During a conversation onstage at a Moms for Liberty event last week, Donald Trump said something that made even me—a seasoned visitor to Trump’s theme park of hyperbole—look around in confusion at the people around me in the audience.
“The transgender thing is incredible,” he told the Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice. “Think of it; your kid goes to school, and he comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child.

Today is the publication date for two new books from Atlantic Editions, an imprint of The Atlantic and the independent publisher Zando: On Heroism: McCain, Milley, Mattis, and the Cowardice of Donald Trump, by Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of The Atlantic and host of Washington Week on PBS; and On the Housing Crisis: Land, Development, Democracy, by Jerusalem Demsas, a staff writer and host of the new Atlantic policy podcast, Good on Paper.

Not that long ago, in the summer of 2020, the moment seemed ripe for meaningful criminal-justice reform in America. Millions of people joined demonstrations denouncing the police killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, among others, and to call for racial justice. There was a feeling that real progress was about to be made in tackling the problem of mass incarceration in the United States that began in the 1970s and that disproportionately affects communities of color.

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Hicham Lamlas of Team Morocco collides with Maximiliano Espinillo of Team Argentina during a men’s preliminary group B blind football match on day four of the Paris 2024 Summer Paralympic Games at Eiffel Tower Stadium. Blind football is played between two teams of five, made up of four vision-impaired outfield players wearing blindfolds and a goalkeeper who is sighted or partially sighted.

There was a thin hope that despite everything, he might actually return home. It was stoked by a series of images that unexpectedly emerged.
Not long after Hersh Goldberg-Polin’s abduction on October 7, CNN stumbled on video of terrorists loading the Berkeley-born, Jerusalem-raised 24-year-old into a pickup truck, the stump of one of his arms wrapped in a tourniquet because a grenade had blown off the rest. It was proof of life.

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Gold medalist Nicholas Bennett of Team Canada celebrates during the victory ceremony for the men’s SB14 100-meter breaststroke final event at the Paris La Defense Arena in Nanterre, France, on September 2, 2024. The SB14 classification is for swimmers with an intellectual impairment. Bennett, who is autistic, won his second medal of the games, and Team Canada’s first gold medal of the 2024 Paralympic games.