President Donald Trump is worried that Attorney General Pam Bondi is moving too slowly to prosecute his political adversaries on fake charges. Trump has good reason to be concerned. He is carrying out his project to consolidate authoritarian power against the trend of declining public support for his administration and himself. He is like a man trying to race upward on a downward-moving escalator.
Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts
During the post-Soviet 1990s, a popular political-satire show called Kukly ran on the Russian independent network NTV. Then-President Boris Yeltsin, for example, was regularly depicted as a feeble drunk. For about a decade, the show featured puppets that lampooned prominent political and cultural figures—until one episode, in which Vladimir Putin showed up as a grotesque, wicked dwarf.
When Anna De Souza was in her early 30s, she asked her ob-gyn when she should start thinking about having kids. “When you were 26,” she remembers the doctor saying.
She was surprised. She’d had some sense that fertility decreases with age but didn’t know how significant the drop-off was. No doctor had ever told her, and she certainly didn’t learn about it in school.
Ole Miss, as is perhaps well known, is in the heartland of beautiful girls. We know this to be true if we are followers—however casually—of something called RushTok, and we know it to be enduringly true because the above sentence was written by Terry Southern in 1963, in “Twirling at Ole Miss,” which was published in Esquire and then included in Tom Wolfe’s essential 1973 anthology, The New Journalism.
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.
Read about the sneaky tactics behind bad customer service, a bizarre PTSD therapy that “seemed too good to be true,” why the dictionary might be obsolete, and more.
Why Can’t Americans Sleep?
Insomnia has become a public-health emergency.
The YIMBY movement gathered in New Haven—and revealed its biggest vulnerability.
Gary Rivlin joins Elizabeth Spiers to discuss his book on Silicon Valley’s race to cash in on AI.
ICE raided a new Hyundai plant in Georgia detaining hundreds of workers from South Korea.
Layoffs are spreading and unemployment is rising—and one kind of worker is being hit the hardest.
It’s called modular construction, and it could allow apartments to be constructed within a week.
The health secretary’s CDC panel wants to stop recommending Covid vaccines but left bigger debates unresolved.
After a deadlock, the vaccine panel voted not to advise states to require a prescription for Covid shots.
The panel also revisited a Thursday vote related to coverage for a different vaccine.
The panel voted to recommend against the combined measles, mumps, rubella and chickenpox vaccine for young children. It postponed to Friday a vote on a recommendation to drop universal newborn vaccination for hepatitis B.
Make America Healthy Again groups are planning rallies from coast to coast in defense of the health secretary after some lawmakers denounced him.
The Waves also discusses the Riverside Church controversy and the case of Sarah Milov.
What we say matters, especially depending on whom we say it to.
The Waves also discusses the case against Jeffrey Epstein and Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Fleishman Is in Trouble.
A survey from the liberal-leaning group Somos Votantes shows Latino voters are souring on the president.
Privately, aides concede voters remain uneasy about prices but argue their policies are beginning to turn things around.
Bill Beach said the president’s suggestions that the jobs report was rigged betrayed a misunderstanding in how those numbers are assembled.
The monthly jobs report showed just 73,000 jobs in July, with big reductions to May’s and June’s numbers
Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman sat down with longtime political prisoner and Indigenous activist Leonard Peltier for his first extended television and radio broadcast interview since his release to home confinement in February. Before his commutation by former President Joe Biden, the 81-year-old Peltier spent nearly 50 years behind bars. Peltier has always maintained his innocence for the 1975 killing of two FBI officers.
A powerful new documentary produced by Fault Lines on Al Jazeera English tells the story of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, the Palestinian pediatrician and director of the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza whom Israel has detained with virtually no contact to the outside world for almost nine months.
We speak with the secretary general of Amnesty International about the human rights group’s new report on the “global political economy enabling Israel’s genocide, occupation and apartheid” against Palestinians. Agnès Callamard says Israel’s “24 months of genocide” since October 2023 would not be possible without international support and the continued supplying of Israel’s war machine by major arms makers, technology firms and other companies. The report names the U.S.
Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings, watch full episodes here, or listen to the weekly podcast here.
This week, ABC pulled the comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s talk show off the air over remarks he made related to Charlie Kirk’s assassination.
“If you can’t laugh at yourself, you are so fucked”: During a conversation yesterday at The Atlantic Festival with Atlantic staff writer Sophie Gilbert, Monica Lewinsky said this was one of the most important things she’s learned. In 1998, as a 24-year-old White House intern, she was entangled in a sex scandal involving President Bill Clinton and quickly became a subject of international scorn.
An existential thriller set in the middle of the Moroccan desert, a whodunit doubling as a crisis of faith, a musical about the founder of the Shaker movement—this year’s Toronto International Film Festival not only screened some of this fall’s biggest movies, but it also offered attendees a rich array of stories to indulge in.
