At the age of 30, I became an editor. On my first day, while I was at lunch, a colleague tossed a photocopy of an essay onto my office chair, with a passage underlined. She’d highlighted a quote from a letter that Harold Ross, the founding editor in chief of The New Yorker, wrote to Katharine White, who ran the magazine’s fiction department: “An editor’s life is certainly a life of disappointment.
A record 129 press workers were killed worldwide in 2025, more in one year than in any of the previous three decades for which the Committee to Protect Journalists has collected data. The previous record was set in 2024. For both 2024 and 2025, the Israeli military was responsible for two-thirds of all press killings.
Testimony and evidence from 59 Palestinian journalists reveals “strikingly consistent” reports of beatings, sensory deprivation, sexual violence, starvation and medical neglect while detained, according to a review by the Committee to Protect Journalists. Most of them were held under Israel’s so-called “administrative detention” policy and were never charged with any crime. The journalists lost an average of 52 pounds in Israeli prisons.
It’s been almost one year since Israeli forces killed 15 Palestinian medics and aid workers in a brutal two-hour massacre on a vehicle convoy in southern Gaza. Israeli soldiers had attempted to cover it up by burying the bodies in a shallow mass grave, and crushing the rescue vehicles with heavy machinery, but a new investigation by Forensic Architecture and Earshot has recreated a minute-by-minute accounting of what took place.
Cuban exiles on a U.S.-registered speedboat attempted to enter Cuba undetected, but were confronted by border patrol in Cuban waters on Wednesday. According to the Cuban Interior Ministry, the Cuban nationals on the speedboat fired on the border agents who then returned fire — killing four and injuring six of the men. This comes as the Trump administration’s blockade of fuel has triggered a severe humanitarian and economic crisis in Cuba, compounding the impact of the U.S.
When the city needed digging out, it called its emergency shovelers. One Queens resident describes the pay, the crosswalks, and the yellow snow.
No one knows what happened. That explains what’s unfolding just north of Tucson.
Our friends at Planet Money have written a book! Author Alex Mayyasi takes us through a few of the best chapters.
If you’re hoping for grocery prices to go down, I’ve got some bad news.
Mariana van Zeller joins Felix Salmon for a look into the hidden economics of black and gray markets.
Supporters of the health secretary’s Make America Healthy Again movement are worried Kennedy is selling out.
The Trump administration is capping student loans, but doctors and dentists opposed to the health secretary will get more than his wellness allies.
Nicole Shanahan has recruited a top screenwriter and enlisted Covid contrarian Jay Bhattacharya.
After letting the health secretary have his way in 2025, Trump is reining him in now that it’s an election year.
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 president stopped in Marjorie Taylor Greene’s old district to defend his economic record.
A brief swing through the farm state underscored administration fears about the midterms.
Sixty-one percent of voters told a CNN poll released Friday that they disapprove of the way Trump is handling the economy.
Around the world, powerful men are facing consequences for their actions. Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro was convicted of trying to overthrow the government in a January 6–style coup, as was his South Korean counterpart, Yoon Suk Yuol. Marcin Romanowski, the former deputy justice minister in the right-wing Polish government, is in hiding in Hungary, accused of misusing public funds.
Casey Means has, to say the least, modified her tone. When she testified today in front of the Senate’s health committee, the nominee for surgeon general didn’t, as she is normally wont to do, delve into her experiences with psychedelics or endorse raw milk. She also did not rail at length against birth control.
Longstanding Republican orthodoxy on free markets and scant details are making Trump’s drug pricing law push difficult.
The middle-aged man in a giraffe costume removed his sunglasses and told the crowd that he was breaking character in order to deliver an earnest message about the most effective way to counteract President Trump. “We do not fight absurdity with valor,” Rob Potylo, a comedian and political activist also known as Robby Roadmaster, said last night as Trump was delivering his State of the Union address. “We fight absurdity with more absurdity!” He then turned around and began to twerk.
On Monday night, someone placed a peculiar bet on the prediction market Kalshi. At 7:45 p.m. eastern time, a single trader put down nearly $100,000 on the claim that, by the end of December, the Trump administration will confirm that alien life or technology exists elsewhere in our universe. According to The Atlantic’s review of Kalshi’s trading data, about 35 minutes after this bet was executed, it was followed by another that was almost twice as large (possibly from the same person).
This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.
Realizing that your brain is slowing down can be jarring. After the age of, say, 45, anyone might start forgetting names, misplacing items, or struggling to pay attention, and the onset of such symptoms can often prompt a visit to a doctor, if only to confirm a patient’s hunch that the passage of time is to blame.
“I couldn’t in good conscience sit there and listen to Trump go on and on with what we knew was going to be hours of lies, gaslighting and maligning the very people that I represent,” says Congressmember Adelita Grijalva on her decision to skip Tuesday’s State of the Union address. “There was no attempt to bring the country together.
We speak with Minneapolis resident Aliya Rahman, who attended Tuesday’s State of the Union address as a guest of Congressmember Ilhan Omar. Rahman was removed from the chamber Tuesday and spent several hours in jail following what she describes as an aggressive arrest by Capitol Police — all for silently challenging Trump during the speech.
“There are only two things you can do at the State of the Union, and they are sit down and stand up,” says Rahman. “I was arrested for standing up.