This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
Tesla fueled Elon Musk’s ascent to astronomical wealth and fame.
Perhaps the greatest trick Donald Trump ever pulled was convincing millions of people—and the American media—to treat his lapses into fantasies and gibberish as a normal, meaningful form of oratory. But Trump is not a normal person, and his speeches are not normal political events.
For too long, Trump has gotten away with pretending that his emotional issues are just part of some offbeat New York charm or an expression of his enthusiasm for public performance.
Hours before meeting with his probation officer about his recent felony convictions, a leading candidate for U.S. president went on a bizarre rant about sharks.
America is suffering from a severe housing shortage, and one of the main culprits is exclusionary zoning: regulations that restrict the amount and type of housing that property owners are allowed to construct on their land. Exclusionary zoning slows economic growth, severely limits economic mobility, and imposes burdens that disproportionately fall on racial minorities.
No one simple solution to this problem exists.
The move may signal the beginning of a broad turn on the right against IVF, an issue that many social conservatives see as the “pro-life” movement’s next frontier.
In a landmark case in Florida, a federal jury has ordered Chiquita Brands International to pay over $38 million in damages to the families of eight Colombian men who were killed by paramilitaries the banana giant funded. Chiquita previously pleaded guilty to paying the far-right United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia paramilitary group, or AUC, $1.7 million from 2001 to 2004.
A federal jury found Hunter Biden guilty Tuesday of three felony charges for illegally purchasing a gun at a time when he was using drugs, making him the first child of a sitting U.S. president to be found guilty of a crime. “This was a fairly straightforward case,” says Ben Schreckinger, reporter for Politico. “Most criminal trials result in convictions. This wasn’t an exception.
A pair of new United Nations reports has accused Israel, as well as Hamas, of committing war crimes in Gaza. The damning documents come as Israel and Hamas are being urged to accept the three-phase ceasefire and hostage deal outlined by President Biden and endorsed by the U.N. Security Council.
His new anti-vaccine persona could have far-reaching consequences if he’s elected to a second stint as president with far-reaching administrative powers.
The Biden administration is in court defending a federal law it argues protects emergency abortions. In practice, the statute has offered only limited help.
Democrats hope Republicans who voted against the legislation pay a political price in November.
Advisers to the Food and Drug Administration said using ecstasy to boost therapy for people with post-traumatic stress disorder was not effective.
Lawmakers and the VA hope ecstasy can help treat veterans with PTSD, but there’s reason for doubt.
Friday’s good jobs numbers may be a boost. But boosts haven’t yet materialized into political benefits.
The president is getting more micro in his economic sales pitch as the landscape loses its luster.
Friday’s government report showed that last month’s hiring gain was down sharply from the blockbuster increase of 315,000 in March.
Biden and Trump are both campaigning on warped economic statistics, cherry-picking weird data from the Covid crisis.
Israelis celebrated the return of the four hostages in Saturday’s raid. The four hostages — Noa Argamani, Almog Meir Jan, Andrey Kozlov and Shlomi Ziv — were all in good medical condition. Just hours after the rescue, thousands of Israelis gathered in Tel Aviv and other cities to protest Netanyahu’s government and to call for a deal to free the remaining hostages.
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
Who really benefits from remote work? Is it true that politicians have to be anti-immigration to win elections? Each episode of Good on Paper, the new podcast hosted by my colleague Jerusalem Demsas, delves into a misunderstood policy issue that deserves more nuanced analysis.
There’s no such thing as a miracle cure for weight loss, but the latest obesity drugs seem to come pretty close. People who take Ozempic or other weekly shots belonging to a class known as GLP-1 agonists, after the gut hormone they mimic, can lose a fifth or more of their body weight in a year. Incessant “food noise” fueling the urge to eat suddenly goes silent.
In recent months, the mystique of these drugs has only grown.
Tomorrow, a cricket match will take place in a pop-up stadium on Long Island with turf flown in from Australia. From the venue’s north stand, you can just about discern the tallest skyscrapers and bridges of New York City. At least 30,000 spectators, most of them wearing the light-blue shirt of India, will pack the bleachers. What happens next—a match in the T20 Cricket World Cup between India and the U.S.A.—will be viewed by a huge audience on digital and TV platforms.
The elections to the European Parliament are, for politics junkies, what the World Cup is for soccer fans. There are 27 countries with 27 different sets of parties—center-right, center-left, far right, far left, liberal, conservative, green—and 27 sets of statistics to peruse.
The federal case against Hunter Biden was not, ultimately, a particularly complicated one. Prosecutors said that he’d lied about his drug use when filling out a form to buy a gun. The evidence backed up the claim. And a jury took less than a full day to deliberate before returning a verdict of guilty on three felonies.
The Hunter Biden case is a personal and family tragedy, but like the recent felony conviction of Donald Trump, it is also a demonstration of the strength of rule of law.
We speak with U.S. Army Major Harrison Mann, the first military and intelligence officer to publicly resign over the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza. Mann left his role at the Defense Intelligence Agency after a 13-year career, saying in a public letter explaining his resignation that “nearly unqualified support for the government of Israel … has enabled and empowered the killing and starvation of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians.
More than eight months into Israel’s devastating assault on Gaza, the territory’s healthcare system is barely functioning, with the World Health Organization reporting this week that there have been 464 Israeli attacks on Gaza’s healthcare system since October 7, affecting 101 health facilities.
Residents in all 27 countries of the European Union went to the polls this weekend to vote for the European Parliament, which resulted in a surge of support for far-right parties across much of the continent while many liberal and Green parties stumbled. Far-right parties did especially well in Italy, Germany and France, prompting French President Emmanuel Macron to dissolve the National Assembly and call snap elections.
His new anti-vaccine persona could have far-reaching consequences if he’s elected to a second stint as president with far-reaching administrative powers.
The Biden administration is in court defending a federal law it argues protects emergency abortions. In practice, the statute has offered only limited help.
Democrats hope Republicans who voted against the legislation pay a political price in November.
Advisers to the Food and Drug Administration said using ecstasy to boost therapy for people with post-traumatic stress disorder was not effective.