This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
Recent mysterious sightings in our night sky cannot be written off as hallucinations, mass delusions, or hoaxes. Something is indeed happening.
This is Atlantic Intelligence, a newsletter in which our writers help you wrap your mind around artificial intelligence and a new machine age. Sign up here.
Earlier this week, OpenAI launched the full version of its video-generating model, Sora. Hype has been building around this release since the startup teased the program nearly 10 months ago, but the final product doesn’t quite meet expectations.
“No one believed them until someone else said it.” Readers encounter this sentiment early in The Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead’s award-winning 2019 novel, not long after the unearthing of a bloody bit of history. A secret graveyard has been discovered on the grounds of a decaying former reform school—the Nickel of the book’s title—that had been earmarked for transformation into a corporate office park.
If you’re reading this and thinking, “I wish I were rich enough to own a stegosaurus,” then there’s an online platform for you.
This year is set to break the record for the hottest year ever recorded. It was a banner year for climate devastation: Southern Africa and South America suffered under severe droughts; dangerous heat bore down on large parts of Asia, Europe, and Central America; and an alarming number of wildfires consumed more than 1 million hectares in Brazil. Hurricanes, intensified by abnormally hot seawater, pummeled the Caribbean and the American Southeast, and floods deluged parts of Africa and Europe.
NASA, ESA, CSA, and M. Zamani
Day 13 of the 2024 Space Telescope Advent Calendar: a cloud in the deep sky. This image, featuring the central region of the Chameleon I dark molecular cloud, about 630 light-years away, was taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. Cold, wispy blue clouds are illuminated in the infrared by the glow of the young, outflowing protostar Ced 110 IRS 4 (orange, upper left).
Three activists with the Uhuru Movement will be sentenced by a Florida judge Monday as part of a legal saga that began when the FBI raided the group in 2022, accusing the antiwar Black liberation group of working as Russian agents. The “Uhuru 3” are Omali Yeshitela, chair of the African People’s Socialist Party, and white solidarity activists Penny Hess and Jesse Nevel.
Laila Soueif is on the 75th day of a hunger strike calling for the U.K. government to push for the release of her son, jailed Egyptian British author and activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah. Charged with spreading false news, Alaa remains imprisoned in Egypt despite having completed his sentence in September. Human rights group say he has been subjected to torture, beatings and horrific treatment while in prison.
We go live to Damascus for the first time since the fall of longtime authoritarian President Bashar al-Assad, where the country’s populace is still reeling from the power struggle that forcibly displaced more than a million people over the last months.
Hugh Son joins to explain the complicated mess left in the wake of a fintech failure, and how users were left holding the bag.
A witness recognized the alleged killer at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s.
The president-elect’s advisers haven’t yet begun meeting with federal agencies, despite signing an agreement late last month allowing them to do so.
Brian Thompson was fatally shot outside a Midtown hotel.
The agency denied Triton Distribution’s application to sell flavored e-liquids.
Trump’s picks to lead the NIH and FDA were critics of health officials and their pandemic 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.
Five weeks after the election, the president took his sharpest swing at Trump’s policy plans.
A pair of POLITICO|Morning Consult polls, one conducted in the final days of the election and the other conducted after Trump won, show how public opinion has changed.
The final paid messages: Economy, culture wars and character.
Harris has ratcheted up her warnings about the dangers of a second Trump term in recent weeks.
We continue our look at the tragic deaths of two Black men who were killed while experiencing mental health crises. Award-winning piano virtuoso Herman Whitfield III died in 2022 after he was repeatedly tasered, handcuffed and pinned to the ground by Indianapolis police officers.
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
In the hours and days that followed the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, even before any information was known about the suspect, social media was flooded with speculation and opinion.
For more than a week now, a 26-year-old software engineer has been America’s main character. Luigi Mangione has been charged with murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in the middle of Midtown Manhattan. The killing was caught on video, leading to a nationwide manhunt and, five days later, Mangione’s arrest at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania. You probably know this, because the fatal shooting, the reaction, and Mangione himself have dominated our national attention.
On Tuesday, the federal government succeeded in doing something that it hasn’t done, or even seriously tried to do, in decades: It persuaded a court to block one large supermarket chain from acquiring another. In a major victory for the Federal Trade Commission, Judge Adrienne Nelson of the U.S.
Most modern interpretations are a sad imitation of what was once a kitschy holiday tradition.
