The smoke is back. Large swaths of America are once again engulfed in a toxic haze that’s drifted down from Canada, which is experiencing its worst fire season on record. Our northern neighbor has burned through a record-breaking 8.2 million hectares so far this year, sending smoke plumes as far as Europe.
This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.Say you have dinner plans with a friend on Friday night. You’ve already chosen a spot and made the reservation. Just as you’re about to head out to meet them, they text you to cancel, saying that they’re exhausted from the week.
One of the through lines in Grease, the 1978 John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John musical, is the squelching of chewing gum. Members of the Pink Ladies, a rebellious clique of high-school girls, repeatedly appear on-screen either smoking cigarettes or chewing the confectionery. In the film, gum identifies the rule breakers: It was so core to Grease that a production designer claimed that he ordered 100,000 sticks for the actors.
A few weeks ago, as the first wave of smoke from the Canadian wildfires rolled south, I was getting ready to drive from Charlottesville, Virginia, about 18 hours west to my hometown of Rogers, Arkansas, to visit family. I figured that by the time I hit the Virginia–North Carolina border, where I was planning to camp, I would have outrun the haze. But it followed me past the campsite and along I-40 in Tennessee, all the way to my corner of Arkansas, just 20 minutes away from Oklahoma.
The riot, when it finally happened, was a leisurely one. In the weeks leading up to August 11, 1834, the people of Boston had been openly discussing burning down the Ursuline Convent that stood just outside the city, in what is now Somerville. The convent, many had become convinced, was a den of sexual iniquity, where priests used the confessional as a mixture of blackmail and mind control to exert power over young women and force them into sexual depravity.
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.
Miguel Cardona name-dropped Sen. Markwayne Mullin and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene following the Supreme Court decision blocking student loan relief.
The 12-week abortion ban will take effect, but the temporary injunction will allow patients to obtain medication abortions at early stages of their pregnancy.
Attorney General Gentner Drummond said “there is no provision of law in Oklahoma to throw elected officials out of office merely for saying something offensive.
The Supreme Court’s ruling “promotes supremacy at the expense of equality,” said the couple behind the Masterpiece Cakeshop case.
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.After a chaotic summer of air travel in 2022, flights have been running relatively smoothly this year. But then storms in the Northeast this past week caused a series of flight cancellations.
The psychodrama over whether John Roberts is in control of the court is irrelevant when the justices just keep enacting the conservative policy agenda.
Nestled within yesterday’s Supreme Court decision declaring that race-conscious admissions programs, like those at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, are unconstitutional is a crucial carveout: Colleges are free to consider “an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life.” In other words, they can weigh a candidate’s race when it is mentioned in an admissions essay.
In 2016, I gave up Diet Coke. This was no small adjustment. I was born and raised in suburban Atlanta, home to the Coca-Cola Company’s global headquarters, and I had never lived in a home without Diet Coke stocked in the refrigerator at all times. Every morning in high school, I’d slam one with breakfast, and then I’d make sure to shove some quarters (a simpler time) in my back pocket to use in the school’s vending machines.
Championing an underappreciated television show can be a joy, an inside secret you’ll share with other fans who have stumbled upon the same discovery. Sure, it’s no fun to feel like you’re the only person in your friend group watching, for instance, Veronica Mars—I certainly did back in the aughts—but as more people caught up and caught on over the years, finally getting to talk about the biggest twists and the best performances felt thrilling.
Over breakfast yesterday, I read that physicists had discovered a sonic hum perhaps caused by enormous objects like black holes converging and rippling the space-time continuum. I grew up in my grandparents’ railroad apartment in South Brooklyn, and now live a life that stuns me with its privilege and creative freedom—I’m someone who thinks a lot about space and time, and how one traverses them.
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.
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.