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.Updated at 8:05 p.m. ET on February 13, 2023Over the past few weeks, U.S. military aircraft have shot down four “objects” over North America, one of which U.S. officials claim was a Chinese surveillance balloon. This is unusual but not a cause for panic.
Their proposal would make Social Security fully solvent through taxes on higher earners and corporations.
It’s not clear what China could have learned from a spy balloon that it wouldn’t have already known from its armada of satellites.
This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he 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.Last week, I asked for your thoughts on preparing for natural disasters.Ed takes stock of his setup:
I live in the country, so I am in a better position than many others.
Steve Marks and other senior officials are accused of using their positions to divert rare, sought-after bourbons for personal use.
For many Americans, wearing a mask has become a relic. But fighting about masks, it seems, has not.Masking has widely been seen as one of the best COVID precautions that people can take. Still, it has sparked ceaseless arguments: over mandates, what types of masks we should wear, and even how to wear them. A new review and meta-analysis of masking studies suggests that the detractors may have a point.
In the pre-balloon era, China was busily engaged in a charm offensive. Following October’s Communist Party congress, at which Xi Jinping won an unprecedented third term in office, Beijing made moves to stifle the combative and confrontational group of diplomats known as wolf warriors. Xi hosted German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in the capital, and condemned Russia’s threats to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine. The tone of China’s leading diplomats noticeably softened.
The North American skies, it turns out, contain lots of unidentified objects. That is the unremarkable conclusion from a remarkable weekend in which fighter jets downed a trio of separate flying things—over Alaska, northern Canada, and Lake Huron. This weekend’s sky wars followed the identification and eventual downing of a Chinese surveillance balloon earlier this month, only after it had traversed the continental United States and was safely over U.S. waters.
February 14 marks the 25th anniversary of V-Day, the global movement to end violence against women, gender-expansive people, girls and the planet. It is also the 10th anniversary of V-Day’s One Billion Rising campaign, a call to action based on the staggering reality that one in three women on the planet will be beaten or raped during her lifetime.
We speak with human rights expert Alena Douhan, a United Nations special rapporteur and one of several U.N. experts calling for the lifting of economic and financial sanctions against Syria in order to aid recovery efforts following last week’s devastating earthquakes. “The people of Syria are currently deprived of any possibility to rebuild their country, and their country needed reconstruction before the earthquake,” says Douhan.
We get an update from Damascus, Syria, on last week’s devastating earthquakes, as the United Nations warns the death toll in Turkey and northwest Syria will top at least 50,000. The U.N. also says the earthquake rescue phase is “coming to a close” and that efforts are expected to turn to providing shelter, food and care to survivors. Millions have been left homeless by the deadly quakes that struck the region, which includes the Syrian city of Aleppo, last week.
The White House is pressing ahead, saying a combination of research on cures and prevention efforts will end the scourge.
Abortion access has come to the center of the national political stage since last June.
The guidance formalizes current recommendations, and does not mandate vaccines.
The Berkeley Research Group’s findings were squashed because they did not align with Trump’s election lies.
The Florida congressman reportedly apologized to the victim’s family after letting the man accused of killing their son lead the Pledge of Allegiance.
The Republican governor’s campaign asked that the city of Tampa ban guns at his event and take the blame for it.
The U.S. representative called out Jonathan Turley during a Congressional hearing for offering up “pure conjecture” about Twitter.
The president promised a lot last year. Here’s how we graded him on some of those pledges.
Noting the 3.4 percent jobless rate, the lowest since May 1969, the president said “the Biden economic play is working.
Fed officials are signaling that they’re determined to keep their vise-like grip on the economy through the end of 2023.
People close to Yellen said she had considered leaving for family reasons and because the Treasury job is highly political — and would become more so with Republicans in control of the House.
As the rate of climate-fueled disasters intensifies, we speak with author and organizer Saket Soni about the workers who are hired by corporations to clean up after hurricanes, floods, blizzards and wildfires. Soni’s new book, “The Great Escape: A True Story of Forced Labor and Immigrant Dreams in America,” focuses on hundreds of Indian workers who were brought to the United States with false promises and subjected to grueling working conditions at a shipyard in Mississippi.
In an in-depth interview with longtime consumer advocate Ralph Nader, we look at Republican-led efforts to gut Medicare and Social Security amid debt limit talks, backed by some Democrats, and other proposed cuts to the social safety net, as well as corporate greed and watchdog journalism. Nader also discusses his newly launched newspaper, the Capitol Hill Citizen.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is in Brussels today to address the European Union Parliament. The visit comes after he made surprise trips to Paris and London where he urged European nations to begin providing Ukraine with fighter jets and long-range weapons. Meanwhile, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres has repeated his call for the war to end.
As the death toll tops 17,000 in Turkey and Syria from Monday’s twin earthquakes, we look at the situation in Syria, where 12 years of brutal war have left the country’s institutions in tatters, further complicating aid efforts. Syrian writer, dissident and former political prisoner Yassin al-Haj Saleh describes how the war has killed about 2% of Syrians and displaced 7 million more, or about a third of the population.
It was found in the strangest place.
Red and white—conveying fire and blankness—were such perfect colors for Rihanna to strobe at us tonight. Over 18 years in the spotlight, the singer has left no doubt that she’s a woman of depth and range, with wild fascinations and gut-held convictions and a rich personal life. But by now, we should understand that she’s never going to show us all of that—because no artist ever could, and because she’s not going to bullshit us otherwise.
“That is probably going to be the nexus of real bipartisan work,” Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said.
How often driving down those roads
we hoped we wouldn’t hit something,
the goats we’d passed that morning
herded by that hour so the jackals
wouldn’t make quick work of them,
red yolk rupturing over peaks
as we raced the light down the mountain.Only once did a boar burst out of the woods
like a question just as soon retracted.