It’s August, but Santa Claus is hard at work. No, he’s not busy checking his lists or helping the elves make presents for all the good little children around the world. He’s livestreaming on TikTok, where he has 1.3 million followers.And this year, Santa’s the one with the wish list.
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.Church attendance in America has been on the decline in recent decades.
The autopsy should have been a piece of cake. My patient had a history of widely metastatic cancer, which was pretty straightforward as far as causes of death go. Entering the various body cavities, my colleague and I found what we anticipated: Nearly every organ was riddled with tumors. But after we had completed the work, I realized that I knew why the patient had died, but not why he’d died that day. We found no evidence of a heart attack or blood clot or ruptured bowel.
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 WeekDonald Trump is guilty of deplorable actions, under indictment for multiple crimes, and yet remains the most popular candidate with voters in the Republican Party’s presidential primary.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado has sued the FBI, the Colorado Springs Police Department and local officers for illegally spying on local activist Jacqueline “Jax” Armendariz Unzueta and the Chinook Center, a community organizing hub in Colorado Springs. “This was one of the worst moments of my life,” says Unzueta, who describes the investigation by law enforcement as “incredibly invasive.
After the Center for Countering Digital Hate reported that hate speech has soared on the website formerly known as Twitter, now rebranded as “X,” Elon Musk responded by filing a lawsuit against the center over the research, calling the group “evil” and its CEO Imran Ahmed a “rat.” X accuses the watchdog group of unlawfully accessing data to “falsely claim it had statistical support showing the platform is overwhelmed with harmful content.
A federal jury has sentenced to death the gunman who killed 11 worshipers at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in the deadliest act of antisemitism in U.S. history. Robert Bowers was found guilty of federal hate crimes for the 2018 massacre. This is the first time federal prosecutors have successfully sought the death penalty under the Biden administration, which has imposed a moratorium on executions.
District Judge B. Lynn Winmill called it a First Amendment issue.
New data from the nonpartisan health advocacy group March of Dimes shows that the U.S. saw a 4 percent decline in hospitals with labor and delivery services between 2019 and 2020.
The number of hospitalizations is still near an all-time low.
Republicans rejected a Democratic bid to re-up PEPFAR via the annual defense policy bill.
Medicaid expansion is set to begin October 1 if Republican lawmakers fund it.
Trump saw slightly more support from his base than Biden, with 88 percent of registered Republicans selecting Trump versus 83 percent of Democrats choosing Biden.
The president pledged to weigh eliminating the debt limit — for good. Instead, he’s got a group weighing options.
On the wonky right, it’s a battle over manifestos — and the GOP’s future.
Thursday’s estimate from the Commerce Department indicated that the gross domestic product picked up from the 2% growth rate in the January-March quarter.
In an in-depth interview, we look at the life and legacy of the groundbreaking musician Sinéad O’Connor, who converted to Islam and also started using the name Shuhada’ Sadaqat in 2018. O’Connor died last week at the age of 56 and was known for her music as much as for her outspoken activism.
Democracy Now! co-host Juan González remembers his longtime friend and comrade, Juan Ramos, a founder and leader of the Young Lords chapter in Philadelphia in the early 1970s who recently died after a long bout with Alzheimer’s. “It’s really not possible to overestimate the influence that Juan Ramos had on the social and political and liberation struggles of the Puerto Rican, Latino community, but also all communities, in Philadelphia,” shares González.
Graham argued that Republicans need to win in 2024 “to stop this crazy crap” after harshly criticizing the judge overseeing the former president’s Jan. 6 case.
The son of the former president was given a quick lesson in recent history.
Fulton County Sheriff Pat Labat said an indictment there would follow normal procedures.
Donald Trump’s legal team is characterizing his Jan. 6 indictment as an attack on the former president’s right to free speech.
“Free speech does not give you a right to engage in a conspiracy,” said the former attorney general in Trump’s administration.
In January, one of the first acts of the new Republican House majority was to establish a special subcommittee devoted to rooting out the ways the FBI and other federal bodies have supposedly been used as tools of political persecution.“We have a duty to get into these agencies and look at how they have been weaponized to go against the very people they’re supposed to represent,” said Representative Jim Jordan, the Trump ally who chairs the body.
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 Ukrainian counteroffensive, under way since the spring, is slogging through miles of trenches and minefields. Progress will depend on the battlefield, not on Western impatience.
Come November of next year, Donald Trump might be elected president of the nation whose democracy he attempted to overthrow. Although it’s early, Trump is polling strongly against his successor, President Joe Biden, despite having been indicted for state and federal crimes, including a conspiracy to keep himself in power after his 2020 election loss.
The long-awaited federal indictment of Donald Trump for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election may be necessary to contain the threat to American democracy that he has unleashed. But it’s unlikely to be sufficient.The germ of election denialism that Trump injected into the American political system has spread so far throughout the Republican Party that it is virtually certain to survive whatever legal accountability the former president faces.
Nearly a year and a half after Russia invaded Ukraine, we speak with defense and international affairs expert Rajan Menon about the state of the war and prospects for peace. “The difficulty is that neither side, neither Ukraine nor Russia, feels that it is losing the war,” says Menon, director of the Grand Strategy program at Defense Priorities and a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies.
We unpack the explosive new criminal charges against Donald Trump for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, marking his third indictment in four months as he continues to campaign for reelection in 2024.
The number of hospitalizations is still near an all-time low.