We spend the hour with the acclaimed writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose book The Message features three essays tackling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, book bans and academic freedom, and the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade. The Message is written as a letter to Coates’s students at Howard University, where he is the Sterling Brown Endowed Chair in the English department.
Lakota historian Nick Estes talks about the violent origins of Thanksgiving and his book Our History Is the Future. “This history … is a continuing history of genocide, of settler colonialism and, basically, the founding myths of this country,” says Estes, who is a co-founder of the Indigenous resistance group The Red Nation and a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe.
When President Joe Biden was running for a second term as president, he repeatedly ruled out granting a pardon to his son Hunter, who has pleaded guilty to tax fraud and lying on a form to purchase a gun. “He was very clear, very upfront, obviously very definitive,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said of one of his many promises to this effect.
Biden professed a willingness to abide by the results of the justice system as a matter of principle.
My friends all think their apartments
used to be brothels. I don’t think
any of them ever were, but it’s a fitting mythology
for an eerie, rundown place with the original mahoganies,
hex tiles, and claw-foots. Sex is a place for ghosts. Sex, cities,
specialty markets with vacant glass fish counters, gilded
wine bars shut with the dissipation of frivolity
that necessitates a gilded wine bar.
It’s the Fourth of July. The city is empty.
Stoplights change.
Updated at 10:17 a.m. ET on December 1, 2024
For more than four decades before Donald Trump assumed the presidency, the FBI director was a position above politics. A new president might choose a political ally as attorney general, but the FBI director was different. An FBI director appointed by Richard Nixon also served under Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. Carter’s choice remained on the job deep into Reagan’s second term, when Reagan moved him to head the CIA.
The recorder used to be an instrument people wanted to hear. As a 1946 article in The Atlantic explained, it gets mentioned lovingly in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Milton’s Paradise Lost. One 17th-century English-navy leader wrote in his diary that it made the best sound he’d ever heard. The recorder was the instrument of kings and queens: Henry VIII had a collection of more than 70.
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.
It takes work to get empty bottles and cans to the right spot.
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.
Makary emerged during the Covid pandemic as a critic of the FDA.
At least three informal advisers connected to the anti-vaccine movement are assisting Kennedy in filling out his staff as he prepares to lead HHS.
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.
In Part 2 of our special broadcast, we look at a recent victory for Indigenous communities in Ecuador, where people overwhelmingly voted to approve a referendum last year banning future oil extraction in a biodiverse section of the Amazon’s Yasuní National Park — a historic referendum result that will protect Indigenous Yasuní land from development.
In this special broadcast, we begin with an extended interview with Palestinian poet and author Mosab Abu Toha about the situation in Gaza and his new book of poetry titled Forest of Noise. He fled Gaza in December after being detained by the Israeli military, but many of his extended family members were unable to escape.
As the war on Gaza spans a second year, we continue our conversation with the acclaimed writer Ta-Nehisi Coates. His new book, The Message, is based in part on his visit last year to Israel and the occupied West Bank, where he says he saw a system of segregation and oppression reminiscent of Jim Crow in the United States. “It was revelatory,” says Coates.
We spend the hour with the acclaimed writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose book The Message features three essays tackling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, book bans and academic freedom, and the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade. The Message is written as a letter to Coates’s students at Howard University, where he is the Sterling Brown Endowed Chair in the English department.
Lakota historian Nick Estes talks about the violent origins of Thanksgiving and his book Our History Is the Future. “This history … is a continuing history of genocide, of settler colonialism and, basically, the founding myths of this country,” says Estes, who is a co-founder of the Indigenous resistance group The Red Nation and a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe.
Trump has been releasing names of his nominees for the Cabinet and other senior posts in waves. He began with some relatively conventional choices, and then unloaded one bombshell after another, perhaps in an attempt to paralyze opposition in the Senate with a flood of bad nominees or to overwhelm the public’s already limited political attention span.
Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings or watch full episodes here.
Although how the country is going to change after Donald Trump takes office remains uncertain, it’s clear that he will be one of the most powerful—and emboldened—U.S. presidents.
