“You know the LIBS are seething over this,” Joe Kinsey, an editor at the sports website OutKick, wrote on X while reposting a video of sorority girls doing a choreographed dance. Many of the girls were wearing red-white-and-blue outfits, though some were dressed as hot dogs. They waved American flags in front of a banner that read We Want You Kappa Delta. “Credit to these ladies for pumping out patriotism to kick off the 2025 school year,” Kinsley wrote.
This article contains spoilers for the movie Weapons.
The most daring aspect of Weapons is that it answers all of its big questions. The sleeper-hit horror film, written and directed by Zach Cregger, has a distressing but undeniably hooky premise: One night, at 2:17 a.m., all but one student in the same third-grade class got up out of their beds and ran out of their suburban homes with their arms outstretched, vanishing into the night.
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
The most recent issue of The Atlantic taught me that the Scottish author Muriel Spark had, according to Judith Shulevitz, “a steely command of omniscience,” and frequently played with “selective disclosure, irony, and other narrative devices.” I knew that Spark was funny, and that her work was highly recommended by people whose taste I respect.
During Donald Trump’s first term, his top advisers attempted to run a traditional process for shaping foreign policy, tapping experts from the White House’s National Security Council, debating recommendations from across the government, and steering the president away from decisions that they feared would damage America’s interests. But Trump was deeply mistrustful of the NSC, which he saw as too big, too cumbersome, and too attached to Republican orthodoxy.
As U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin meet in Alaska for a high-stakes summit to discuss a possible ceasefire in Ukraine, we host a debate between two foreign policy thinkers about the war, its causes and how it could be brought to a conclusion.
John Mearsheimer is an international relations theorist at the University of Chicago, known for his realist perspective. He has long argued that Western policies are the main cause of the Ukraine crisis.
President Trump says his takeover of policing in Washington, D.C., will serve as an example of policies he hopes to enact in other major U.S. cities, including New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. All the cities on his target list are led by Black mayors, and most have “sanctuary” policies limiting local cooperation with federal immigration authorities.
He’s right that there’s a problem. He’s wrong about what causes and fixes it.
Are the feds really sending in the troops because of “Big Balls”?
It started with a cheese pull.
If you’re seeking the profound, here’s the best way to travel nationally and internationally
Brian Blase has pushed the GOP to make deeper cuts to the safety-net health program.
The ruling overturned a district judge’s injunction that had directed the administration to restore the flow of the grants.
Agency Director Susan Monarez tried to soothe staff at a Tuesday meeting, but some employees said the all-hands call was lacking.
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.
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
We speak with Rachel Griffin Accurso, the educator known to millions around the world as Ms. Rachel, who has become a leading advocate for children in Gaza. Her YouTube channel for young children became wildly popular during the COVID-19 pandemic and today has more than 16 million subscribers. Since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza, Accurso has used her social media reach to speak out for Palestinian children facing hunger, disease, injury and death.
A few years ago, during the coronavirus pandemic, Daniel Humm had an epiphany. Human reliance on animal products was cooking the planet, and, as a chef, reducing his reliance on them could be part of a solution. When his New York City restaurant, Eleven Madison Park—which had once been named the world’s best restaurant—reopened, it would be free of animal products, making it the first three-Michelin-star dining room to bear that distinction.
Last year, Ford CEO Jim Farley commuted in a car that wasn’t made by his own company. In an effort to scope out the competition, Farley spent six months driving around in a Xiaomi SU7. The Chinese-made electric sedan is one of the world’s most impressive cars: It can accelerate faster than many Porsches, has a giant touch screen that lets you turn off the lights at your house, and comes with a built-in AI assistant—all for roughly $30,000 in China.
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.
Last month, I wrote about my attempt to self-rejuvenate through small moments of joy, and I asked readers to submit some tips of their own. Boy, did you come through. Two clear themes emerged in the dozens of replies we received.
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.
“When Paul Morphy plays seven games of chess at once and blindfold, when young Colburn gives impromptu solution to a mathematical problem involving fifty-six figures, we are struck with hopeless wonder,” J. Brownlee Brown wrote in 1864. His Atlantic article had a simple headline: “Genius.
Pedro Nunes / Reuters
People look on as a wildfire approaches in Trancoso, Portugal, on August 13, 2025.Patricia De Melo Moreira / AFP / Getty
A man tries to extinguish a wildfire with a tree branch in Trancoso on August 12, 2025.Marcelo Del Pozo / Reuters
A person watches as a helicopter draws water at Atlanterra Beach on August 12, 2025, a day after many locals and tourists were evacuated from Tarifa, Spain, because of wildfires.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s ‘Make America Healthy Again’ movement is taking off in red — and blue — states, even as health experts condemn some of his actions.
Former Colombian President Álvaro Uribe was recently sentenced to 12 years of house arrest after he was found guilty of bribing imprisoned members of paramilitary groups to coax them into retracting damaging testimony exposing Uribe’s ties to U.S.-backed, right-wing paramilitary groups. Uribe was a staunch U.S.
As President Trump threatens to use U.S. special forces against drug cartels abroad, a new book, The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces, reveals some of the most secretive and elite special forces in the Army are heavily involved in narcotrafficking themselves.
