On paper, Pixar’s new film, Elemental, seems like the kind of wildly inventive, visually dynamic project that has made the company such a consistent success in the animation world. The studio’s formula is clear enough: Take an inanimate, perhaps abstract thing (a toy, a car, a feeling, a human soul) and personify it, even as a talking blob of sorts, building out a representational world that nonetheless feels familiar.
Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf 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.Last week I asked readers what they experience or observe personally that is most at odds with what they see portrayed in the media.G. is a 77-year-old woman:
I’m not seeing the real me.
Hunter Biden, President Joe Biden’s son, is pleading guilty to federal tax offenses and a separate felony gun charge for which he is avoiding prosecution, according to a plea agreement with the Justice Department announced Tuesday. The deal caps a multiyear probe by the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney in Delaware.
We speak with Minneapolis City Councilmember Robin Wonsley, the first Black Democratic Socialist on the City Council, about the Justice Department’s newly released probe into the city’s police department that found systemic problems with discrimination and excessive force and concluded: “The patterns and practices we observed made what happened to George Floyd possible.
The Democratic majority in Minnesota’s state Legislature, along with Democratic Governor Tim Walz, have enacted sweeping progressive reforms this year, with many praising the ambitious agenda as a “Minnesota Miracle.
In New York, a battle is brewing over a bill called Coverage for All that would use a surplus of federal funds to pay people who are undocumented to enroll in the state’s Essential Plan under the federal Affordable Care Act, potentially granting 250,000 people access to healthcare.
Jews, Episcopalians, Unitarians, Satanists and other people of faith say the laws infringe on their religious rights.
The blockbuster weight loss drugs’ access to a key market — older Americans — is limited, as Medicare is banned from covering weight loss drugs as part of the Part D program.
The agency followed the guidance of its independent advisory committee, which identified a commonly circulating strain of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
Mandy Cohen’s experience parrying GOP assaults is seen as a key attribute she’ll need in leading the CDC.
More than 140,000 residents have lost eligibility in one of the poorest states in the country.
Inflation slowed to just 4% in May.
The Fed is paying particular attention to so-called core prices, which exclude volatile food and energy costs and are regarded as a better gauge of longer-term inflation trends.
Peter Wehner says evangelical support for Trump is a “tremendous indictment” of that community.
POLITICO asked a panel of strategists and elected officials what under-the-radar issue they think could play an outsize role in 2024.
The former president struggled with this question during a Fox News interview.
The Supreme Court justice issued an irate response to ethics claims before they were published.
Aird’s victory, nearly one year after Roe v. Wade was overturned, bolsters protections for abortion rights in the state.
The submersible craft’s journey to the bottom of the ocean and back was supposed to take about eight hours. Two and a half hours for the descent, a few hours to explore the century-old wreckage of the Titanic, and then another two and a half hours to return to the surface.But the sub and its five passengers have now been missing in the Atlantic Ocean for three days. In that period, it has had no communication with the rest of the world.
Julie Rikelman, who represented an abortion clinic in the landmark Supreme Court case that gutted Roe v. Wade, will now serve on a U.S. appeals court.
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 Ukrainians are making progress in their long-awaited counteroffensive. Meanwhile, the Russian president is talking like a gangster and rattling the nuclear saber—again.
District Judge Jay Moody issued a permanent injunction against the Arkansas law.
Foul whisperings are abroad: unnatural deeds Do breed unnatural troubles … — MacbethSome years ago, the satellite radio and pharmaceutical entrepreneur Martine Rothblatt decided that she wanted a semblance of her wife to last forever.
After more than a decade, autocorrect “fails” could be on their way out. Apple’s much-maligned spelling software is getting upgraded by artificial intelligence: Using sophisticated language models, the new autocorrect won’t just check words against a dictionary, but will be able to consider the context of the word in a sentence.
Truman Burbank, the unwitting star of the world’s most popular TV show, is supposed to be an everyman. The Truman Show is set in an island town, Seahaven, that evokes the prefab conformities of American suburbia. Truman is a brand in a setting that is stridently generic. Since his birth, he has navigated a world manufactured—by Christof, the creator of his show—for lucrative inoffensiveness.
Whistleblower Dan Ellsberg joined us after the Justice Department charged WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange with 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act for publishing U.S. military and diplomatic documents exposing U.S. war crimes. Assange is locked up in London and faces up to 175 years in prison if extradited and convicted in the United States.
Daniel Ellsberg was best known for leaking the Pentagon Papers, but he was also a lifelong anti-nuclear activist, stemming from his time working as a nuclear planner for the U.S. government. In December 2017, he joined us to discuss his memoir, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. “This was an actual war plan for how we would use the existing weapons,” he noted, “many of which I had seen already that time.
Over the past 50 years Daniel Ellsberg remained an antiwar and anti-nuclear activist who inspired a new generation of whistleblowers. In his last interview with Democracy Now! in April, he spoke about the war in Ukraine and why it required a diplomatic solution, and about the latest leak of Pentagon documents by Air National Guard member Jack Teixeira, who has been indicted on six counts of willful retention and transmission of classified information.
We remember the life and legacy of Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, who died Friday at the age of 92, just months after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. In 1971, Daniel Ellsberg, then a top military strategist working for the RAND Corporation, risked life in prison by secretly copying and then leaking 7,000 pages of top-secret documents outlining the secret history of the U.S. War in Vietnam.
The blockbuster weight loss drugs’ access to a key market — older Americans — is limited, as Medicare is banned from covering weight loss drugs as part of the Part D program.