This week, Meta launched its Twitter competitor: Instagram’s Threads. I chatted with my colleague Charlie Warzel, who covers technology, about why Threads is appealing to users, and what it would take for the platform to succeed.First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:
“Step aside, Joe Biden.
This is an edition of the revamped Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.The lonely, alienated young male narrator is a common figure in literature across time and place. Readers encounter him in the unnamed, frenzied protagonist who stalks around Christiania in Knut Hamsun’s Hunger; in Leopold Bloom as he wanders James Joyce’s Dublin in Ulysses; and in J. D.
Marjorie Taylor Greene has been called many things, but she has never been called a moderate squish.Until now.The U.S. representative from Georgia was apparently kicked out of the House Freedom Caucus, the hard-right group famous for bedeviling Republican House speakers, in a vote last month, Politico first reported. Representative Andy Harris, a board member, told several outlets about the outcome.
On the 10th anniversary of the 2013 coup in Egypt when General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi removed the country’s first democratically elected president from power, we speak with author Shadi Hamid about “Lessons for the Next Arab Spring,” in which he details how the Obama administration helped to kill the democratic uprising across the Middle East.
In Guatemala, election officials have rejected an attempt by the ruling business and political elite to overturn the results of last month’s first round of the presidential election. Sandra Torres, the former first lady, accused of corruption, and her allies challenged the results of June’s first-round elections, which saw the progressive, anti-corruption candidate Bernardo Arévalo win second place and force a runoff.
A damning new database reveals thousands of lobbyists are working for fossil fuel companies at the same time they represent hundreds of cities, universities, tech companies and even environmental groups that claim to be taking steps to address the climate crisis. We speak with The Guardian’s environmental reporter Oliver Milman.
This week unprecedented temperatures driven by climate change shattered heat records around the world. More records could be broken soon, as scientists say 2023 is set to be one of the warmest years in the history of planet Earth. “We can’t stop global warming at this point,” says Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org. “All we can do is try to stop it short of the place where it cuts civilizations off at the knees.
This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here. In 2000, I got the RIM 957, my first BlackBerry. It received, in real time, emails sent to my work account. Such receipt would cause the device to flash a light and buzz, pager-style. It buzzed constantly.
Midway through his concurrence with the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down affirmative action, Justice Clarence Thomas deploys one of the most absurd and baffling arguments ever put to paper by a justice.
Democrats have long wanted Biden to go after “junk insurance.
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 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.
Former acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal has a blunt reality check for the former president.
“Don’t take my word for it, go read the Constitution,” Pence told the woman during a 2024 campaign stop in Iowa.
The New York Democrat said Biden had done “quite well” given the party’s limitations.
“This is the problem with someone who doesn’t think about this country and its citizens first,” the former New Jersey governor said.
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.The Supreme Court’s debt-relief ruling is a blow to President Joe Biden—and to the millions of people who expected that some of their loans would be forgiven. The Biden administration is quickly moving to its Plan B for relieving student debt, but little about this process will be quick.
Questions linger around how many patients will be able to access the drug with limited coverage from Medicare.
Threads is here. It’s Twitter, but on Instagram. If that makes sense to you, we’re sorry, and also, you are the target audience for Threads: people who like to publish text posts on the internet but say they have ~worries~ (with tildes, just like that) about Elon Musk, the billionaire-king who now owns the bird app.
Last September in Paris, I attended a screening of the Netflix feature Athena, about an apocalyptic insurrection following the videotaped killing of a teenager of North African descent by a group of men dressed as police. The unrest begins within an isolated French hyperghetto and blooms into a nationwide civil war, a dismal progression that no longer seems entirely far-fetched.
The Biden administration’s new proposal would place further restrictions on short-term health insurance plans.
When President Joe Biden visits South Carolina to tout a new solar-energy-manufacturing facility today, he will underscore a striking pattern: Some of the biggest winners from his economic agenda have been Republican-leaning places whose political leaders have consistently opposed his initiatives.
We speak with Democratic Congressmember Ro Khanna of California about several topics.
We speak with BBC Arabic correspondent Rasha Qandeel, whose new documentary investigates Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s role in producing the highly addictive amphetamine known as Captagon and how this is impacting his relations with other states in the region.
The United Nations General Assembly has approved a resolution to establish an independent body to investigate what happened to more than 130,000 people who went missing during the conflict in Syria over the last 12 years. The Syrian government opposed the resolution, along with Russia, China, Belarus, North Korea, Cuba and Iran. “This is one of the most painful chapters in the Syrian crisis,” says Dr.
Press freedom groups around the world have condemned the brutal attack on Russian journalist Elena Milashina, who was beaten by unknown assailants in the Chechen capital of Grozny on July 4. Milashina, a reporter for Novaya Gazeta, was in town to report on Chechnya’s ongoing attacks on LGBTQ people when she was assaulted along with lawyer Alexander Nemov.
