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.Reading short novels and encountering a range of characters’ worlds in quick succession can be a singular pleasure, especially in the summertime.First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:
Elon Musk really broke Twitter this time.
John D. Haltigan sued the University of California at Santa Cruz in May. He wants to work there as a professor of psychology. But he alleges that its hiring practices violate the First Amendment by imposing an ideological litmus test on prospective hires: To be considered, an applicant must submit a statement detailing their contributions to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Twitter may have just had its worst weekend ever, technically speaking. In response to a series of server emergencies, Elon Musk, the Twitter owner and self-professed free-speech “absolutist,” decided to limit how many tweets people can view, and how they can view them. This was not your average fail whale. It was the social-media equivalent of Costco implementing a 10-items-or-fewer rule, or a 24-hour diner closing at 7 p.m.
Don’t want to miss a single column? Sign up to get Caleb’s writing in your inbox.The ancient Greeks called it katabasis: a test of heroism by descent into the underworld. The deeper you go, the more difficult the journey becomes. But if you can withstand the heat as you approach eternal damnation, you return to Earth’s surface with the wisdom to transcend mortal fear. This mythic quest has long captured the cultural imagination, from Orpheus to Barbarian.
Whistleblower Dan Ellsberg joined us after the Justice Department charged WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange with 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act for publishing U.S. military and diplomatic documents exposing U.S. war crimes. Assange is locked up in London and faces up to 175 years in prison if extradited and convicted in the United States.
As we remember Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, who died in June, we look at how he was also a lifelong anti-nuclear activist, stemming from his time working as a nuclear planner for the U.S. government. In December 2017, he joined us to discuss his memoir, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. “This was an actual war plan for how we would use the existing weapons,” he noted, “many of which I had seen already that time.
Over the past 50 years, Daniel Ellsberg remained an antiwar and anti-nuclear activist who inspired a new generation of whistleblowers. In his last interview with Democracy Now!, in April, he spoke about the war in Ukraine and why it required a diplomatic solution, and about the latest leak of Pentagon documents by Air National Guard member Jack Teixeira, who has been indicted on six counts of willful retention and transmission of classified information.
In a special broadcast, we remember the life and legacy of Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, who died in June at the age of 92, just months after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. In 1971, Daniel Ellsberg, then a top military strategist working for the RAND Corporation, risked life in prison by secretly copying and then leaking 7,000 pages of top-secret documents outlining the secret history of the U.S. War in Vietnam.
GOP lawmakers say President Joe Biden is using PEPFAR to promote abortion rights.
It’ll be years before many blue-state efforts to expand abortion access have an impact.
The 10-page document reveals no proof of either a lab leak or an animal host.
The company is pushing back a promotional campaign three weeks to get past the news.
Not everything played out the way people expected.
The push to own the economy, by literally branding it with the president’s name, is not without risk.
Inflation slowed to just 4% in May.
On the final day of the Supreme Court’s term, we speak with David Dayen, executive editor of The American Prospect, about recent revelations detailing many of the Supreme Court conservative justices’ close relationships to Republican megadonors, and how allegations of financial impropriety further delegitimize the court’s standing as an objective legal authority. “These are lifetime appointments,” says Dayen. “This is what arrogance looks like.
The Supreme Court has struck down President Biden’s plan to provide relief to 40 million student borrowers of up to $20,000 in student loan debt. We speak to David Dayen, executive editor of The American Prospect, about how one of the key complainant states, Missouri, hinged its opposition on the argument that its state agency, the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority, or MOHELA, will be harmed by the debt relief plan.
In one of the last cases in the Supreme Court’s current session, the justices ruled in favor of a wedding website designer who wants to be allowed to refuse service to same-sex couples. Lorie Smith of Colorado filed the lawsuit with help from the right-wing Alliance Defending Freedom as part of the group’s ongoing attempt to roll back the rights of LGBTQ people. But as reporter Melissa Gira Grant discovered, part of the case may be built on a lie.
The conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court has declared race-conscious admissions policies at colleges and universities across the country to be unlawful, effectively ending affirmative action in education. The landmark 6-3 ruling was along ideological lines and strikes down decades of precedent, but stops short of banning legacy admissions and allows military academies to continue using affirmative action.
The former president’s claim about his indictment doesn’t pass the sniff test.
The New York Democrat named what the Supreme Court is “destroying” following its affirmative action and student loan debt forgiveness decisions last week.
Glenn Kirschner explained what the special counsel’s reported ongoing investigation into the classified materials case means.
The former New Jersey governor says the “control freak” former president is really alarmed over this development.
Jill Wine-Banks spelled out what’s likely now in store for the former president.
On January 24, 2017, the poet Jane Hirshfield was boiling mad. Five days into Donald Trump’s presidency, his administration had cut mentions of climate change from its website; in several federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Agriculture, employees were forbidden from speaking publicly about their research without authorization.
This article was originally published by Undark Magazine.In October 2021, 84-year-old Jim Yeldell was diagnosed with Stage 3 lung cancer. The first drug he tried disrupted his balance and coordination, so his doctor halved the dose to minimize these side effects, Yeldell recalls. In addition, his physician recommended a course of treatment that included chemotherapy, radiation, and a drug targeting a specific genetic mutation.
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.Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer reveals what’s keeping them entertained.Today’s special guest is Atlantic contributing writer Ian Bogost, who is also the director of the film-and-media-studies program at Washington University in St.
Anglophone readers of Mieko Kanai’s whirling, urgent novel Mild Vertigo will face only one disappointment: There’s not yet much more where it came from. Kanai was born in Japan in 1947 and has written roughly 30 novels and story collections over the course of a career that has also included poetry, criticism, and essay writing, but so far only a fraction of her body of work has appeared in English.Mild Vertigo, translated by Polly Barton, should generate high demand for more.
In 2017, as Hurricane Harvey came barreling toward Texas, Patrick Rios, the mayor of a coastal community called Rockport, had a morbid message for residents who might consider ignoring an evacuation order. “We’re suggesting if people are going to stay here, mark their arm with a Sharpie marker with their name and Social Security number,” Rios warned would-be holdouts.
GOP lawmakers say President Joe Biden is using PEPFAR to promote abortion rights.