The internet of old was a vibrant bazaar. It was noisy, chaotic, and offbeat. Every click brought you somewhere new, sometimes unpredictable, letting you uncover curiosities you hadn’t even known to look for. The internet of today, however, is a slick concierge. It speaks in soothing statements and offers a frictionless and flattering experience.
This has stripped us of something profoundly human: the joy of exploring and questioning. We’ve willingly become creatures of instant gratification.

Today The Atlantic is announcing that Jonathan Haidt, who has written a number of hugely significant stories for The Atlantic, and Eugene Robinson, one of the most well-known and influential journalists and columnists, will both become contributing writers. The Atlantic will now be the primary home for Jonathan’s most ambitious essays and features, and Eugene joins us most recently from The Washington Post, where he worked for three decades.

Just before heading to his meetings with the leader of China, the president of the United States issued some comments about nuclear weapons, or “nuclear,” as he tends to call them. He wants to resume nuclear bomb tests, something no nuclear state except North Korea has done since the last century.

After a months-long trade war between China and the United States, Presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping are scheduled to meet Thursday in Korea. Both countries seem to be angling for a truce; over the weekend, they announced a “framework” for a possible agreement.
The negotiations offer an occasion to stop to consider how China went from technological backwater to superpower in less than half a lifetime, and an opportunity for the United States to learn from that success. U.S.

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Two weeks ago, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned that the ongoing government shutdown was “starting to cut into muscle.

Updated with new questions at 6:10 p.m. ET on October 29, 2025.
It’s said that the 17th- and 18th-century polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was the last person to know everything. He was a whiz at philosophy, law, logic, science, engineering, politics—the works. But there was also simply less to know back then; the post–Industrial Revolution knowledge explosion killed the universal genius.
Which is to say that I bet Leibniz wouldn’t know the full oeuvre of K-pop if he were alive today.

Urbana, Ohio, is a small city of 11,000, where nearly three out of four voters went for Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election. The journalist Beth Macy, who in her previous books chronicled the widening fissures in American society by examining the opioid crisis and the aftereffects of globalization, grew up there. In Paper Girl, she returns to Urbana—a place beset by economic decline, dwindling public resources, failing schools, and the disappearance of local journalism.