I found it hard to get to sleep on Thursday night after seeing news that a Moscow court had charged the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich with espionage. The images from outside the court shocked many of us. The Moscow press pack is a tight-knit community, and Gershkovich’s colleagues from the BBC, the Financial Times, Politico, and other publications posted “Journalism is not a crime” on their social media.
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.Russian President Vladimir Putin is once again trying to manipulate nuclear weapons to compensate for the ongoing Russian military disaster in Ukraine. These new Russian moves are dangerous but not a crisis.First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
Don’t take your eye off Jack Smith.
This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he 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 quoted the late astronomer and astrophysicist Carl Sagan on humanity’s place in the cosmos, and asked readers for their thoughts on outer space.
If you asked Americans to name a space mission, any space mission, I suspect very few would pick Apollo 8. The 1968 mission, the first to circle the moon, gets overshadowed by Apollo 11 (“One small step for man”; you know the rest) and Apollo 13 (of Tom Hanks fame). The astronauts didn’t venture from their spaceship, nor did they touch the lunar surface. But in its own, quiet way, that mission was an existential milestone.
Even a halfway-decent political campaign knows you better than you know yourself. A candidate’s army of number crunchers vacuums up any morsel of personal information that might affect the choice we make at the polls. In 2020, Donald Trump and the Republican Party compiled 3,000 data points on every single voter in America. In 2012, the data nerds helped Barack Obama parse the electorate to microtarget his door-knocking efforts toward the most-persuadable swing voters. And in 1960, John F.
As Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis plans to run for president in 2024, his time at Guantánamo is coming under scrutiny. Prior to entering politics, DeSantis served in the Navy as an attorney, first at the U.S. prison at the Guantánamo Bay prison in Cuba and later in Iraq. Former Guantánamo prisoner Mansoor Adayfi says DeSantis personally witnessed him being force-fed and tortured, and other prisoners have backed up Adayfi’s account.
On Friday, a Federal Judge in Memphis, Tennessee, temporarily blocked a law signed by Tennessee Governor Bill Lee banning drag shows in public, and legal experts say it will likely continue to be blocked all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. “Tennessee’s drag ban was always bad law. It was always against the First Amendment,” says Elie Mystal, justice correspondent for The Nation.
A federal Judge in Texas on Thursday blocked the Affordable Care Act mandate for health insurance companies to provide preventive care. We speak with Elie Mystal, justice correspondent for The Nation, about his piece, “The GOP’s War on Obamacare Is Screwing Up Its War on Abortion,” and how the Republican Party opposes access to abortion but will not require insurance companies to cover basic prenatal care.
As former President Donald Trump is expected to be arrested in New York on charges related to paying hush money to adult film star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 presidential campaign, we speak with The Nation’s justice correspondent Elie Mystal, who says the case against Trump is far from a slam dunk.
The nationwide ruling holds that the health panel that decided what services insurers must cover is unconstitutional.
The fall of Roe has upended the traditional political battle lines.
At least 11 states have now enacted laws restricting or banning gender-affirming care for minors.
Narcan can now be sold in gas stations, convenience stores and grocery stores.
The Democratic officials’ case raises the likelihood that rules around pills will go before the Supreme Court.
Jerome Powell “stepped up and took a flamethrower to the regulations,” the senator said.
The government said prices increased 0.4% last month, just below January’s 0.5% rise.
“I can’t think of a time when there’s been greater uncertainty,” the president said.
The president promised a lot last year. Here’s how we graded him on some of those pledges.
Noting the 3.4 percent jobless rate, the lowest since May 1969, the president said “the Biden economic play is working.
In the wake of the mass shooting at a private Christian elementary school in Nashville, Tennessee, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said Wednesday Republicans “want to see all the facts” before proposing any new gun legislation.
More than a thousand students rallied at the Tennessee state Capitol Thursday to demand gun control, just days after a mass shooting at a Nashville Christian elementary school where three adults and three 9-year-olds were killed. Republicans hold a supermajority in Tennessee’s Legislature and have loosened gun restrictions. We speak with Dr. Katrina Green, an emergency physician in Nashville who has lost patients to gun violence and joined in Thursday’s protest.
In an unprecedented move, a Manhattan grand jury voted Thursday to indict former President Donald Trump for hush-money payments made to adult film star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 presidential campaign to hide an alleged affair, making Trump the first former U.S. president to face criminal charges.
We speak with writer and filmmaker Jennifer Fox, whose 2018 movie The Tale dealt with childhood sexual abuse. She has now come forward to name her abuser. The film is a narrative memoir based in part on Fox’s own life experience about being abused by a coach as a young girl. While the main character is named Fox, the name of the abusive coach was fictionalized. Now Fox has revealed the man who abused her as Ted Nash, the legendary Olympic rower and coach who died in 2021.
Donald Trump’s campaign says the former president will deliver remarks Tuesday night in Florida after his scheduled arraignment in New York.
Joe Tacopina is getting on the nerves of the former president’s other attorneys and advisers, according to a new Rolling Stone report.
This story contains spoilers through the second episode of Succession Season 4.The Roys of Succession tend to go out of their way to prove they’re not delicate people. They reject any opportunity to talk about their feelings. They’d rather drop f-bombs than share hugs and kisses. And they relish their daily boardroom showdowns: Reneging on deals, jousting in bidding wars, and tearing apart competitors is, for them, a way of life.
The former attorney general said it would be a “particularly bad idea” for Trump to testify at trial.
“What I hope is that we get in and out of there,” said attorney Joe Tacopina. Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen said he expects “total mayhem.
The Pennsylvania Democrat got discharged from the hospital six weeks after checking in for inpatient treatment of his clinical depression.
Here’s one more piece of evidence that the ’90s have returned: Road rage is back in style. Stories of people who turned traffic frustrations into acts of violence were mainstays of that decade, rendered in news and in pop culture. A little bit true crime, a little bit morality tale, they captured the moment’s creeping suspicion that life was much less stable than it might have seemed.