We’re joined in our New York studio by +972 Magazine journalist Haggai Matar to discuss the latest developments in Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza. Matar is a former conscientious objector who previously refused to participate in Israel’s mandatory military service during the Second Intifada.
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.
Ronald Reagan, invoking the 17th-century Puritan John Winthrop, once compared America to “a shining city on a hill.” This image of visibility and power, my colleague David Frum writes in a new essay, “imposed extra moral responsibility on the city dwellers.
Updated at 8 p.m. ET on December 4, 2024.
This morning, I had an unsettling experience.
I was invited onto MSNBC’s Morning Joe to talk from a studio in Washington, D.C., about an article I’d written on Trump’s approach to foreign policy. Before getting to the article, I was asked about the nomination of Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense—specifically about an NBC News report that his heavy drinking worried colleagues at Fox News and at the veterans organizations he’d headed.
No federal agency is as hated as the IRS, and perhaps no federal agency deserves so much hate.
The average American spends 13 hours a year completing the agency’s ugly, indecipherable forms. The process is so onerous that Americans fork over $10 billion annually to tax preparers, who nevertheless screw up an estimated 60 percent of their clients’ returns. The IRS audits low-income working families more often than it audits all but the very richest families.
Hunter Biden has lived a troubled life, and faced years in prison—until Sunday, when his father rescued him, issuing a full executive pardon clearing him of all charges. Show me a parent who wouldn’t have done the same. If saving Hunter was politically improper or reputationally risky, it was also done in accordance with the higher and fiercer laws of familial love.
NASA, ESA, STScI, A. Simon, M. H. Wong, J. DePasquale
Day 4 of the 2024 Space Telescope Advent Calendar: A prominent string of alternating storms is visible across the low northern latitudes of Jupiter, forming a “vortex street,” as some planetary astronomers call it. Hubble recently observed this wave pattern of nested cyclones and anticyclones, locked together like alternating gears.
Brian Thompson was fatally shot outside a Midtown hotel.
We look at the world of high-tech surveillance with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ronan Farrow and filmmaker Matthew O’Neill. Their new HBO documentary Surveilled is now available for streaming. Farrow says he became interested in the topic after he was tracked by the Israeli private intelligence firm Black Cube during his reporting on Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein’s sexual abuse.
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol faces impeachment after opposition parties in the country’s National Assembly introduced a motion to force him from office for his shocking declaration of martial law. The conservative Yoon made his announcement in a televised briefing Tuesday evening, accusing the liberal opposition of undermining the state and possibly colluding with North Korea.
In a Maine town, one store was a lifeline—and right in the middle of the deadliest tragedy ever in state history.
These two diverging displays of womanhood online have a common source.
Athletes, coaches, and choreographers are facing the fact that they’ve been unintentionally breaking the law nearly every day.
How we shop has changed so much, thanks to influencers, the internet, the pandemic, and more. In Checking Out, we’ll talk about all of it.
He used caps lock, so you know he means it.
The agency denied Triton Distribution’s application to sell flavored e-liquids.
Trump’s picks to lead the NIH and FDA were critics of health officials and their pandemic policies.
The Stanford University physician and economist, known for opposing Covid-19 lockdowns, has been tapped to lead the $47 billion biomedical research agency.
If his nomination is approved, the longtime associate of Peter Thiel will work alongside Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
A close adviser to Peter Thiel with ties across Silicon Valley, O’Neill reentered the mix in recent days for the No. 2 HHS job.
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.
A pair of POLITICO|Morning Consult polls, one conducted in the final days of the election and the other conducted after Trump won, show how public opinion has changed.
The final paid messages: Economy, culture wars and character.
Harris has ratcheted up her warnings about the dangers of a second Trump term in recent weeks.
The Democratic nominee isn’t campaigning much on the Biden administration’s bigger, slower-moving policies.
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 image is black-and-white, lending it an air of “historical artifact”: A modern-day Donald Trump standing next to Elvis Presley. The president-elect posted the picture on Truth Social last night. Presley is strumming a guitar; Trump is idling in the frame.
