The robot is shaped like a human, but it sure doesn’t move like one. It starts supine on the floor, pancake-flat. Then, in a display of superhuman joint mobility, its legs curl upward from the knees, sort of like a scorpion tail, until its feet settle firmly on the floor beside its hips. From there, it stands up, a swiveling mass of silver limbs. The robot’s ring-light head turns a full 180 degrees to face the camera, as though possessed. Then it lurches forward at you.

President Joe Biden won a decisive Electoral College victory in 2020 by restoring old Democratic advantages in the Rust Belt while establishing new beachheads in the Sun Belt.
But this year, his position in polls has weakened on both fronts. The result is that, even this far from Election Day, signs are developing that Biden could face a last-mile problem in the Electoral College.

The Atlantic is sharing news about four new staff writers: the hire of Ali Breland, most recently at Mother Jones, to report on disinformation and extremism; the promotion of Matteo Wong, previously an associate editor, covering artificial intelligence; and the moves of longtime Atlantic editors Julie Beck and Ellen Cushing to staff-writer positions, covering culture and family. More details on the new roles are below, as announced by deputy editors Paul Bisceglio and Jane Yong Kim.

In the spring of 1988, I made a lifelong friend thanks to a video-game cheat code. As preparation for a family move to Pensacola, Florida, I visited my new school. While there, I casually told a future classmate named Tim that the numbers 007 373 5963 would take him straight to the final fight of the very popular Nintendo boxing game Mike Tyson’s Punch Out. My buddies and I in Oxford, Mississippi, all knew this code by heart, but it turned out to be rare and valuable information in Pensacola.

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A new abortion ban in Florida has providers scrambling—and pregnant women reassessing their options. But the law has implications well beyond the Sunshine State. More after these four new stories from The Atlantic:
Trump’s contempt knows no bounds.

Today The Atlantic announces Democracy at a Crossroads, a three-stop tour bringing Atlantic writers to colleges and universities across the country to discuss crucial issues shaping the 2024 election cycle. The first event is Thursday, May 2, at 5:30 p.m. PT at the University of Nevada, Reno with Atlantic staff writers Elaina Plott Calabro, Adam Harris, and Ron Brownstein and contributing writer Evan Smith.

The ongoing outbreak of H5N1 avian flu virus looks a lot like a public-health problem that the United States should be well prepared for.
Although this version of flu is relatively new to the world, scientists have been tracking H5N1 for almost 30 years. Researchers know the basics of how flu spreads and who tends to be most at risk. They have experience with other flus that have jumped into us from animals. The U.S.

Photographs by Lila Barth
On August 23, 2000, after an extensive search and a months-long rumble of media speculation, a press conference was held in London. There, the actor who’d been chosen to play Harry Potter in the first movie adaptation of J. K. Rowling’s best-selling novels was unveiled, alongside the film’s other two child leads. According to the on-screen caption in the BBC’s coverage of the event, this 11-year-old’s name was “Daniel Radford.

On a Wednesday morning last December, Bruno Landier slung his gun and handcuffs around his waist and stepped into the mouth of a cave. Inside the sprawling network of limestone cavities, which sit in a cliffside that towers above the tiny town of Marboué, in north-central France, Landier crouched under hanging vines. He stepped over rusted pipes, remnants from when the caves housed a mushroom farm.