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.Don’t be fooled by the unsettling elegance of the phrase toilet plume. It describes the invisible cloud of particles heaved by a toilet when flushed, and was once feared to be a vector for COVID-19.
Steven Soderbergh is the rare filmmaker who views a sequel as a chance to do something different. In a moviemaking era suffused with safe and predictable follow-ups, Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Twelve remains a sterling example of a strange, surprising left turn from its predecessor’s formula.
Welcome to the week of AI one-upmanship. On Tuesday, in a surprise announcement, Microsoft unveiled its plans to bring the technology behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT bot to its search engine, Bing. (Remember Bing? Because Bing remembers your jokes.) According to the company, the new tool will be a paradigm shift in the way that humans search the internet.
Eleven years ago, on the remote Japanese island of Kojima, a female macaque walked backwards into a stray heap of primate poop, glanced down at her foot, and completely flipped her lid.
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.
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.
The death toll in Turkey and Syria has passed 19,300 and continues to rise following Monday’s devastating earthquakes. Many survivors are without shelter, heat, food, water or medical care, and the first United Nations aid only reached northwest Syria three days after the quakes. Rescue efforts in Syria have been further complicated by damage and displacement from 12 years of war and harsh sanctions. Prior to the earthquake, the U.N.
District Court Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk could strike down the FDA’s decades-old decision to approve mifepristone.
Now that a growing body of evidence says marijuana is bad for you, more regulation is in the offing.
The latest action, against telehealth firm GoodRx, could have far-reaching implications for online business models.
The symbolic vote comes a day after President Joe Biden said he’d end the emergency on May 11.
Some Americans will have to pay for Covid vaccines and treatments, but the changes don’t end there.
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.
The Trump White House press secretary’s State of the Union rebuttal “vividly demonstrates a problem for the GOP,” said Paul Waldman and Greg Sargent.
His staff says he has no signs of another stroke, but will have more tests.
GOP lawmakers in Montana are co-sponsoring a bill that would allow students to deadname their transgender peers without punishment.
“You are promoting an ancient religious rite called human sacrifice,” the Fox News host said during an anti-abortion rant.
The Colorado Republican appeared to forget who was president in 2020.
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.At last night’s State of the Union address, the first one since the fall of Roe v. Wade, President Joe Biden pledged to continue working to protect access to reproductive health care amid more than a dozen extreme state-level bans.
After President Joe Biden delivered his State of the Union address last night, George Santos offered his appraisal of the proceedings. “SOTU category is: GASLIGHTING!” the representative pronounced in a tweet.The review was curious, coming as it did from a man who has fabricated much of his own biography.
Joe Biden knows how to handle a tough crowd. This was evident last night at the State of the Union, and it was apparent to me seven years ago, on March 20, 2016. On that day, President Barack Obama sent Biden to sell the recently struck Iran nuclear deal to the national conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). This was the political equivalent of asking the vice president to push New York Times subscriptions at a Donald Trump rally.
Updated at 4:56 pm ET on February 8, 2023This 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.
After Smokey Robinson announced his upcoming album, many music listeners were aghast. The Motown legend, at the age of 82, unfurled the most blatantly sexual record title of his career: Gasms. It didn’t help that the album, which will be released in late April, includes songs such as “I Wanna Know Your Body” and, ahem, “I Fit in There.” Predictably, the subsequent volley of Viagra jokes alone could’ve crashed Twitter.
President Joe Biden delivered his second State of the Union address Tuesday, touting his administration’s achievements and laying out his plans for the next two years under a divided Congress, including on immigration, the economy, the climate crisis and more.
Democratic Congressmember Delia Ramirez of Illinois praises President Biden for proposing a path to citizenship in his State of the Union address on Tuesday for the millions of undocumented immigrants in the country. “My problem is the militarizing of the border,” she adds. Ramirez, who delivered a response to the State of the Union speech on behalf of the Working Families Party, says compassion should be at the center of the debate on immigration.