For 13 months, President Trump has been the chairman, muse, occasional programmer, and featured artist at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. His centrality—perhaps even more than his name on the building—helps explain why so many acts have abandoned the Washington, D.C., arts complex. (The most recent, the New York City Ballet, didn’t need to explain itself when it dropped a six-show run this week.)
Trump is undoubtedly on his way to remaking the Kennedy Center in his image.

Editor’s Note: Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined to discuss growing opposition to President Trump’s attacks on Iran and what winning a war with unclear objectives could like.
President Trump continues to offer different answers to what victory in Iran may look like. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined last night to discuss this, and more.

A few years ago in Dhahran, the Saudi state oil company, Aramco, gave me a tour of its headquarters, a facility so sparkling and orderly that one could forget that its whole purpose was to extract from the ground one of the filthiest substances on Earth. The most impressive stop on the tour was the Aramco emergency command center, which I imagine is paying its workers a lot of overtime right now. It looked like the control room for a mission to Alpha Centauri.

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Waiting can be understood as the absence of something: It’s what stands between you and the coffee, the subway ride, the doctor’s appointment. But what if we tried to construe waiting as a gift of time instead? Okay, fine: Waiting for hours at the DMV or the airport may never feel like a gift.

Lanre Dokun, a psychiatrist in New York, has a lot of clients with financial anxiety. For the older ones, the stress is usually situational: Perhaps they’ve lost their job, or they’re worrying about medical costs. But for young adults, he’s noticed, the concern is downright existential. It’s a “chronic background stressor,” he told me, or even “a character in their lives.” Clients who are objectively on solid ground are worried they one day won’t be. Some are obsessive about budgeting.

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Walk into any American airport today, and you might end up in a security line that extends past the baggage claim. You might hear a muffled voice announcing over the intercom that your flight has—once again—been delayed. And you might have to pay even more for this experience.

Atlantic Trivia (n.): that quiz which is too easy when one gets three of three correct and too difficult when one correctly answers any fewer.
And by the way, did you know—also a tidbit from Ross’s article—that the Chinese used their newfangled invention of paper only for packing and padding in the early days? It was not used for the dissemination of knowledge until some time later.

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The margins of my books are filled with handwritten annotations such as “Absolutely not” and “STOP IT!!!!” and “girl get UP.” These are not necessarily critiques of the story; some are expressions of high praise. Several of my favorite titles are full of characters who utterly vex, agitate, and perturb me.

Last Thursday, the CNN reporter Jeremy Diamond interrogated Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at a press conference in Jerusalem. This act of journalism was not unusual, but what happened next was. Diamond uploaded the exchange to social media, and the footage didn’t simply go viral—it became the locus of a mass digital delusion.

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What is Twitter’s legacy? In this episode of Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel traces how Twitter, now called X, evolved from a status-update tool to one of the most culturally and politically influential—and contentious—platforms of the modern internet. Charlie is joined by early Twitter executive Jason Goldman.