Almost one-third of the way through Usher’s performance at this year’s Super Bowl halftime show, Alicia Keys appeared, attached to a billowing red cape and seated at a matching piano. As the Grammys-festooned pop and R&B singer-songwriter gently played the opening arpeggios of one of her biggest hits, 2004’s “If I Ain’t Got You,” something small but unexpected happened.
The Office of Personnel Management, which oversees health insurance for 8 million federal workers and their families at a cost of more than $60 billion a year, has never checked the eligibility of those on its rolls.
GOP Gov. Kay Ivey expects to sign legislation she believes will allow the state’s fertility clinics to reopen soon.
Policymakers were determined to avoid the mistakes of the Great Recession — and they succeeded. But now they are in a mood of “fear and introspection.
“You can’t blame the president when policies go wrong, and then say he’s not responsible if things are going right.
The unemployment rate stayed at 3.7%, just above a half-century low.
The strategy shift focuses on Trump’s tax law and poses a simple question to voters: Whose side are you on?
In an act that has captured the attention of the world, Aaron Bushnell, a 25-year-old active-duty member of the U.S. Air Force, set himself on fire outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington Sunday to protest Israel’s assault on Gaza and U.S. support for the military campaign. Bushnell, who live-streamed the action, said, “I will no longer be complicit in genocide,” before lighting himself on fire and repeatedly shouted “Free Palestine” as he was engulfed in the flames.
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.
A calendar is a site of order.
Earlier this week, I woke up, checked my phone, and noticed that everyone online seemed fixated on the same question: Where is Kate Middleton?
Many of these people were not devoted Royal Family watchers. Rather, they were casual perusers of the internet who’d seen a post, a message-board thread, or an article on the princess of Wales’s recent absence from public life and found themselves hacking through a dense jungle of rumors.
Last Friday, in a bathroom at the Newark airport, I encountered a phrase I hadn’t seen in a long time: Stop the spread. It accompanied an automatic hand-sanitizing station, which groaned weakly when I passed my hand beneath it, dispensing nothing. Presumably set up in the early pandemic, the sign and dispenser had long ago become relics. Basically everyone seemed to ignore them.
The votes in the House and the Senate come nearly two weeks after the state Supreme Court ruled that frozen eggs are children, setting off a national debate about how IVF is performed in the U.S.
The original “Burn Book” from Mean Girls was used to spread rumors and gossip about other girls (and some boys) at North Shore High School. Kara Swisher’s new memoir, Burn Book, tells true stories about men (and some women) who ruled Silicon Valley. In the 1990s, Swisher was a political reporter in Washington, but tuned into the dot-com revolution early and moved to California to cover it.
In Gaza City, at least 104 Palestinian refugees were killed Thursday when Israeli troops opened fire on a crowd waiting for food aid. “This isn’t the first time people have been shot at by Israeli forces while people have been trying to access food,” says the U.N.’s special rapporteur on the right to food, Michael Fakhri, who accuses Israel of the war crime of intentional starvation.
As Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell announces he will step down as the Senate’s Republican leader after 17 years — the longest term in Senate history — we speak with Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley, who says, “McConnell’s legacy has been one of obstruction.” He describes McConnell’s “aggressive” use of the filibuster, the topic of Merkley’s new book, Filibustered!: How to Fix the Broken Senate and Save America, as having “broken the cycle in which government can function.
As over 100 Palestinians are killed by Israeli forces while gathering for food aid in Gaza City, we speak to Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon, who in November became the second of only five U.S. senators to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. In January, he traveled to the Rafah border crossing in Egypt to witness the system of humanitarian aid deliveries, which he described on the Senate floor as a “complicated, bizarre inspection process.” Merkley is now calling for the U.S.
The Alabama Supreme Court ruling that granted legal personhood to frozen embryos puts a new spotlight on states with laws that confer rights on fetuses from the moment of fertilization.
GOP Gov. Kay Ivey expects to sign legislation she believes will allow the state’s fertility clinics to reopen soon.
At the same time that they are professing support for IVF, dozens of congressional Republicans have signed onto so-called personhood legislation.
Policymakers were determined to avoid the mistakes of the Great Recession — and they succeeded. But now they are in a mood of “fear and introspection.
“You can’t blame the president when policies go wrong, and then say he’s not responsible if things are going right.
The unemployment rate stayed at 3.7%, just above a half-century low.
The strategy shift focuses on Trump’s tax law and poses a simple question to voters: Whose side are you on?
On his 90th birthday, the legendary consumer advocate, corporate critic and four-time presidential candidate Ralph Nader joins Democracy Now! for an in-depth conversation about U.S. democracy and why “Congress is a weapon of mass destruction.” He says lawmakers have shredded the country’s social safety net, refused to rein in the U.S. war machine, allowed white-collar crime to go unpunished, failed to enforce tax fairness and more.
It has been two years since Russia invaded Ukraine, sparking a brutal war in which tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians have died. With Ukraine running low on both weapons and new recruits, and with more U.S. funding stalled in Congress, we host a discussion on the future of the conflict with peace activist Medea Benjamin of CodePink and Oberlin professor Stephen Crowley, an expert on Russian and Eastern European politics.
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.
At what point does a “long-shot candidacy” tip into a pure vanity spectacle? Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota refuses to suspend his Democratic-primary campaign against President Joe Biden.
Dour, somber Mitch McConnell was gleeful, if such a thing can be imagined. Surveying the aftermath of the January 6 riot, the longtime Kentucky senator concluded that Donald Trump was finished. “I feel exhilarated by the fact that this fellow finally, totally discredited himself,” he told a reporter. “He put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.”
That was a little more than three years ago. Today, McConnell surrendered to Trump.
Four years after what was once the “novel coronavirus” was declared a pandemic, COVID remains the most dangerous infectious respiratory illness regularly circulating in the U.S. But a glance at the United States’ most prominent COVID policies can give the impression that the disease is just another seasonal flu.
Last fall, when Netflix hiked the cost of its top-tier Ultra HD plan by 15 percent, I had finally had enough: $22.99 a month just felt like too much for the ability to see Jaws in 4K video resolution. A couple of weeks later, I heard that Max was pushing up the fee of its own 4K streaming by 25 percent. Now I wasn’t just annoyed, but confused. Super-high-res televisions are firmly ensconced as the next standard for home viewing of TV and movies.
