On Sunday, I had my first Lunar New Year celebration in New York City’s Chinatown. At one point, after I had released my confetti popper and my friend had left, I stood in a park, alone in the crowd. I dug the tips of my black boots into the piles of festive red and pink paper shreds, fake flower petals, and tiny imitation $100 bills on the ground. And then I inhaled, holding the breath in my lungs for a few extra seconds before releasing it back into the cold air.
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.The American economy is doing fine. So why are tech companies laying off tens of thousands of workers?But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
The trillion-dollar coin might be the least bad option.
For once, the Academy Award nominations seemingly arrived without too much existential panic about the entire enterprise. The latest slate of honorees, announced this morning by Riz Ahmed and Allison Williams, includes two of the most commercially successful films of the year, a bunch of crowd-pleasing word-of-mouth hits, and some genuine indie and foreign surprises.
It shouldn’t be hard to persuade people to take a sip of yerba mate. It’s completely natural. It makes you feel simultaneously energized and relaxed. You can drink it all day without feeling like your stomach acid is burning through your esophagus. It’s the preferred caffeine source of Lionel Messi, Zoe Saldaña, and the pope.
We speak with The Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill about the brewing scandals over the handling of classified documents by President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, and how they “point to deeper systemic problems with Washington’s obsession with secrecy.
As California is reeling after three mass shootings over the past three days, we go to Oakland to speak with Connie Wun, co-founder of the AAPI Women Lead organization and a researcher on race and gender violence, and look at the state of gun control with Nick Suplina, managing director for law and policy at Everytown for Gun Safety.
Debates about rape, incest and health exceptions are dividing Republicans.
Overturning Roe “was only the first phase of this battle,” House Whip Steve Scalise said.
The Biden administration plans to widen testing of bathroom waste when international flights arrive.
The agencies said the surveillance signal “is very unlikely” to represent a “true clinical risk” and said they continued to recommend the vaccine.
Architect of the administration’s mass vaccination campaign will exit amid preparations for end of the emergency response
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.
Even with last month’s further easing of inflation, the Federal Reserve plans to keep raising interest rates.
We look at calls for police accountability in Los Angeles, where officers killed three men of color within 48 hours earlier this month, including 31-year-old Black school teacher Keenan Anderson, who died hours after he was repeatedly tasered. We speak with Anderson’s cousin Patrisse Cullors, a Black Lives Matter co-founder, who has joined in protests over the police killings. “The last two weeks have been a nightmare,” says Cullors.
We get an update on calls for an independent investigation into the Atlanta police killing of an activist during a violent raid Wednesday on a proposed $90 million training facility in a public forest, known by opponents to the facility as “Cop City.
In Washington, D.C., human rights and free speech advocates gather today for the Belmarsh Tribunal, focused on the imprisonment of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Assange has been languishing for close to four years in the harsh Belmarsh prison in London while appealing extradition to the United States on espionage charges. If convicted, Assange could face up to 175 years in jail for publishing documents that exposed war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The California governor shredded the conservative network with a damning summary following the massacre at a Monterey Park ballroom dance hall.
The serially lying lawmaker complained that skits about him on late-night TV are “terrible.
The Arizona senator’s decision to leave the Democratic Party has put leading Democratic officials in a very tight spot.
They’re making their lists, checking them twice, trying to decide who’s in and who’s not. Once again, it’s admissions season, and tensions are running high as university leaders wrestle with challenging decisions that will affect the future of their schools. Chief among those tensions, in the past few years, has been the question of whether standardized tests should be central to the process.
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.Some NATO nations are wavering about sending tanks and other advanced weapons to Ukraine. I understand fears of escalation, but if Russia wins in Ukraine, the world will lose.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
Photographs by Lenard SmithOn an early-December morning in California’s Mojave Desert, the Geoscience Support Services geohydrologist Logan Wicks squats in the sand and fiddles with a broken white pipe. Here on a sandy road off Route 66, past miles of scrubby creosote and spiny mesquite, Wicks monitors the pumps and pipes of a promising desert extraction project.But he’s not looking for oil or gas.
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.
Evan McMurry is joining the staff of The Atlantic later this month, where he will be a senior editor leading audience strategy and overseeing the magazine’s audience team. He comes to The Atlantic from ABC News, where he ran social strategy across the network’s accounts, and has previously worked as a political blogger and an editor.
The verdict is the second major trial involving far-right extremists accused of plotting to forcibly keep then-President Donald Trump in power.
The company is supposedly dumping its cartoon mascots, saying it’s realized that “even a candy’s shoes can be polarizing.
Former British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, famed linguist and dissident Noam Chomsky and others gave testimony Friday at the Belmarsh Tribunal in Washington, D.C., calling on President Biden to drop charges against Julian Assange. The WikiLeaks founder has been languishing for close to four years in the harsh Belmarsh prison in London while appealing extradition to the United States.
Debates about rape, incest and health exceptions are dividing Republicans.
Overturning Roe “was only the first phase of this battle,” House Whip Steve Scalise said.