Robert Redford ruled the golden-boy category, whether he was twirling a Colt revolver or directing a camera’s glance. He sure looked like one of life’s winners. As others have pointed out in their remembrances of the actor and director, he was a “quintessential leading man” who possessed “near-iconographic physical beauty.” But the sheen was slippery, as he was well aware.
Sarah Topol is the winner of the 22nd annual Michael Kelly Award for “The Deserter: An Epic Story of Love and War,” published last year by The New York Times Magazine. Topol’s moving, five-part feature is about a combat officer who deserted from the Russian army and, together with his wife, defected to the West; Topol also spoke with 18 other Russian defectors for her reporting.
The award was announced this morning at the 16th annual Atlantic Festival in New York City.
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books.
Book publishing has, let’s say, a complicated relationship with artificial intelligence. Earlier this month, Anthropic settled a lawsuit brought by authors and publishers, agreeing to pay $1.5 billion after training its chatbot, Claude, on pirated text; hundreds of such copyright lawsuits against data-scraping tech companies are still making their way through the courts.
The panel also revisited a Thursday vote related to coverage for a different vaccine.
Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman sat down with longtime political prisoner and Indigenous activist Leonard Peltier for his first extended television and radio broadcast interview since his release to home confinement in February. Before his commutation by former President Joe Biden, the 81-year-old Peltier spent nearly 50 years behind bars. Peltier has always maintained his innocence for the 1975 killing of two FBI officers.
Gary Rivlin joins Elizabeth Spiers to discuss his book on Silicon Valley’s race to cash in on AI.
ICE raided a new Hyundai plant in Georgia detaining hundreds of workers from South Korea.
Layoffs are spreading and unemployment is rising—and one kind of worker is being hit the hardest.
It’s called modular construction, and it could allow apartments to be constructed within a week.
A trillion dollars will come in handy if you want to colonize Mars.
Susan Monarez’s testimony came on the eve of a pivotal meeting of Kennedy’s handpicked vaccine panel.
A copy of Susan Monarez’s testimony obtained by POLITICO contrasts sharply with Health Secretary Kennedy’s remarks before the Senate Finance Committee.
Trump wants MAHA moms’ votes, but lawmakers are worried about his health secretary’s vaccine policies.
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 survey from the liberal-leaning group Somos Votantes shows Latino voters are souring on the president.
Privately, aides concede voters remain uneasy about prices but argue their policies are beginning to turn things around.
Bill Beach said the president’s suggestions that the jobs report was rigged betrayed a misunderstanding in how those numbers are assembled.
The monthly jobs report showed just 73,000 jobs in July, with big reductions to May’s and June’s numbers
Robert Redford, the legendary Oscar-winning director, actor and activist, died at the age of 89 on Tuesday. Redford was a longtime environmental activist who served for five decades as a trustee of the Natural Resources Defense Council. He was also the creator of the Sundance Film Festival, which he helped grow into one of the largest independent film festivals in the world.
President Trump signed an order authorizing the deployment of National Guard troops to Memphis, Tennessee, on Monday. The order also creates a so-called safe task force, which Trump claims will address violent crime in the city. Law enforcement officers from several federal agencies will also be dispatched to Memphis, including the FBI, DEA, ICE and Homeland Security.
“This is nothing more than a power play for more authoritarianism from this administration,” says Justin J.
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Yesterday, Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show was suspended indefinitely. It’s a shocking moment for free speech, given the order in which events unfolded. Earlier that day, FCC Chair Brendan Carr had suggested on a conservative podcast that ABC and its affiliates consider taking steps against Kimmel, saying, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.
Three months into its tenure, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s handpicked vaccine advisory committee has taken down one of its easiest targets.
Today, its members voted to limit the national guidance for a childhood vaccine that has helped protect infants against some of the most dangerous and fast-spreading viral diseases in the United States.
The panel voted to recommend against the combined measles, mumps, rubella and chickenpox vaccine for young children. It postponed to Friday a vote on a recommendation to drop universal newborn vaccination for hepatitis B.
On Tuesday afternoon, three parents sat in a row before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism. Two of them had each recently lost a child to suicide; the third has a teenage son who, after cutting his arm in front of her and biting her, is undergoing residential treatment. All three blame generative AI for what has happened to their children.
They had come to testify on what appears to be an emerging health crisis in teens’ interactions with AI chatbots.
In a conversation with Tim Alberta at The Atlantic Festival, former Vice President Mike Pence discussed his conservatism, the state of free speech on the right, and his relationship with President Donald Trump.
Alberta asked Pence about ABC’s decision last night to “indefinitely suspend” the comedian Jimmy Kimmel. The network’s move came after Kimmel said “the MAGA gang” was “desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.
The 78-year-old comic legend David Letterman arrived onstage at The Atlantic Festival today carrying a list of presidents he’d mocked in his 33 years as the longest-running late-night comedy host in American history. Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama—he’d made fun of them all (especially, he added with a chuckle, Clinton and Bush II).
