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Twice a day, all across the country, the National Weather Service launches a fleet of latex balloons into the stratosphere to collect what’s known as “upper-air data”—detailed measurements of temperature, humidity, and pressure.
In late March, I started receiving daily texts from the federal government about AI. “🇺🇸AI is changing how we work and live,” one message read. “You might feel curious, skeptical, or unsure—that’s normal.” I had enrolled in an AI-literacy course from the Labor Department created to help workers succeed in the ChatGPT economy.
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.
In the eyes of its many critics, New York City has always been both too American and not American enough. It’s the place where the pursuit of profit curdles into greed—where hustlers, financiers, and real-estate speculators conjure fortunes out of thin air.
It’s time for your scheduled open-heart surgery. Unfortunately, no one has seen or heard from the surgeon in weeks, since the Incident. The nurse says that she spoke with him at length on a wide variety of important subjects and that he had never been more eloquent. “Will he be along shortly?” you ask. “I hired him to perform a specific job, and I would like him to do that.” The nurse is appalled by this disrespect for the doctor’s privacy.
Plans for a luxury resort in an ecologically sensitive area have set off more than a month of protests in Albania, where thousands have taken to the streets to oppose the megaproject backed by Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. The Flamingo Revolution — named for its feared impact on migratory birds — began as an environmental protest but has now turned into anger at the entire political system, threatening to bring down the government of Prime Minister Edi Rama.
The family of Geraldo Lunas Campos is suing over the 55-year-old Cuban immigrant’s death at an ICE detention center in Texas earlier this year, with a local coroner ruling his death a homicide from asphyxia. The Department of Homeland Security said Lunas Campos had attempted suicide, but witnesses said he died after being restrained by multiple guards. The family’s lawsuit names four guards and multiple private companies overseeing the jail.
Immigration and civil rights advocacy groups are demanding an independent investigation into the fatal shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican immigrant and father of three who was killed by ICE agents in Houston on Tuesday morning. Salgado Araujo, who had been living in the United States for nearly 35 years, worked in construction and was starting his day by picking up other workers in Magnolia Park, a historically Latino neighborhood, when ICE agents targeted him.
We speak with political analyst Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, about the latest events in the Middle East. The United States has bombed Iran for multiple days after President Donald Trump declared the ceasefire between the countries to be “over.” Iran says it has retaliated by attacking U.S. military bases and other strategic sites in Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar.
Nobel Prize winner Alvin Roth explains what we learn when markets are shaped by big ethical questions.
Comcast splits from NBCUniversal as media companies realize bigger isn’t better.
The A.I. boom and the Iran war are driving demand for chips to unprecedented levels—leading to bigger price tags for your gadgets.
Alan Greenspan died this week at the age of 100, but his legacy lives on with the Fed’s current chairman.
In the face of a financial quagmire, why not throw up a few glow sticks?
But the health secretary has allies among some patient advocates and makers of tests that detect disease.
Survival will be tracked for 28 days after starting treatment
Despite the restoration of Medicaid funding for health care services — but not abortions — dozens of closed clinics are not likely to reopen.
Insurers are embracing the health secretary’s Make America Healthy Again movement as the GOP looks to cut health care costs.
The POLITICO Poll shows that the Make America Healthy Again umbrella includes people with opposing ideologies and different politics.
Outward’s hosts sit down with the host and co-creator of When We All Get to Heaven.
The neighborhood changes, the church moves, people forget and remember “the AIDS years,” but AIDS isn’t over.
The AIDS cocktail opens new possibilities. And MCC San Francisco tries to use the experience of AIDS to make bigger social change.
The church’s minister gets sick and everyone knows it.
The church’s “it couple” faces AIDS, caregiving, and loss as part of a pair, part of families, and part of a community.
As part of the U.S.-backed “Board of Peace” 20-point plan to end Israel’s military assault on Gaza, Hamas is dissolving its civilian governing body in the Gaza Strip. Hamas’s head of administration, Mohammed al-Farra, resigned from his position on Monday. Hamas, which has controlled the territory for nearly two decades, has said that its ministries and staff will stay in place, and that it will still oversee security and policing in parts of Gaza left under its control.
The Nazi tattoo wasn’t bad enough to force Graham Platner to abandon his Senate bid, his defenders argued earlier this year. Any young Marine, under the powerful influence of alcohol and immaturity, might see a skull and crossbones and think: Badass. The now-deleted Reddit posts mocking rural white people, insulting cops, and making light of assault? Well, chalk that up to the same.
Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old construction contractor and father of three, was a “man of routine,” according to his sons. He woke up at 5 a.m. every day, ate a big breakfast prepared by his wife, and left home at sunrise to build houses in the Houston area. Salgado Araujo came across the border from Mexico as a teenager and had been working without legal status for 35 years. Yesterday he left in his work van to pick up his brother and two other men en route to a job.
Two hundred fifty years and two days into the American experiment, a 55-year-old bespectacled bald man from Liverpool enters a sterile hotel conference room in Atlanta, shaking his head. “It’s all gone to hell, hasn’t it?” he mutters.
In 14 hours, the United States men’s soccer team is scheduled to play Belgium in the World Cup Round of 16, a match that ought to be a celebration of the U.S.’s triumphant, and somewhat unexpected, run in the world’s biggest sporting event.
Iran’s decision to attack ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz and the U.S. decision to retaliate and threaten to abandon diplomacy have pushed both sides close to the resumption of a war that neither wants.
For the United States—which joined Israel in late February in a war to end Iran’s nuclear ambitions, among other goals—allowing Iran’s continued attacks on ships in the strait risked signaling that Tehran still holds the whip hand over one of the world’s most strategic waterways.
If Donald Trump ever had any control over the war he started with Iran, he’s lost it. The Iranians are now setting the terms of this conflict and are routinely humiliating the American president. The “cease-fire” Trump declared last month—a move probably meant to both soothe international markets and avert legislative action from the United States Congress—never really existed, because neither side ever ceased firing.
A new investigation has uncovered how the United Arab Emirates (UAE) supports a secret network of military training camps for the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) that enables them to continue their deadly war in Sudan.
“This war, which is often categorized in international media as a civil war, is really a proxy war,” says award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker Julia Steers.