Is Donald Trump trying to help Republicans win the midterm elections? The obvious answer to this question is yes, of course, simply because all political leaders benefit from their party winning elections. Yet several of Trump’s actions throw this normally perfunctory question into at least some doubt.
Traditionally, candidates laboring under the burden of an unpopular president seek to detach themselves from the national brand. Trump is making this impossible.

For as long as ChatGPT has existed, Americans have been asking it, “Could that funny little spot on my toe be cancer?” And as AI has advanced over the past few years, doctors have begun to use specialized models to ask much the same questions in clinics. In the face of these developments, professional medical societies have presented a unified front: Doctors must always have the final say in clinical care.
We disagree.

Breakfast-cereal boxes are a window into both the politics of food and American culture. As a particularly timely example, since Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took office last year as secretary of health and human services, he has called for the removal of artificial dyes from breakfast cereals. On Fox News in 2024, he lamented that the bright colors in Froot Loops are “literally poisoning our kids.” (How exactly these dyes interact with human health is complicated.

This past June, a Virginia mother named Karyann Parkinson took a bike ride with her 5-year-old son and stopped by a pond inside their gated community to collect goose feathers from the grass. The two of them rode back home, whereupon Parkinson’s son asked his mother if he could walk back to the pond by himself to fetch a few more feathers. Parkinson, who was eight months pregnant with her fifth child, studying for the bar exam, and—perhaps most pressing—making lunch, agreed.

This story was updated at 6:12 p.m. ET on September 8, 2026.
Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch plans to retire from the institution at the end of this year, bringing to a close a tenure marked by unprecedented pressure on the museum complex from a White House keen on controlling how to tell the nation’s history.

The human brain has a method for dealing with the intrinsic fear of death. Terror-management theory, which builds on the work of the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, explains that the psyche handles this fear in a variety of ways. Many people either escape reality or adopt a belief system that promises immortality: so on the one hand, sex, drugs, or entertainment; on the other, religion, fame, or careerism.