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.
For months, President Donald Trump’s crusade against the drug trade has carried the threat of violence: “I think we’re just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country,” he said in October.
When I visited the Snapple website this week, I was served one of the drink brand’s famous fun facts: that a jiffy is an “actual time measurement equaling 1/100th of a second.” Fun indeed! And arguably even a little bit true!
In 2013 in The Atlantic, Adrienne LaFrance courageously exposed that many of Snapple’s bottle-cap facts were false.
The vice president fine-tunes Trump’s economic message, but he’s only got so much wiggle room.
For all of the professional gains women have made over the past several decades, one stubborn measure of inequality—the gender wage gap—has been especially difficult to stamp out. And it’s a disparity that can be traced in large part to parenthood. In nearly every country on Earth, the arrival of children tends to coincide with a lasting drop in employment and earnings for moms but not dads.
The actor and director Rob Reiner and his wife, the producer and photographer Michele Singer Reiner, were found stabbed to death in their home on Sunday. Yesterday, their son Nick, who has spoken about his bouts of drug addiction and homelessness, was arrested on suspicion of murder. With that news, a terrible event became doubly tragic.
Reiner was beloved by almost everyone who knew him. On social media, friends described him as generous, kind, funny, and a caring soul.
Voters who backed Donald Trump in 2024 and swung to Democrats in this year’s Virginia and New Jersey elections did so over economic concerns, according to focus groups conducted by a Democratic pollster and obtained by POLITICO.
At least a dozen people have died in Gaza as winter storms batter displaced Palestinians forced to shelter in makeshift tents among the rubble of collapsing buildings severely damaged by Israeli bombing. That rubble is being eyed by U.S.-based contractors, who are already vying for lucrative contracts to rebuild Gaza under the Trump-backed ceasefire deal.
New York City housing advocate Patrick Markee’s new book, Placeless: Homelessness in the New Gilded Age, looks at homelessness through the lens of housing affordability. Homelessness, which affects millions across the United States, “has roots in structural economic changes, right-wing economic policies and systemic racism,” explains Markee.
The two victims in Saturday’s mass shooting at Brown University have been identified: freshman Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov and sophomore Ella Cook. We speak to another sophomore, Zoe Weissman, who came to Brown from Parkland, Florida, where she was a student at the middle school adjacent to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School during the mass shooting that occurred there in 2018.
Disney invests $1 billion in OpenAI so you can’t use Sora to make Darth Vader porn among other concerns.
Tim Wu joins Elizabeth Spiers to discuss his book on how our economy ended up under the collective thumb of Big Tech.
Even though that might mean you-know-who buys the studio instead.
MIT business professor Retsef Levi teaches about how health care decisions are made, but isn’t a doctor.
The billionaire philanthropist has said his meetings with the late convicted sex offender were a mistake.
The neighborhood changes, the church moves, people forget and remember “the AIDS years,” but AIDS isn’t over.
The AIDS cocktail opens new possibilities. And MCC San Francisco tries to use the experience of AIDS to make bigger social change.
The church’s minister gets sick and everyone knows it.
The church’s “it couple” faces AIDS, caregiving, and loss as part of a pair, part of families, and part of a community.
A celebrity contracts HIV, the world finally pays attention to AIDS, and Jim Mitulski preaches to a community tired of people dying from it.
In races across the country, Democrats focused on promises to make life more affordable — even as they offered contrasting approaches.
The White House plans to make affordability a key selling point for Republicans across the board as the 2026 midterm elections come into focus.
President Donald Trump will give a speech in Northeastern Pennsylvania on Tuesday, the first stop in a ‘tour’ where he will talk about affordability concerns, among others.
An online bazaar of freelance headhunters finds new recruits to fight Ukraine, emboldening Vladimir Putin at the negotiating table and scaring European leaders about what his growing army might do next.
Democratic lawmakers repeatedly called on Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to resign as they confronted her on Trump’s immigration crackdown during a heated House Homeland Security Committee hearing Thursday. We speak with Congressmember Delia Ramirez, who reiterated her call during the hearing for Noem to resign and announced that she would begin taking steps for her impeachment.
Lynda Ben-Menashe, the president of the National Council of Jewish Women Australia, expressed an apt sentiment after yesterday’s terror attack at Bondi Beach: She said that she was “horrified and devastated” but, she added, “not shocked.”
Indeed, how could anyone be shocked? The act of terrorism, in which a father-and-son duo targeted Jews celebrating Hanukkah and killed at least 15, was the deadliest in Australia’s history. But events have been working up to it since October 7, 2023.
When Rob Reiner died violently alongside his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, yesterday, a familiar thing happened in American public life: a window opened.
It opened not because Reiner, a vocal liberal, was universally beloved or politically neutral, but because his work occupied shared cultural space.
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.
The president is the only person in the United States with the megaphone to speak to the nation and guide them through moments of tragedy.
On the first night of Hanukkah, I learned that Eli Schlanger, a rabbi I had known for decades, was gunned down at a Hanukkah celebration he had organized in Sydney, attended by roughly 1,000 people. When Eli and I were 16, we volunteered together at a summer camp for indigent Ukrainian boys in Odesa. The early mornings we spent watching the sun rise over the beach, as he spoke with quiet certainty about his dream of becoming a rabbi and building a Jewish community, are etched in my memory.
