Three hours after Thomas Jefferson died at his Monticello home on July 4, 1826, his personal secretary, Nicholas Trist, snipped a lock of the Founder’s gray hair, still faintly reddish blond. Trist then tied the hair with orange thread and placed it in a paper packet, along with a short note describing what he’d done.
In an era before photography or modern embalming, hair was an easily preserved reminder of a beloved friend or relative who’d died.

Drew Philp is the winner of the 23rd annual Michael Kelly Award, given by The Atlantic, for his investigative feature “There Will Be No Mercy,” published by The Atavist Magazine in 2025. Philp’s harrowing exposé of Ethiopia’s civil war serves as the definitive account of the two-year conflict, considered one of the deadliest of this century.
The award was announced this morning at The Atlantic Festival in New York City.

Since becoming Health and Human Services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has repeatedly denied that he opposes vaccines and has toned down some of his more extreme rhetoric on the subject. But in a keynote speech today at a conference for Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine organization he founded, the old Kennedy was back. He complained about safety studies, floated disproven theories about a link between vaccines and autism, and all but declared himself an anti-vaxxer.

In a conversation at The Atlantic Festival with The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg warned fellow members of the Democratic Party to resist the urge to revert to “the previous status quo” if they regain power in the midterms.

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If Democrats win control of the House in November, they will face a dilemma: Should they attempt a record third impeachment of Donald Trump?
The president and his allies have warned that this would be a Democratic majority’s first move. “I’m going to be impeached.

Welcome to our wedding weekend! It’s going to be a beautiful occasion, followed by an intimate gathering of family, dear friends, and one Russian oligarch nobody knows who will be handed the bill afterward. The bride will wear white, the groom will wear white, and the Russian oligarch nobody knows will wear camouflage in case someone tries to take a picture of him and ProPublica finds out. We will try to pass him off as a tropical plant, or suggest that he was doing close-up magic.

Few reporters understand as much about Donald Trump’s thinking, motives, and behavior as Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. Haberman has been covering the president closely for more than a decade at The New York Times; she started with his first campaign in 2015, and her record of scoops quickly brought her into the public eye. Swan was, for many years, her chief professional rival: He worked for Axios, where he landed a controversial 2018 one-on-one interview with Trump.