The afternoon before Donald Trump’s blowout win in South Carolina’s primary, Shellie Hargenrader and Julianne Poulnot emerged from a rally for the former president bubbling with righteous conviction.
They had spent the previous hour listening to the candidate’s son Donald Trump Jr. regale supporters at the campaign’s headquarters in an office park outside Charleston. The crowd had been energized, frequently calling out in response to his words as if at a church service as Trump Jr.

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As the war in Ukraine enters a third year—and while a crucial aid package stalls in the House—Russia has gained recent momentum from its capture of Avdiivka, while Ukrainian forces face intensifying shortages of man power and ammunition.

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One of my favorite descriptions of New York City life comes from a 2022 article by my colleague Xochitl Gonzalez:
New York in the summer is a noisy place, especially if you don’t have money. The rich run off to the Hamptons or Maine.

One night last winter, over drinks in downtown Los Angeles, the biologist David Gruber told me that human beings might someday talk to sperm whales. In 2020, Gruber founded Project CETI with some of the world’s leading artificial-intelligence researchers, and they have so far raised $33 million for a high-tech effort to learn the whales’ language.

When, earlier this month, Tucker Carlson posted a short video clip of himself visiting a Russian supermarket and raving about how great the bread was and how low the prices were, and another clip from his trip to a knockoff McDonald’s restaurant in Moscow, he received plenty of well-deserved mockery. Carlson seemed both willfully ignorant, pretending that he doesn’t know that prices are lower in Russia than in the U.S. because Russia is much poorer than the U.S.

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Strap in, folks. Today, we’re talking about rats: why you should love them, and why you should consider obtaining one for yourself. But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

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The role of first lady couldn’t be stranger. You attain the position almost by accident, simply by virtue of being married to the president, but then it comes with punishingly high expectations.

Michael Smart chuckled as he thought back to their banishment.
Truthfully he couldn’t say for sure what the problem had been, why it was that in 2012, the John Birch Society—the far-right organization historically steeped in conspiracism and opposition to civil rights—had found itself blacklisted by the Conservative Political Action Conference. “Nobody knows the official reason, because they don’t tell you that,” Smart, a field coordinator for the group, told me.
He has theories, of course.

Once, in a windowless conference room, I got into an argument with a minor Japanese-government official about Hayao Miyazaki. This was in 2017, three years after the director had announced his latest retirement from filmmaking. His final project was supposed to be 2013’s The Wind Rises, a World War II movie about a man who loves building airplanes but struggles to accept the destruction they bring.

Near the end of the Supreme Court’s oral arguments about whether Colorado could exclude former President Donald Trump from its ballot as an insurrectionist, the attorney representing voters from the state offered a warning to the justices—one evoking the January 6 riot that had set the case in motion.