Why shouldn’t Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White play women’s basketball? The answer is simple: They’re not female. By all evidence, the two former NBA players have XY chromosomes—White has fathered children—and have been through male puberty. They have significant athletic advantages over female athletes and should not be eligible for the WNBA.
“Many secrets; no mysteries.” That’s the master code of the Trump administration. When it does something strange, there’s never any mystery as to why: Somebody close to the president, or possibly the president and his family themselves, intends to score a dishonest dollar. Exactly who and how may be secret. Exactly why is no mystery.
So it is with the news that the Department of the Treasury has ended ownership-reporting requirements for U.S.
America’s favorite new sweet treat is a glaring recession indicator.
A live chat with Felix Salmon and Lee Buchheit hosted by the Library of Mistakes.
Leopold Aschenbrenner’s A.I.-focused portfolio was plummeting before Ken Griffin snapped up most of it.
The Trump administration alleges that some hospitals are incorrectly billing for gender-affirming care.
Jay Bhattacharya’s interview ended up similar in tone to the one with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. last week on CNN.
Several conservative states will require proof from people who say they’re too sick to work.
The parasite, which spreads via fresh produce and can cause explosive diarrhea, has sickened thousands of Americans in this summer’s record outbreak.
The Kentucky senator and nemesis of America’s Covid czar says he’s taking his case straight to the attorney general.
Outward’s hosts sit down with the host and co-creator of When We All Get to Heaven.
The neighborhood changes, the church moves, people forget and remember “the AIDS years,” but AIDS isn’t over.
The AIDS cocktail opens new possibilities. And MCC San Francisco tries to use the experience of AIDS to make bigger social change.
The church’s minister gets sick and everyone knows it.
The church’s “it couple” faces AIDS, caregiving, and loss as part of a pair, part of families, and part of a community.
The new documentary American Doctor tells the story of how the besieged hospitals of Gaza have continued to treat the sick and wounded throughout Israel’s genocidal war on the Palestinian territory, with local medical staff risking their own lives in the process. According to Palestinian officials, Israeli attacks have killed about 1,700 healthcare workers in Gaza since October 2023. The documentary follows three U.S. doctors as they volunteer in Gaza hospitals.
One of the biggest upsets from Democratic primary elections this month was Donavan McKinney’s defeat of two-term Congressmember Shri Thanedar in the House primary to represent parts of Detroit and Wayne County in Michigan’s 13th District. McKinney, a democratic socialist state lawmaker, won on a platform to get corporate money out of politics, support Medicare for All and end military aid to Israel, among other issues.
We speak with Tennessee lawmaker Justin J. Pearson, who just won the Democratic primary to represent part of Memphis in the state’s 9th Congressional District. Pearson’s campaign focused in part on opposing large artificial intelligence data centers, particularly Elon Musk’s Colossus 1 and Colossus 2, which are in the Memphis area.
“People don’t want toxic data centers polluting the air that they breathe,” says Pearson.
We speak with Timnit Gebru, a leader in the field of AI ethics, about how artificial intelligence is entrenching societal biases and inequality. Gebru is the founder and executive director of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, a group of academics, activists and engineers who produce research rooted in the belief that technology should benefit everyone.
Yesterday in London, Jason Arday, the controversy-plagued British academic and author, was found dead. Made famous as the youngest Black professor in Cambridge’s more than 800-year history, Arday had been dogged by weeks of scrutiny amid accusations of plagiarism, fake qualifications, and a fabricated backstory filled with hard-to-believe details.
He claimed to have been mute until age 11 and illiterate until 18, disadvantages that did not deter him from getting a Ph.D.
This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.
“Summer always overstays its welcome by about a month,” my colleague Elizabeth Bruenig wrote last week. “After the Fourth of July, which has its charms, nothing but a stretch of relentless heat lies ahead, reaching toward Labor Day, and I begin to yearn for fall.
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.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has said that the U.S. could maintain a blockade of Iran “indefinitely.” On Washington Week With The Atlantic, panelists joined to discuss the political consequences of the continued conflict, and more.
The time has come to admit it: The United States has a potty-training problem. In Utah, a law came into effect last year mandating that, with some exceptions, children will not be allowed to enroll in public school without first being toilet trained. Kansas lawmakers introduced a similar bill in January, and at least one district in Florida is considering a policy change that could force kindergartners to stay home until they are out of diapers.
Did Anthony Fauci really get a text from Joan Baez, as his private diary suggests, wishing him a “happy fucking birthday” in the midst of the pandemic? Until now, the answer to that question has remained blessedly unclear. But soon we may have access to the former National Institutes of Health official’s phone. Senator Ron Johnson announced this week that he’d retrieved tens of thousands of messages and hundreds of voicemails from Fauci’s government-issued device and made them fully searchable.
A live chat with Felix Salmon and Lee Buchheit hosted by the Library of Mistakes.
Leopold Aschenbrenner’s A.I.-focused portfolio was plummeting before Ken Griffin snapped up most of it.
The Trump administration alleges that some hospitals are incorrectly billing for gender-affirming care.
Jay Bhattacharya’s interview ended up similar in tone to the one with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. last week on CNN.
