The government shutdown is now the longest in history. Panelists joined Washington Week With The Atlantic to discuss how voters and lawmakers are responding, and more.
Three weeks before Thanksgiving, “the administration has chosen to not find money to fund the food-assistance program for some 42 million Americans,” Jeff Zeleny, the chief national-affairs correspondent at CNN, said last night. “But they have found money for military payments and ICE officers and others.

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Some critics of the suburbs argue that they’re not a place at all. “The anthropologist Marc Augé coined the term non-places to describe interchangeable, impersonal spaces lacking in history and culture that people pass through quickly and anonymously,” Julie Beck wrote last year.

Whenever I read a novel about immigration, I recall a scene from the 2006 Italian film Nuovomondo (released as Golden Door in English). At the turn of the 20th century, a young Sicilian woman who will soon marry a “rich American” presents two postcards, supposedly from the United States, to a village elder. The first depicts a man holding a wheelbarrow that contains a massive onion, so large that it dwarfs both the wheelbarrow and the man.

The beauty writer Jessica DeFino refers often to the “mirror world” inside our phone, the uncanny, glistening selfieverse that’s also become more real for many of its devotees than the lumpy, blotchy meatspace where the rest of us live. I thought about the mirror world while watching All’s Fair, Ryan Murphy’s new creative product—I can’t call it a television show, because it isn’t one.

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Every government shutdown is a game of a chicken between Democrats and Republicans, or sometimes between Congress and the White House. And every administration tries to use its power to squeeze opponents, moving around money to keep some programs running and closing others.

Updated with new questions at 4:15 p.m. ET on November 7, 2025.
The 37-volume Naturalis Historia, written by the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder, is the world’s earliest surviving encyclopedia. In the first century C.E., Pliny set out to collect the breadth of human knowledge, and millennia later, it’s still a great document for learning a little bit about everything. It has chapters on sugar, Germany, the rainbow, Cesarean births, the art of painting, and hypothetical antipodes.

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In Toni Morrison’s Sula, the title character and Nel are friends and enemies all at once: Nel envies and eventually hates Sula but, at the end of the novel, finds herself entirely bereft without her. In Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, Lila and Elena are united by their similarities in an unforgiving world, until their differences send them hurtling away from each other.

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Throughout Donald Trump’s first term, his third campaign, and the first 10 months of his second term in office, he and his allies warned darkly of a “deep state” seeking to thwart his every move.

Zohran Mamdani is an extraordinary political story: a generational political talent, an out-of-nowhere success, and—measured by the number of citizens he will soon govern—the most powerful elected democratic socialist in American history.
But his allies have tried to turn his victory into something different: a model for the national Democratic Party.