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A few years ago, my colleague Olga Khazan shared a radical proposition: What if we stopped firing our friends? The friendship breakup has become a feature of modern life: Online, advice abounds on “how to aggressively confront, or even abandon, friends who disappoint us,” Olga noted.

The longest-ever government shutdown ended on November 12, but Deairra Tracey is still scared.
The disabled mother of three from Perth Amboy, New Jersey, had to visit food banks and skip meals so that her children could eat after the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program abruptly stopped paying out benefits on November 1.

Today’s White House meeting between New York’s mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani, and President Donald Trump suggests that maybe, just maybe, the U.S. government won’t go to war with its largest city. The event was much anticipated as blood sport, a showdown between a young communist and an old despot, to use their favored insults for each other.
Instead, the two men put on such a show of good manners that at times I had to laugh out loud at the stagecraft.

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Last week, Leonardo Williams, the mayor of Durham, North Carolina, received a call from the office of Governor Josh Stein.

Dan Driscoll kept everyone waiting. The United States secretary of the Army had been due to arrive earlier today at the U.S. ambassador’s residence in Kyiv to speak with diplomats from NATO member states. The guests were eager to hear about the 28-point peace plan Driscoll had delivered on behalf of the Trump administration to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. But what they heard when Driscoll finally got there left some of the Europeans infuriated.

Let me make a small concession on behalf of the medical community: The CDC is technically correct when it asserts, as it did this week in a surprise update to its website, that “studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.” But the underlying logic of this change clearly goes beyond the wispy double negative. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has already said that he believes in the affirmative: Vaccines do cause autism.

Updated with new questions at 4:25 p.m. ET on November 21, 2025.
If I have provided you with any factoids in the course of Atlantic Trivia, I apologize, because a factoid, properly, is not a small, interesting fact. A factoid is a piece of information that looks like a fact but is untrue. Norman Mailer popularized the term in 1973, very intentionally giving it the suffix -oid. Is a humanoid not a creature whose appearance suggests humanity but whose nature belies it? Thus is it with factoid.