Last month, the surgeon general released a lengthy advisory calling attention to social media and its effects on the mental health of teenagers. Historically, a warning from the surgeon general pointed a big neon sign at an issue that we might not be sure how much to worry about: cigarettes, AIDS, drunk driving. But people are already worried about social media—and they’re acting on those concerns.
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.Yesterday, news outlets reported the existence of a recording in which Donald Trump discusses his possession of classified documents. The recording could prove legally damaging, but its existence also reveals something important about how the former president operates.
Cohen’s appointment would come at a transition point for the CDC.
Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Question of the WeekIf there were a Hall of Fame for song lyrics and you got to make one nomination, what would it be and why? (The linguist John McWhorter might pick something from Steely Dan.)Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com.
If the writer-director Nicole Holofcener could predict the future, she’d guess that no matter what happens to the planet, no matter how much human society evolves and devolves, our descendants will still get emotionally distressed over something small, petty, and entirely irrelevant to anyone else. People hurting each other’s feelings, she told me over Zoom last week, is “going to happen until the end of the world.
Advocates for student debt relief are raising the alarm over a controversial part of the bipartisan deal to raise the U.S. debt ceiling that would end the freeze on student loan repayments by the end of August. The moratorium has been in place since 2020. Meanwhile, the fate of the Biden administration’s plan to forgive up to $20,000 in student debt for borrowers is going to be decided by the Supreme Court, where it is likely to face skepticism from the conservative majority.
We host a roundtable discussion with three experts in artificial intelligence on growing concerns over the technology’s potential dangers. Yoshua Bengio, known as one of the three “godfathers of AI,” is a professor at the University of Montreal and founder and scientific director at Mila–Quebec AI Institute. Bengio is also a signatory of the Future of Life Institute open letter calling for a pause on large AI experiments.
The battle showed how hard it can be to tackle rising health care costs.
Resneck talks to POLITICO about the group’s challenges — from legal threats to AI — as he prepares to step down.
Debt ceiling talks and court battles risk also cutting off public health funding and PrEP drug access.
Negotiations between Biden and GOP leaders are targeting public health dollars slated for combating record infection rates.
During a two-hour oral argument, the judges appeared sympathetic to an anti-abortion medical group seeking to revoke the FDA’s approval of mifepristone.
The Fed is paying particular attention to so-called core prices, which exclude volatile food and energy costs and are regarded as a better gauge of longer-term inflation trends.
POLITICO asked a panel of strategists and elected officials what under-the-radar issue they think could play an outsize role in 2024.
The slowdown reflects the impact of the Fed’s aggressive drive to tame inflation.
Sen. Markwayne Mullin’s outburst causes his colleagues to erupt in laughter.
The Fox News analyst cackled on air at one of the former president’s claims.
Derek Myers’ account of how he was hired raises questions about potential ethical improprieties around the New York congressman.
Ty Cobb, who served in the Trump White House, said new recording “eviscerates” Trump’s already-weak defense.
Faced with a Monday deadline, a compromise bill with big spending cuts is halfway to President Joe Biden’s desk.
Shortly after House Speaker Kevin McCarthy announced that he had struck a deal with President Joe Biden to raise the debt ceiling, Republican leaders began circulating a fact sheet to their members listing the victories McCarthy had secured. The first bullet point captured what was supposedly the whole point of the negotiations for the GOP: The newly christened Fiscal Responsibility Act would cut spending.
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.As my colleague Matteo Wong noted earlier this month, a hotter-than-usual summer may await many Americans.
Republicans and Democrats have reached a debt-ceiling deal. Republicans will agree not to blow up the global economy if Democrats trim federal spending over the next two years, claw back money from the Internal Revenue Service, speed up the country’s energy-permitting process, and impose new work requirements on the food-stamp and welfare programs, among other changes.Perhaps this is the best deal the two sides could have reached. Perhaps it is not that big a deal at all.
Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Replies have been edited for length and clarity.Last week I asked readers if they want Ron DeSantis’s Republican primary campaign to succeed or to fail.
This article contains spoilers through the Season 4 finale of Succession.“The journey we went on with the amniocentesis after what the blood test showed us—everything looks healthy.” With these understated words uttered by a doctor over the phone, we learned in Episode 4 of Succession’s final season that Shiv Roy (played beautifully by Sarah Snook) was pregnant. But in the episodes that followed, the show hardly acknowledged her impending motherhood.
We look at the impact of the reelection of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan Sunday in a tight runoff vote, extending his 20-year rule for a further five years. Erdoğan received just over 52% of the vote, beating challenger Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, an economist and former civil servant who unified a broad coalition but failed to unseat Erdoğan despite growing dissatisfaction with his governance and deep economic pain within the country.
We go to Kampala, Uganda, to discuss the impact of one of the most draconian anti-LGBTQ laws in the world, just signed by Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni. The new law makes same-sex relationships punishable by life imprisonment. Some LGBTQ people could receive the death sentence.
We look at how a new Supreme Court ruling awards a major victory to polluters and land developers. In a 5-4 decision last week, the justices sharply limited the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency to protect and preserve wetlands under the Clean Water Act. The ruling ends protections for about half of all the wetlands in the contiguous United States, jeopardizing access to safe drinking water for millions.
As lawmakers push through the bipartisan deal to raise the debt limit, it is being called a “dirty debt ceiling deal” by opponents because it includes language meant to speed completion of the Mountain Valley Pipeline. The controversial $6.6 billion pipeline would go through Virginia and West Virginia and carry 2 billion cubic feet of fracked gas across more than a thousand streams and wetlands in Appalachia.
Resneck talks to POLITICO about the group’s challenges — from legal threats to AI — as he prepares to step down.