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.This week, Rishi Sunak was officially installed as the prime minister of Great Britain. I spoke with Atlantic writer Helen Lewis about the U.K.’s topsy-turvy political moment and her essay on Sunak as the face of Britain’s “new ruling class.
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.Question of the WeekWhile covering Donald Trump, multiple journalistic outlets published articles questioning his mental fitness.
“Grandma, is the air on?” Kisha Skipper was worried. She’s the vice president of the Yonkers NAACP and a member of the Climate Safe Yonkers Task Force, a group that’s planning projects to make the city safer in a hotter world. And she could see her 95-year-old grandmother sweating on the video call.Skipper’s grandmother is reluctant to turn on her air-conditioning even on the hottest days, because running the unit costs money and she’s on a fixed income.
The dirty secret of higher education in the United States is that racial preferences for Black, Latino, and Native American college students provide cover for an admissions system that mostly benefits the wealthy.
As Republican-led states clamp down on voting rights, we look at how Black voters are helping to organize unprecedented voter turnout ahead of midterms. “We are literally fighting for democracy,” says LaTosha Brown, co-founder of the Black Voters Matter Fund, who says organizing voters is “the winning strategy” despite the resolve of the “consulting class” to invest campaign funds primarily in TV ads.
As the midterms draw closer, we speak with journalist Will Bunch about how extremist Republican candidates increasingly look like they could win. In Pennsylvania, the Republican gubernatorial candidate is Doug Mastriano who attended the January 6th “Stop the Steal” rally and helped arrange buses for pro-Trump protesters to come as well. He later worked with former President Trump’s legal team to overturn the 2020 election results.
Hundreds of Penn State students protesting a speaking event with Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes on Monday night were showered with pepper spray by men who appeared to be with the hate group. Penn State, which abruptly called off the talk on Monday, had resisted earlier calls from students, faculty and community members to cancel the event, citing free-speech rights. We speak with one of those students, Sam Ajah, president of the Penn State College Democrats club.
The candidates for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania met Tuesday for their first and only debate in a race being closely watched across the country as a possible bellwether for the midterm elections. Trump-backed Republican nominee and TV personality Mehmet Oz, better known as Dr. Oz, sparred with Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman about crime, inflation, abortion and more.
The November measure comes as health care advocates at the state level grapple with how to help residents with the rising costs of health care now that it appears Congress will be unable to pass any significant reforms to address the issue.
The head of the federal public health agency is isolating at home with mild symptoms.
If the plan fails, the agency risks repeating the mistakes it made during the pandemic.
Covid vaccines’ inclusion on the schedules don’t constitute mandates.
A Pennsylvania statehouse race is testing whether the GOP’s last abortion rights supporters can survive post-Roe
The president will sign a national security memo directing his administration to implement a plan to prepare for future viral and biological threats.
According to an NBC News poll released Sunday, 70 percent of registered voters expressed interest in the upcoming election as a “9” or “10” on a 10-point scale.
The budget gap shrank by half in fiscal 2022 as spending on pandemic programs expired and tax revenues surged.
The U.K. political drama will have ripple effects in the U.S.
The ACLU is asking the Supreme Court to overturn an Arkansas anti-BDS law that penalizes state contractors unless they pledge not to boycott the state of Israel. Arkansas is one of more than 30 U.S. states to have passed “copycat” legislation to criminalize the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which seeks to boycott Israel and Israeli goods to protest its violation of Palestinian rights.
The Environmental Protection Agency is launching a civil rights investigation into whether the state of Mississippi discriminated against the majority-Black capital of Jackson when it refused to use federal funds to address the city’s dangerous water crisis. Mississippi has received federal funds to address drinking water needs since 1996 but distributed funds to Jackson just three times over this 26-year span.
The former House speaker explained why “anybody not named Trump” would be a better bet for the GOP in 2024.
Why did John Fetterman’s team agree to tonight’s debate? Because declining it likely seemed a worse option. For all of Mehmet Oz’s carpetbaggery, medical quackery, and general charlatanism, he got that much right near the end of the first and only Pennsylvania debate for U.S. Senate: Voters really do want to see both candidates face off.Fetterman used to talk one way, he had a stroke, and now he talks another way.
The Republican candidate for a Senate seat in Pennsylvania made the comments during a debate against Democratic rival John Fetterman.
The Democrat’s difficulty recovering from a nearly fatal stroke was apparent in the Senate candidates’ first and only head-to-head matchup in Pennsylvania.
Pennsylvania Senate candidates John Fetterman and Mehmet Oz faced off in their one and only debate Tuesday night. After a rough start where Fetterman’s lack of experience in being a fast-talking fraud doctor was in contrast to his fast-talking hack doctor opponent, he began righting the ship. In a nice exchange where Mehmet Oz side-stepped a question about how most doctors consider Dr.
Back in August, Bloomberg carried a piece titled “welcome to Europe’s dark, cold winter.” It warned that even if countries were able to find gas to fill their storage facilities, it might not prevent a winter filled with blackouts, business closures, and an economy in freefall. That’s because prices were soaring and “replenishing storage and reducing demand still may not be enough.
Day 15 of the Oath Keepers seditious conspiracy trial featured defense attorneys making repeated implications that it was U.S. Capitol Police who invited rioters inside the Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2021.
This is a conspiracy theory long-debunked and easily disproven with the viewing of less than 20 minutes of closed-circuit security footage from the eastern rotunda door, for one. That footage is embedded below, courtesy of NBC News.
Beloved comedic actor Leslie Jordan died on Monday after reportedly suffering a medical emergency while driving his car. The New York Times reports that the 67-year-old crashed into the side of a building and was dead at the scene. The nature of the reported medical emergency that led to the crash is unclear.
Beltway journalists seem pretty convinced at this point that Republicans are resurgent in the closing weeks of the midterms while Democrats are in for a “shellacking.”
Much of that certainty seems to have been cemented by the New York Times/Siena college survey released early last week, which found Republicans leading Democrats by 3 points among likely voters in the generic ballot.
This is the only time the two candidates will debate ahead of the 2022 midterm elections.
The president stopped short of encouraging people to wear masks as part of the country’s COVID-19 mitigation strategy.