Ever since President Trump started playing armchair museum curator last year, the White House has employed a number of strategies to try to influence exhibitions at the Smithsonian. It has sent threatening letters, published a memo that reads like an exhibit hit list, and even resorted to an occasional bit of online trolling.
Compared with cinema’s menagerie of big-city talking animals, the ovine stars of the movie The Sheep Detectives lead idyllic lives: They sleep among cozy bales of hay. They graze on the English countryside’s beautiful, grassy hills. Each has been thoughtfully named by their beloved shepherd, George (played by Hugh Jackman)—there’s Lily, Mopple, Sebastian, Cloud, Ronnie, Reggie, Wool Eyes, Sir Ritchfield, and Zora.
We speak with journalist Karen Hao, author of Empire of AI, about the Trump administration’s alliance with tech billionaires, efforts to regulate artificial intelligence technology, and rising local opposition to data centers across the United States.
“In 2025, these data center protests successfully stalled over $100 billion worth of these facilities,” says Hao. “It really does cut across political lines.
Late-night comedian Stephen Colbert has ended his 11-year run as host of The Late Show on CBS. His program’s cancellation removes one of President Trump’s most vocal critics from the airwaves and comes after the comedian criticized his own employer for agreeing to pay $16 million to settle a lawsuit brought by President Trump.
The deadly Ebola outbreak spreading across the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo has killed at least 177 people, with more than 750 suspected cases reported in the DRC and neighboring Uganda, according to the World Health Organization. Health officials believe the virus may have been spreading undetected for months before the outbreak was identified, raising concerns that the scale of transmission could be far greater than initially understood.
The new Fed Chair is inheriting an inflation conundrum: appease Trump or hold out on rates?
The incoming IPO wave is rewriting stock market rules in real time—and setting us up for a lot of risk.
The Iran war and fuel prices are driving up airfare—but travelers are about to find out which costs may never come back down.
The health secretary has said the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force erred by failing to recommend screening for Alzheimer’s disease.
Supreme Court decision not to hear pharma cases gives “strong signal” that Medicare price talks will continue.
The International Rescue Committee said the cuts are partially to blame for the rapid spread of the disease in the Congo.
The new fund comes as a pro-abortion rights group says threats and violent attacks at clinics are on the rise.
Outward’s hosts sit down with the host and co-creator of When We All Get to Heaven.
The neighborhood changes, the church moves, people forget and remember “the AIDS years,” but AIDS isn’t over.
The AIDS cocktail opens new possibilities. And MCC San Francisco tries to use the experience of AIDS to make bigger social change.
The church’s minister gets sick and everyone knows it.
The church’s “it couple” faces AIDS, caregiving, and loss as part of a pair, part of families, and part of a community.
“We have to take care of ourselves because we can’t rely on one foreign partner,” Mark Carney said in a video address. “We can’t control the disruption coming from our neighbors.
Amnesty International’s 2025 report on the global use of the death penalty finds that executions have surged to their highest recorded number in over 40 years, driven largely by the expanded use of political executions in Iran to “create a climate of fear and intimidation in the society and deter dissent.” Amnesty recorded 2,707 executions in 2025. But the data excludes China, believed to be the world’s top executioner, because its government does not release any public data on executions.
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Earlier this year, Nicki Minaj asked her fans to “go out there and make some babies.” Sitting onstage at a D.C. auditorium, the rapper and recent MAGA convert wasn’t just talking about the wonders of parenthood—she was plugging President Trump’s new child-savings accounts.
Donald Trump’s most amusing habit is meting out casual abuse to his sycophants. His recent answer to a question about the wedding of Donald Trump Jr. may, depending on how deserving one deems Trump’s eldest son of mistreatment—poor Don Jr. was, after all, born into the Trump life—qualify as his most hilarious riff ever.
The scene is the Oval Office, today, midday. Trump is asked by a reporter whether he plans to attend Don Jr.’s wedding to the Palm Beach socialite Bettina Anderson this weekend.
The arrests have the Trump administration again accusing Gov. Tim Walz of poor oversight of federal funds.
The outlines of President Trump’s endgame in the Iran war are now emerging. In a phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday, Trump reportedly explained that the United States was negotiating a “letter of intent” with Iran that would “formally end the war and launch a 30-day period of negotiations” on Iran’s nuclear program and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.
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As colleges hold graduation ceremonies across the country, many schools are attempting to silence pro-Palestine speech at the commemorations, including canceling speakers and eliminating live speeches by students altogether. There will be no live student speakers at the City University of New York’s School of Law or at New York University’s school-specific ceremonies after former students gave speeches that included expressing support for Palestine and criticism of Israel.
The decades-old U.S. humanitarian aid agency USAID was largely dismantled in the early days of President Trump’s second term by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. The authors of a new study in the journal Science conclude, “The abrupt withdrawal of USAID led to a significant and sustained increase in conflict across Africa’s most USAID-dependent regions.
The Trump administration is advancing plans to resettle an additional 10,000 white South Africans in the United States as refugees. Under President Trump’s proposal, which was submitted to Congress on Monday, the U.S. would lift its record-low refugee admissions figure from 7,500 to 17,500, with the additional openings reserved for Afrikaners. This comes as the administration continues to block the entry of refugees from other countries. The U.S.
