This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.
After his death, James Garfield got the full Horatio Alger treatment. As well he should have. Garfield, who died in September 1881 from an assassin’s bullet and his own doctors’ staggeringly inept care, really did rise, as Alger’s book phrased it, From Canal Boy to President.
Donald Trump has now installed descriptive plaques under all the portraits that line his “Presidential Walk of Fame” in the White House. If you wonder whether they are petty, but also deeply strange and erratically capitalized, the answer is: Yes! Of course!
Surely they cannot really be that bad, you say. All right. See if you can guess the real ones! Then scroll to the bottom for the answer key.
25.
A daily roundup of the best stories and cartoons by Daily Kos staff and contributors to keep you in the know.
For Pete’s sake! Hegseth wants to make spirituality manly again?
We certainly wouldn’t want it to nourish the body and soul, now would we?
Trump screams at America that everything is fine
Sometimes if you say the lies louder it makes them come true.
Cartoon: Doesn’t fit
It’s hard to make a victim out of a monster.
The move could fuel more research and provide tax breaks to cannabis companies.
The paramilitary Rapid Support Forces in Sudan, backed by the United Arab Emirates, is accused of attempting to cover up its mass killings of civilians by burning and burying bodies, according to a new report by Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab. This comes as drone strikes have plunged several cities into darkness, including Khartoum and the coastal city of Port Sudan.
Former immigration judge Tania Nemer, who was fired in February, is now suing the Trump administration, alleging that she was discriminated against despite strong performance reviews. Nemer is one of about 100 immigration judges who have been fired or reassigned since Trump took office. The system is notoriously backlogged, with more than 3 million cases pending. “I was pulled away in the middle of the hearing,” she says.
President Trump praised the state of the U.S. economy in a primetime address Wednesday evening, even though new government statistics show the nation’s unemployment rate is at a new four-year high of 4.6%. Dean Baker, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, says Trump’s aides should be “wondering about the man’s sanity” after Wednesday’s speech. “This is utterly divorced from reality.
With insurance rates spiking and Congress stalemated, professional advocates are swooping in to shape the narrative.
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.
Students for Life of America is pushing the federal agency to include an anti-abortion drug on its list of drinking water contaminants.
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.
The vice president fine-tunes Trump’s economic message, but he’s only got so much wiggle room.
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.
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.
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.
The president of the United States just barged into America’s living rooms like an angry, confused grandfather to tell us all that we are ungrateful whelps.
When a president asks for network time, it’s usually to announce something important. But tonight, Donald Trump did not give anything like a normal speech or address.
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Last week, the Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado made a daring escape from her home country to Norway, where she was honored as winner of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize.
This story was updated on December 17 at 9:39 p.m. ET
President Donald Trump’s prime-time address tonight included an Oprah-style You get a car! And you get a car! reveal for members of the U.S. military. Specifically, he said that he was giving troops a “war dividend,” a onetime bonus check pegged to a sum with deep patriotic significance: $1,776.
“The checks are already on the way,” Trump said during his address, promising them to more than 1.4 million troops.
Updated with new questions at 4 p.m. on December 17, 2025.
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.
