Spend your weekend with a cup of warm coffee and our National Magazine Award–nominated articles.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
People forgot how war actually works.
Shoppers are stuck in a dupe loop.
Permission-slip culture is hurting America.
Yesterday, the American Society of Magazine Editors announced the finalists for this year’s National Magazine Awards, and The Atlantic was recognized for a range of work.

After a train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, on February 3, national attention was slow to turn to the crash. That has now changed decisively. In the past 10 days, EPA Administrator Michael Regan, former President Donald Trump, and Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg have all visited the town. A lively national political debate has also emerged, but it’s one that, like the burning rail cars, has produced a lot of heat, but not a great deal of light.

The past few years have seen an intensifying of the ways politics can intervene in education, including the censorship of books. Lawmakers in Texas have made repeated pushes to restrict the books that kids can access in schools. Leaders in other states across the country have done the same, including in Tennessee, where one local school board infamously banned Maus, a graphic novel that brutally—but honestly—depicts the Holocaust.

Can a million people vanish from the planet without the world knowing? It seems impossible in this age of instant digital communications, ubiquitous smartphones, and global social-media platforms that anything of comparable consequence can go unnoticed and unrecorded—no matter how remote the country or how determined its rulers might be to hide the truth.Yet that’s apparently what has happened in China over the past two and a half months.

For the first time, the Supreme Court is considering its opinion on the brief but powerful “26 words that created the internet.”Enacted in 1996, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act immunizes online platforms from liability for anything that is posted on their site by a third party—a protection that allowed the web to bloom by encouraging experimentation and interactivity in its early years.

The war in Ukraine is the final shovel of dirt on the grave of any optimism about the world order that was born with the fall of Soviet Communism. Now we are faced with the long grind of defeating Moscow’s armies and eventually rebuilding a better world.Before we turn to Ukraine, here are a few of today’s stories from The Atlantic.

Pretty early into Cocaine Bear’s running time, I started searching desperately for the metaphor. Elizabeth Banks’s action-comedy-horror is, as you might have heard, about a black bear in 1980s Georgia who eats a lot of cocaine that fell out of an airplane. The cocaine makes her angry and hungry for more cocaine, and given that she’s already a big bear with sharp claws, the combination is quite distressing for the people in the forest around her.