President Donald Trump’s attempted takeover of America’s 250th-anniversary celebration began this past spring when his team drew up a $33 million fundraising plan for a series of events starring the president, including a military parade in Washington. America250 had been founded by Congress as a bipartisan effort, with a mission to engage “350 million Americans for the 250th.
Last week, the National Institutes of Health finally got some good news. A Senate subcommittee voted, with support from both parties, to increase the agency’s $48 billion budget—a direct rebuke to the Trump administration’s proposed budget, which would have slashed the agency’s funding some 40 percent.
The other day, I came across a video of a psychotherapist in training acting out a scene of a distracted mother ignoring her child. “Hey, Mom, can you play with me?” the therapist asks, mimicking the kid. “Not now,” she responds as the mom, gripping her phone. “I’m busy.” The therapist warns that the “unavailable mother” can create lasting “insecure attachment,” potentially relegating a child to a future of anxiety, self-doubt, and dysfunctional relationships.
This week marks 80 years since the first use of nuclear weapons in war, when the United States dropped a pair of atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945. Hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed in the bombings. Many died instantly, and many others died more slowly from severe burns and radiation sickness. Some estimates put the combined death toll over 250,000 killed.
We speak with former Labor Secretary Robert Reich about his new memoir, Coming Up Short, which tells his life story alongside the growth of inequality in America. Reich was born in 1946 as part of the baby-boom generation that enjoyed unprecedented levels of prosperity and social mobility in the decades after World War II.
We speak to former Labor Secretary Robert Reich about how President Trump’s firing of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, hours after the agency released a weaker-than-expected jobs report, undermines a key agency. Trump claimed, without offering any evidence, that the numbers were “rigged” in order to make him look bad. The BLS report showed just 73,000 jobs were added in July and that far fewer jobs had been created in May and June than previously estimated.
Should you check your bag or carry-on? A discussion.
Is the mobile betting boom ruining the integrity of major league sports? Does it matter?
Yes, the president firing the BLS commissioner is bad. Really bad.
The president overruled his HHS secretary and FDA chief, four people with knowledge of the decision tell POLITICO.
Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary has taken a personal interest in addressing hormone therapy treatment for menopause.
Some in Congress have put pressure on the FDA to review the pill, which ends pregnancy before 10 weeks.
Chronic venous insufficiency is a common condition that can worsen over time.
The Waves also discusses the Riverside Church controversy and the case of Sarah Milov.
What we say matters, especially depending on whom we say it to.
The Waves also discusses the case against Jeffrey Epstein and Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Fleishman Is in Trouble.
Bill Beach said the president’s suggestions that the jobs report was rigged betrayed a misunderstanding in how those numbers are assembled.
The monthly jobs report showed just 73,000 jobs in July, with big reductions to May’s and June’s numbers
The president’s approval rating had been ticking upward since its biggest drop in April.
The move ends investments in projects involving mRNA technology.
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One of Donald Trump’s tells is his talk of the “Russia hoax.” When that phrase passes his lips, it’s a sign that the president is agitated about something.
The president is trying to bring a taste of Mar-a-Lago to D.C.—but it’s not as unprecedented as some people think.
Last week, the Department of Homeland Security debuted a recruitment strategy to expand the ranks of ICE: sign-on bonuses. Thanks to a rush of cash from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the department announced that it’s offering up to $50,000 to newly hired federal law-enforcement agents. The offer caught the eye of one group that seemed to be particularly pleased by the government’s exciting career opportunity.
Whatever quarrels one might have with Senator Bernie Sanders, his thinking would seem to be immune from medieval anti-Semitic influence. Yet last month, after Sanders denounced “the Netanyahu government’s extermination of Gaza,” the pro-Israel group AIPAC attacked Sanders’s statement as a “hate-filled rant” and “despicable blood libel.
Asala Ferany sat cross-legged inside her tent in a camp near Deir al-Balah, trying to soothe her youngest child. Nada, barely more than a year old, clung to her mother’s neck with tiny, weak arms. The midday heat, nearly 90 degrees Fahrenheit, seeped through the plastic tarp above them. Sweat trickled down Asala’s face, and she had to leave the tent to get some air.
Anna Holmes is joining The Atlantic as a contributing writer later this month, where she will cover a wide range of subjects relating to American culture. Anna created the website Jezebel and was editor in chief of Topic magazine, and her writing has appeared in The Atlantic as well as in The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Bloomberg Businessweek.
More than 50 Democrats in the Texas Legislature have left the state to block the passage of a new congressional map, which was gerrymandered to give Republicans five extra seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. The new map would especially harm Latino and Black representation in Congress, but President Trump is pushing for it in order to retain a Republican majority in the 2026 midterm election. “Texas is essentially just going to be the guinea pig.
Former Amazon Labor Union President Chris Smalls joins us for one of his first interviews since he returned to the United States after he was beaten, arrested and detained by the Israeli military for attempting to bring aid to starving Palestinians in Gaza. Smalls calls Israel’s assault and starvation of Gaza a “working-class issue,” and was the only Black member of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition’s latest attempt to break Israel’s near-total blockade of Gaza.
