeller joins Felix Salmon for a look into the hidden economics of black and gray markets.
Longstanding Republican orthodoxy on free markets and scant details are making Trump’s drug pricing law push difficult.
Supporters of the health secretary’s Make America Healthy Again movement are worried Kennedy is selling out.
The Trump administration is capping student loans, but doctors and dentists opposed to the health secretary will get more than his wellness allies.
Nicole Shanahan has recruited a top screenwriter and enlisted Covid contrarian Jay Bhattacharya.
Outward’s hosts sit down with the host and co-creator of When We All Get to Heaven.
The neighborhood changes, the church moves, people forget and remember “the AIDS years,” but AIDS isn’t over.
The AIDS cocktail opens new possibilities. And MCC San Francisco tries to use the experience of AIDS to make bigger social change.
The church’s minister gets sick and everyone knows it.
The church’s “it couple” faces AIDS, caregiving, and loss as part of a pair, part of families, and part of a community.
The president stopped in Marjorie Taylor Greene’s old district to defend his economic record.
A brief swing through the farm state underscored administration fears about the midterms.
Sixty-one percent of voters told a CNN poll released Friday that they disapprove of the way Trump is handling the economy.
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.
Earlier this week, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth sat down with Dario Amodei, the CEO of the leading AI firm Anthropic, for a conversation about ethics.
Right before armed guards escorted me from the rally and left me on the edge of a Texas-county road, I was informed that I was no longer welcome at an event that I had already attended. For the past hour, I’d watched as Representative Jasmine Crockett riled up her supporters in deep-red Lubbock, where voters were thrilled to receive a visit from the Democratic Senate candidate.
On a winter night last year, shortly after Donald Trump was sworn into office, senior officials at the Department of Homeland Security assembled discreetly at a private home in Washington, D.C., to discuss what they saw as a gathering crisis inside the agency: the relationship between their new boss, Kristi Noem, and Corey Lewandowski, her adviser, enforcer, and rumored boyfriend.
The officials were under enormous pressure.
Two Republican senators told POLITICO they were undecided after Means faced tough questions on her vaccine views at a nomination hearing.
Humanity’s real problem, the great biologist Edward O. Wilson once remarked, is that “we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.” There is no better proof for this aphorism than the American military’s escalating spat with Anthropic, the creator of the artificial-intelligence model Claude.
If the most fervent believers are correct, AI might one day challenge the power and sovereignty of nation-states.
At the age of 30, I became an editor. On my first day, while I was at lunch, a colleague tossed a photocopy of an essay onto my office chair, with a passage underlined. She’d highlighted a quote from a letter that Harold Ross, the founding editor in chief of The New Yorker, wrote to Katharine White, who ran the magazine’s fiction department: “An editor’s life is certainly a life of disappointment.