Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings, watch full episodes here, or listen to the weekly podcast here.
This week, Donald Trump called for Republicans to “nationalize” the upcoming elections—even though state and local officials are charged with this role. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined to discuss this and more.

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When Michael Pollan traveled to a cave in New Mexico to try to understand consciousness, he learned what good meditation is really made of.

My folks are visiting me in Southern California for a couple of months, so I rented them a house down the street. The place is new construction, modern and sleek. Rentals tend to be shabby and worn-out, so choosing a home with the latest and greatest felt like a way to make the experience hassle-free.
All of the appliances and systems are brand-new: the HVAC, the lighting, the entertainment. Touch screens of various shapes and sizes control this, that, and the other.

The first question to confront when considering The Pete Davidson Show, a new Netflix series that the streamer is calling a “video podcast,” is: What is a podcast? The term can be a little difficult to pin down; what initially referred to downloadable audio files you ported onto your iPod is today used for most online radio. Now the notion of a podcast is transforming again to include filmed entertainment.

Every Olympics opening ceremony is an advertisement—for the host country, for the Olympics themselves, for the notion of a free-trading global order competing through sport, in the same place and on even ground. This year, the ceremony for the Winter Olympics, held in the Italian cities Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo, was also an advertisement for the past.
This focus on the old is, well, new.

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For as long as the Trump family has been cashing in on crypto, Don Jr., Eric, and their affiliates have deployed a particular narrative about their reasons for investing in the industry.

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The torchbearers Deborah Compagnoni and Alberto Tomba light one of two Olympic cauldrons during the opening ceremony of the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics at Piazza Dibona in Milan, Italy, today. The Olympic flame, carried through all 110 provinces in Italy over the past 63 days, has reached its final destinations: a pair of identical cauldrons in Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo.

Nothing about TrumpRx is subtle. When you open up the government’s new online drugstore, the first thing you see is a banner with giant text: “Find the world’s lowest prices on prescription drugs.” Launched last night, TrumpRx allows Americans to purchase certain medications at steep discounts—either by buying them directly from the drug company or by showing a coupon at the pharmacy. “Thanks to President Trump, the days of Big Pharma price-gouging are over,” the website says.

Donald Trump supercharged his political career by claiming that Barack Obama wasn’t American. Yesterday, 16 minutes before midnight, the president’s account on Truth Social posted a video that suggests Obama isn’t even human. It briefly shows the head of the first Black president and that of his wife superimposed onto the bodies of apes. They dance along to “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”
The video, which Trump’s account shared twice, seems to be a screen recording.