The very last shot of Jesse Eisenberg’s new film, A Real Pain, is identical to its first: a close-up of the tortured, weary face of Benji Kaplan, played by Kieran Culkin with a frenetic intensity familiar from his work on Succession. That his sad eyes remain static despite all he has seen is significant, because this is, ostensibly, a Holocaust film, and everyone is supposed to be changed by the end of a Holocaust film.
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
If I were to assign one book to every American voter this week, it would be Alexei Navalny’s Patriot. Half memoir, half prison diary, it testifies to the brutal treatment of the Russian dissident, who died in a Siberian prison last February. Still, as my colleague Gal Beckerman noted last week in The Atlantic, the writing is surprisingly funny.
Since September 29, when the smell of chlorine first began to waft over metro Atlanta, Georgia residents’ lives have been upended by an enormous chemical fire. That day, a chemical plant containing millions of pounds of pool sanitizer burned to the ground in Conyers, Georgia. The blaze was extinguished in hours, but an enormous plume of orange and black smoke remained for days, so thick that drivers on Interstate 20 struggled to see past their windshield.
With just days to go before the November 5 presidential election, fears are growing that Republicans intend to interfere with the official results in order to install Donald Trump as president. At Sunday’s Madison Square Garden rally, Trump said he had a “little secret” with House Speaker Mike Johnson that would have a “big impact” on the outcome, though neither he nor Johnson elaborated on what that entailed.
We speak with The Nation’s John Nichols in Wisconsin, where Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are spending a lot of their time in the closing days of the election in a tight battle for the state’s 10 Electoral College votes. Nichols also discusses the battle for the Senate, with key races in Wisconsin and Nebraska; how New York races could tip control of the House to Democrats; and why Kamala Harris needs to expand her message beyond the threat of Trump’s authoritarianism.
Kamala Harris is blasting Donald Trump for vowing to protect women whether they “like it or not” at the same time he is calling for Republican Liz Cheney to be shot in the face. We get response from The Nation’s abortion access correspondent Amy Littlefield and talk about 10 states with abortion rights on the ballot, including Arizona, Nevada, Florida, South Dakota and Missouri. Trump’s remarks are a “succinct and clear definition of patriarchy,” says Littlefield.
If you want to hit Jeff Bezos, show him you’re willing to hit him where he makes his money, even if that means inconveniencing yourself.
Masayoshi Son threw fortunes at enterprises that would crash or soar. Here’s how he made billions.
People are shelling out to learn skills once reserved for doomsday preppers or reality show contestants.
Traffickers are to blame, the candidates say. Virtually no one’s talking about treatment.
Arizona is one of several states where right-leaning groups are backing conservative judges as they prepare to challenge newly passed ballot measures protecting abortion.
Missteps by the World Health Organization, a vaccine manufacturer and an African country led to another health emergency, experts say.
Trump says he’ll veto legislation to ban the procedure.
Harris has ratcheted up her warnings about the dangers of a second Trump term in recent weeks.
The Democratic nominee isn’t campaigning much on the Biden administration’s bigger, slower-moving policies.
The Treasury secretary is defending her legacy — and warning that the stability of the U.S. economy is at stake.
It was her first solo interview with a national network as the Democratic presidential nominee.
Interest rate cut “is not a declaration of victory, it’s a declaration of progress.
Anti-trans attacks are a key part of Donald Trump’s campaign message, and Republicans are spending tens of millions of dollars in the last stretch of the presidential race to flood the airwaves and social media with political ads that focus on transgender rights. “Transphobia is not just a plank but a key pillar of the Republican Party,” says journalist Imara Jones of TransLash Media. “The Republican Party has become an extremist movement.
After the second attempt on his life, Donald Trump accused his political opponents of inspiring the attacks against him with their rhetoric. The reality, however, is that Trump himself has a long record—singular among American presidents of the modern era—of inciting and threatening violence against his fellow citizens, journalists, and anyone he deems his opposition. Below is a partial list of his violent comments, from the 2016 presidential campaign until today.
A party faction that includes several GOP governors says government shouldn’t get involved.
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present, surface delightful treasures, and examine the American idea.
This year’s presidential election is the 60th in the history of the United States. The Atlantic has for 42 of those election cycles published stories examining the fitness of candidates to serve, the inclinations of the voting public to vote, and the sturdiness of our democratic institutions to carry on.
When Shannon Coulter first started listening to Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear’s speech at the Democratic National Convention in August, she thought it seemed fairly standard. “All women,” he said, “should have the freedom to make their own decisions, freedom over their own bodies, freedom about whether to pursue IVF.” But then he said something that she rarely hears from political leaders: Women should also have “freedom about whether to have children at all.
If the presidential election has provided relief from anything, it has been the generative-AI boom. Neither Kamala Harris nor Donald Trump has made much of the technology in their public messaging, and they have not articulated particularly detailed AI platforms. Bots do not seem to rank among the economy, immigration, abortion rights, and other issues that can make or break campaigns.
But don’t be fooled.
Representative Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat in a tight race for a Senate seat, has been on the defensive about a manufacturing renaissance happening in her own backyard.
Thanks to incentives that President Joe Biden’s administration has championed in the Inflation Reduction Act and other legislation, Michigan alone could see 50,000 or more new jobs by 2030 brought on by the boom in electric vehicles.
We speak with former Ohio state senator and Bernie Sanders presidential campaign staffer Nina Turner about how the 2024 election has left her and many voters “frustrated” and “exhausted.” While she is not endorsing a candidate, she denounces the white supremacist rhetoric of the Trump campaign, which she notes is “as American as apple pie.
“There can be no middle ground, not in this moment.” As the U.S. presidential race draws to a close, Bishop William Barber, the national co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, founding director of the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale Divinity School and co-author of White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy, explains why he is endorsing Kamala Harris for president in his personal capacity.
We are joined by U.N. special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory, Francesca Albanese, who says Israel is committing genocide on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Facing accusations of antisemitism from Israeli and U.S.
