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“When the national media turns its eye to college campuses, it often focuses on the ways the college experience has evolved in recent years,” Ashley Fetters wrote in 2018.

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.
After nearly five decades, Dan Balz is retiring from The Washington Post, where he covered 12 elections and eight presidencies as a political correspondent.

Although flag-burning has never been popular in America, condemning it has long been a staple for politicians. On Monday, President Donald Trump joined the chorus by issuing an executive order calling the act “uniquely offensive and provocative” and “a statement of contempt, hostility, and violence against our Nation.” The order directs federal officials to prosecute flag-burners whenever possible.

Of all the public indignities great athletes are subjected to, from the meme to the boo to the hurled bottle, undoubtedly the worst is the bad statue. A bronze figure in a stadium plaza is so much more permanent than an insult, and the irony is that a Dwyane Wade or a Michael Jordan has to accept the thing as a compliment. The statue’s intent is to immortalize. Instead, it kills its subject dead.

In 2023, the United States produced $28 trillion worth of goods and services. The average family had a net worth of $192,900. Shares in American companies accounted for more than half of global-market capitalization. Yet one in eight Americans lived in poverty, as did one in seven children.
The best way we have to help those people is to give them money.