Today's Liberal News

What’s Really Driving Netanyahu’s Decisions

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.
Overnight, Israel’s security cabinet approved a proposal from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to occupy Gaza City, a plan that neither the Israeli security establishment nor the majority of the Israeli public supports.

The Giant Asterisk to MAHA’s Food-Dye Crackdown

Last month, America’s top health officials gathered in downtown Washington for an ice-cream party. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—joined by Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins—hunched over a cooler and served himself a scoop. Off to the side, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary licked a cone.

Reading Mrs. Dalloway Again and Again

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway turned 100 this spring—not quite double the age of its protagonist, Clarissa Dalloway, who, as Woolf writes, “had just broken into her fifty-second year.” The book pops up less frequently on lists of the best fiction of the 20th century than James Joyce’s Ulysses, the libidinous classic to which Dalloway is often read as a side-eyed response.

How the Texas Standoff Will (Probably) End

Texas state Democrats had been plotting their departure for weeks. But most weren’t sure they were going—or where they were headed—until just before they boarded their plane. For a successful quorum break, the timing “has to be ripe,” State Representative Gina Hinojosa told me. “Like a melon at the grocery store.” On Sunday, she and dozens of her colleagues hopped on a chartered plane and flew to Chicago in an attempt to prevent Texas Republicans from redrawing the state’s congressional maps.

Pete Hegseth Doesn’t Want to Talk About Golden Dome

Donald Trump wants to spend billions of dollars on a successor to President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, and he’s calling it “Golden Dome,” inspired by both Israel’s Iron Dome defense and Reagan’s early-1980s concept of a “peace shield” over North America. It’s a hugely ambitious project, but Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth apparently would prefer that no one talk about it.

Gaza Takeover: Mouin Rabbani on Israel’s “Indefinite, Genocidal Military Campaign”

Israel’s security cabinet has announced the approval of a plan to occupy Gaza City, moving its ongoing military offensive north and displacing hundreds of thousands of civilians to camps in central Gaza. Middle East analyst Mouin Rabbani emphasizes that the new strategy is simply “the first phase of a larger plan” for the permanent displacement, occupation and annexation of the entire Gaza Strip, as confirmed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a recent interview with Fox News.

The New ChatGPT Resets the AI Race

Yesterday evening, Sam Altman shared an image of the Death Star on X. There was no caption on the picture, which showed the world-destroying Star Wars space station rising over an Earth-like planet, but his audience understood the context. In fewer than 24 hours, OpenAI would release an AI model intended to wipe out all the rest.
That model, GPT-5, launched earlier today with all the requisite fanfare. In an announcement video, Altman said that the product will serve as a “legitimate Ph.D.

A Political Game Could Redefine Voting in America

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.
Activists and organizers like to say that the world is run by those who show up, so the fact that what Texas’s Democratic legislators need to do to further their agenda is not show up is inauspicious for them.

Things Aren’t Going Donald Trump’s Way

Donald Trump has almost certainly complained more about journalists than any of his predecessors have, maybe more than all of them combined. So when Trump deemed a query “the nastiest question” he’s ever gotten from a member of the press, it was notable.
The moment came in May, when CNBC’s Megan Cassella asked Trump about “TACO,” an acronym for “Trump always chickens out.