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Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition.
Not all movies are meant to be watched twice. Some leave a glancing effect; others emanate so much intensity that the idea of sitting through them again feels unbearable.
The June issue of The Atlantic features an excerpt from Sam Tanenhaus’s long-awaited biography of the conservative intellectual and polemicist William F. Buckley Jr. That book—Buckley: The Life and Revolution That Changed America—will be published by Penguin Random House on June 3. Buckley exerted enormous influence not only on American politics but also on how political debate was waged (more and more, on television).
It’s the product of a multimillion-dollar business built to cash in on your proud moment.
Trump’s policies have made travel feel incredibly fraught. We talked to some lawyers about what to expect.
An update to the CDC’s website shows that children “may” get the Covid vaccine if their parents and doctors want them to.
The CMS administrator says in a POLITICO podcast that most Americans agree with the White House push to enact work requirements.
The health secretary said the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association and The Lancet are in bed with pharma.
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.
The General Services Administration, which oversees government contracting, is leading a review of more than 20,000 consulting agreements for what is “non-essential.
The crowded contest in the Garden State shows how hard it is to address pocketbook issues.
Earlier, Buffett warned Saturday about the dire global consequences of President Donald Trump’s tariffs.
Trump has blamed shaky economic numbers on his predecessor.
Following its latest round of focus groups, Navigator Research is urging Democrats to proactively push their own economic policies.
President Donald Trump has signed a wave of pardons for people convicted of fraud, including a Virginia sheriff who took tens of thousands of dollars in bribes and a reality TV couple who evaded millions in taxes after defrauding banks. Last month, Trump pardoned a Florida healthcare executive convicted of tax evasion for stealing nearly $11 million in payroll taxes from the paychecks of doctors and nurses.
President Donald Trump has vowed to go to the Supreme Court to keep his tariffs in place after a whirlwind 24 hours that saw a court temporarily reinstate the measures, soon after two courts blocked most of the tariffs, saying Trump overstepped his presidential authority. Trump has been infuriated by the legal challenges and lashed out on social media against the Federalist Society and conservative legal activist Leonard Leo.
We speak with esteemed historian scholar Ellen Schrecker about the Trump administration’s assault on universities and the crackdown on dissent, a climate of fear and censorship she describes as “worse than McCarthyism.”
“During the McCarthy period, it was attacking only individual professors and only about their sort of extracurricular political activities on the left. … Today, the repression that’s coming out of Washington, D.C.
“The point of this is to lure Palestinians as though they’re animals going into a cage, lure them with the bait of promise of aid, and then entrap them in the south of Gaza.” As starving Palestinians in Gaza compete for the limited trickle of supplies admitted into the enclave by a new U.S.
The Conversation with Dasha Burns launches with Mehmet Oz as its first guest.
Federal policy changes are having spillover effects on everything from disease outbreak mitigation to long-term care
Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings, watch full episodes here, or listen to the weekly podcast here.
Donald Trump’s willingness to mix public office with personal benefit is facing scrutiny, as are his latest pardons.
Updated at 3:38 p.m. ET on May 31, 2025
Solving HIV vaccination—a puzzle that scientists have been tackling for decades without success—could be like cracking the code to a safe. The key, they now think, may be delivering a series of different shots in a specific sequence, iteratively training the body to produce a strong, broad immune response that will endure against the fast-mutating virus, ideally for a lifetime.
This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.
“History found you.” In 2020, Caitlin Flanagan told recent college graduates that their dreams were interrupted in much the same way her father’s dreams had once been interrupted. In 1941, he was a new student at Amherst College, “and he thought it was paradise,” Caitlin wrote.
Every major movie franchise has boxes to check. In Jurassic Park, dinosaurs must run amok; in Planet of the Apes, apes have to meditate on intelligence; in The Fast and the Furious, Vin Diesel absolutely has to evangelize the benefits of family, Corona beers, and tricked-out cars. But Mission: Impossible took four films to fully establish its franchise must-have: the ever more blurred lines between its death-defying, stunt-loving star, Tom Cruise, and the superspy he plays.
