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.Attendance at an elite college increases a student’s chances of joining America’s most elite ranks, according to a new study.
Hollywood has always had a short memory. Industry analysts will predict doom for the future of cinema for months, then exult when a new release defies expectations. This summer has been no exception: A few blockbusters such as The Flash and Indiana Jones underperformed, and hand-wringing quickly ensued. But last weekend brought a colossal turnaround, thanks to Barbenheimer—the head-to-head releases of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer.
This article contains spoilers for the film Barbie.As soon as I asked a question about Ken, my call with Greta Gerwig dropped. When the writer-director of Barbie returned, she had no idea what happened. I suggested that of course merely mentioning Ken—the pining and overlooked doll played by Ryan Gosling—would cause a failure of some sort. Gerwig agreed. “The world was like, I don’t care,” she joked.But the world cares very much about the movie he’s in.
The Knesset’s passage of legislation yesterday to curtail the authority of Israel’s Supreme Court marks a new era for the state of Israel. The disjuncture comes not because of the legal implications alone, although they are substantial. Nor because of the economic, diplomatic, and security damage wrought in the short time since Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu returned to office, although it is considerable.
In February of 1949, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the former director of Los Alamos Laboratory under the Manhattan Project, took to the pages of this magazine to write about a terrible defeat. Nearly four years had passed since the Manhattan Project had detonated the first atomic bomb in New Mexico. The explosion had flashed purple light onto the surrounding mountains and raised a 40,000-foot pillar of flame, smoke, and debris from the desert floor.
Kurdish peace activist Kani Xulam is in New York City after his solo 300-mile, 24-day walk from the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., to the United Nations headquarters. His arrival Monday coincided with the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne, which partitioned Kurdistan into four parts — British Iraq, French Syria, Turkey and Iran — which left the Kurdish people without a recognized sovereign state.
Amid a widening crackdown on abortion access, 19 Republican attorneys general in states where abortion is illegal are demanding the right for local governments to access the private medical records of patients in order to see if they obtained abortions out of state. We speak to Tamarra Wieder, state director of Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates in Louisville, Kentucky, where residents are crossing state lines to access abortion care due to the state’s near-total abortion ban.
We speak with two Israeli journalists in Tel Aviv after lawmakers in Israel passed a highly contested bill Monday weakening the power of the Supreme Court by preventing it from blocking government decisions it deems unreasonable. The bill is part of a broader set of judicial reforms pushed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that has sparked months of unprecedented protests, which continued last night.
The administration is proposing rules to force them to cover mental health like other care.
Four veterans are dead and the projected budget for the system has ballooned to more than $50 billion.
The push to own the economy, by literally branding it with the president’s name, is not without risk.
“I’m like, seriously asking you this,” said the former Biden White House press secretary.
Bernard Kerik worked with Rudy Giuliani to investigate unfounded claims of voter fraud after the 2020 presidential election.
“She said I’m messing with homeless people … One should be happy if someone wants to make love to them,” said the New York City mayor, chuckling.
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.Last week, seven technology companies appeared at the White House and agreed to voluntary guardrails around the use of AI. In promising to take these steps, the companies are nodding to the potential risks of their creations without pausing their aggressive competition.
With sincere apologies, I need to ask you to imagine yourself arriving at the airport. Freshly expelled from whatever mode of transport brought you there, you are probably at least a little bit harried. Maybe you’re running late or you’re wrangling small children. Maybe you are weighed down by an overstuffed tote bag and a roll-aboard that could burst at any moment because you are opposed in principle to paying $50 to check a bag.
“Texas will see you in court, Mr. President,” the Texas governor said.
The Colorado Republican is explaining her controversial action after the incident went viral last week.
In the three-plus decades I’ve been alive, I have never been bitten by a tick. Actually, that may be a lie, and I have no way of knowing for sure. Because even though ticks have harpoonlike mouthparts, even though certain species can latch on for up to two weeks, even though some guzzle enough blood to swell 100 times in weight, their bites are disturbingly discreet.
The movie Oppenheimer about J. Robert Oppenheimer — the “father of the atomic bomb” — focuses on Oppenheimer’s conflicted feelings about the weapons of mass destruction he helped unleash on the world, and how officials ignored those concerns after World War II as the Cold War started an arms race. Journalist Greg Mitchell says that while the film is well made and worth seeing, “the omissions are quite serious.
In a landmark $13 million settlement, New York City has agreed to pay 1,300 people attacked by police while protesting the Minnesota police murder of George Floyd in 2020. Sow v. City of New York yielded the largest total payout to protesters in a class-action suit in U.S. history, totaling about $10,000 per person.
As a record-breaking heat wave continues in Arizona, reporters with The Intercept say they have observed U.S. Border Patrol holding about 50 migrants inside a chain-link pen in the Sonoran Desert, at the Ajo Border Patrol Station. This comes as the group Humane Borders reports the bodies of at least 13 people were found over the past month in the Sonoran Desert where many migrants cross.
The U.S. Justice Department is threatening to sue the state of Texas after Republican Governor Greg Abbott installed barrels wrapped in razor wire in the Rio Grande in an attempt to block migrants from crossing the river. This comes just after a whistleblower state trooper at the Texas Department of Public Safety recently protested the state’s inhumane policies in a letter to superiors.
On a Monday morning in April, Sam Altman sat inside OpenAI’s San Francisco headquarters, telling me about a dangerous artificial intelligence that his company had built but would never release. His employees, he later said, often lose sleep worrying about the AIs they might one day release without fully appreciating their dangers. With his heel perched on the edge of his swivel chair, he looked relaxed.
What does Harvard do? What is Yale for? What is Dartmouth’s purpose?The schools themselves have ready answers to those questions. Harvard says it exists to “educate the citizens and citizen-leaders for our society” through the “transformative power of a liberal arts education.
The Republicans’ health care hopes are riding on the must-pass bills.
Four veterans are dead and the projected budget for the system has ballooned to more than $50 billion.
Gene therapy advocates say the treatments can cure rare diseases more quickly if government helps.
The push to own the economy, by literally branding it with the president’s name, is not without risk.
In an in-depth interview about her work, we speak with Isabel Allende, one of the world’s most celebrated novelists, author of 26 books that have sold more than 77 million copies and have been translated into 42 languages. Her books include The House of the Spirits, Paula and Daughter of Fortune, and her latest novel is The Wind Knows My Name, which looks at the trauma of child-family separation, from Nazi Germany to the U.S.