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.
Sure, NASA is set to reduce its workforce by at least 2,145 employees, most of them senior-level and with expertise that will be extremely hard to replace.
Earlier today, Grok showed me how to tell if someone is a “good scientist,” just from their demographics. For starters, according to a formula devised by Elon Musk’s chatbot, they have to be a white, Asian, or Jewish man.
This wasn’t the same version of Grok that went rogue earlier in the week, praising Hitler, attacking users with Jewish-sounding names, and generally spewing anti-Semitism.
When I was little, I asked God for straight hair. I begged him to persuade my ballet instructor to let me dance en pointe instead of holding me back to give my ankles another year to strengthen. And I prayed that my parents would send me to Camp Mystic.
These are the kinds of things girls think about and talk about with one another, and with God. I grew up in Austin, Texas, and every third girl I knew went to Mystic, the Christian girls’ camp that was devastated by flooding last week.
This story was updated on July 11, 2025, at 4:35 pm ET.
Working in government, especially in national defense or the intelligence community, can be an unsettling business. You must give up a few of your rights and a lot of your privacy in order to remain a trustworthy public servant.
The great joy of a reality dating show is watching couples evolve. You see two strangers meet and make stilted small talk. Then they loosen up, share a first kiss, look at each other with progressively gooey gazes—until they leave the show hand in hand, or one of them breaks it off and starts the process over again with someone else.
Democracy Now! recently interviewed U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk in Geneva, Switzerland. The wide-ranging conversation touched on immigration policy in the United States, climate change around the world, the global fight to preserve human rights and more.
See Part 1 of our conversation with Türk, including his response to Israel’s brutal war on Gaza.
A federal judge in New Hampshire has issued a nationwide injunction against President Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship for children born in the United States since February 20. In a class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of immigrant parents, the ACLU argued that the order would leave children born to undocumented parents “effectively stateless.
Rescue teams in central Texas are still searching for about 160 people who went missing in the catastrophic flash floods on July 4. The official death toll has climbed to at least 121 victims. State policymakers are now in the spotlight, as questions swirl around Texas’s lack of emergency precautions and the climate denialism of Republican political leaders.
Riders don’t want buses to be free. They want something else.
Brian Goldstone on the unrecognized population of full-time workers in America without stable housing.
After the tariff turmoil of months ago, what do we make of the big upswings we’re seeing in the markets?
Chase and Amex are about to spike their annual fees. It’ll drive away customers. That’s the point.
Civil servants told POLITICO they’re anxious and exhausted, but holding out hope their lawyers can still save their jobs.
The CDC says cases have reached nearly 1,300, the most since 1992.
It seeks information on employees who quit or faced discipline during the Biden administration for refusing to execute DEI orders, according to an email obtained by POLITICO.
They say the decision “erodes trust” by pitting providers against federal recommendations that aren’t grounded in evidence.
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’s approval rating had been ticking upward since its biggest drop in April.
The General Services Administration, which oversees government contracting, is leading a review of more than 20,000 consulting agreements for what is “non-essential.
The crowded contest in the Garden State shows how hard it is to address pocketbook issues.
The largest municipal workers’ strike in decades in the city of Philadelphia has ended after 9,000 members of AFSCME District Council 33, who are primarily sanitation workers, walked off the job a week ago. Growing piles of trash on the streets of Philadelphia brought the strike into clear view for city residents. Labor historian Francis Ryan says the workers won “the hearts of a lot of Philadelphians” with a popular social media campaign.
The Trump administration had promised a bombshell. Americans, many of whom had spent years wondering over the unknowns in the Jeffrey Epstein case, would finally get their hands on the secret files that would explain it all.
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.
Japan is the one place in the world that has felt, and personally mourned, the staggering damage of nuclear warfare. The tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have turned the country into a longtime proponent of nuclear disarmament. But that national identity is starting to shift.
Air travelers in America shall no more doff their chukkas, their wedges, their wingtips, their espadrilles, or their Mary Janes, according to a rule-change announced by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Tuesday. It’s been more than two decades since the Transportation Security Administration started putting people’s footwear through its scanners, after a man named Richard Reid tried and failed to detonate his high-top sneakers on a flight to Miami in December 2001.
As The Atlantic continues to expand its editorial team, today it announced the hire of Idrees Kahloon as a staff writer. Idrees is currently the Washington bureau chief of The Economist.
This week, The Atlantic also announced two additional staff writers: Vivian Salama, joining next month from The Wall Street Journal to cover national security and foreign policy; and Tom Bartlett, who began yesterday to cover health and science under the second Trump administration.
The One Big Beautiful Bill is law. Now what?
Not quite six months into his new term, President Donald Trump has fulfilled many of his campaign promises. He has cut taxes, launched trade wars, frustrated longtime international allies, cracked down on border crossings, and slashed the federal government. He steamrolled the opposition, including members of his own party, to push through Congress a far-reaching and expensive piece of legislation that contains nearly his entire domestic agenda.
