President Trump reportedly wants to exclude Social Security and Medicare from budget cuts while severely retrenching other domestic federal functions. That represents a frontal challenge not only to congressional Democrats but also to Republican budget hawks led by House Speaker … | Continue reading
What We’re FollowingRising Hate: In the latest wave of bomb threats against Jewish Americans, 19 community centers and schools in 11 states were targeted today—just one day after scores of headstones were damaged or pushed over at a Jewish cemetery in Philadelphia. Acts of vandal … | Continue reading
Today in 5 LinesPresident Trump will reportedly propose a federal budget that increases defense-related spending by $54 billion and cuts spending for other federal agencies. During a meeting with U.S. governors, Trump said his budget will put “America first” and stressed that hea … | Continue reading
Tarek El-Messidi had been planning to leave Philadelphia to visit family on Sunday night. But when he heard that Mount Carmel Jewish Cemetery had been desecrated, he cancelled his flight. El-Messidi is Muslim, but he felt it was important to be with his hometown Jewish community … | Continue reading
SpaceX is planning to send two people for a trip around around the moon in late 2018, Elon Musk, the company’s CEO, announced Monday.Two passengers—private citizens, not astronauts—will launch inside a Dragon capsule atop a Falcon Heavy rocket for a weeklong, 400,000-mile loop ar … | Continue reading
A Kuwaiti oil field set afire by retreating Iraqi troops during Operation Desert Storm on March 1, 1991 (Wikimedia)Spurred by our collection of stories from readers who used marijuana as a substitute for prescription opioids, another reader writes:I am a totally and permanently s … | Continue reading
American presidents have often clashed with the press. But for a long time, the chief executive had little choice but to interact with journalists anyway.This was as much a logistical matter as it was a begrudging commitment to the underpinnings of Democracy: News organizations w … | Continue reading
Viola Davis’s acceptance speech for Best Supporting Actress began with a thanks to the Academy and this observation: “You know, there’s one place that all the people with the greatest potential are gathered.”Pause. Some viewers may have felt a queasy pang. Was the Fences actress … | Continue reading
Carnival season 2017 is underway across Europe and the Americas. These pre-Lent festivals, often a blend of local pagan and Catholic traditions, usher out the winter and welcome in spring. Gathered here are images of carnivals around the world, including images from Spain, Brazil … | Continue reading
When you cross into or out of the United States, whether in a car or at an airport, you enter a special zone where federal agents have unusual powers to search your belongings—powers they don’t have elsewhere in the country. The high standard set by the Fourth Amendment, which pr … | Continue reading
On a family vacation to the woods, Angie Scioli can only spend a few days swigging Lime-A-Ritas and strumming her ukulele before the compulsion to plan lessons pulls her back to her profession. As an award-winning social-studies teacher at Leesville Road High School in Raleigh, N … | Continue reading
The manner of Moonlight’s Best Picture win at the Oscars may have been bizarre and shocking, but in toppling expected favorite La La Land, Barry Jenkins’s film set a number of milestones. It’s the lowest-budgeted film to win the prize since Delbert Mann’s Marty in 1955; if adjust … | Continue reading
Today The Atlantic debuts an exciting new project: The Atlantic Life Timeline. The timeline draws upon The Atlantic’s 160-year archive to create a personal and shareable timeline that shows readers their own place in history, through the lens of The Atlantic’s reporting on key mo … | Continue reading
If the last-minute twist at the Oscars was seen to echo all the last-minute twists in American culture lately—the Super Bowl, the election—a silly five-minute segment earlier in the night should be noted for what it captured about the country’s ongoing tensions and tastes in iPho … | Continue reading
Why does Donald Trump exaggerate the size of his inauguration crowd, brag about his election win in conversations with world leaders, and claim without evidence that voter fraud may have cost him the popular vote? Why does he dismiss protesters who oppose him as “paid professiona … | Continue reading
Last year, the comedian Marc Maron brought the author Chuck Klosterman on as a guest on his WTF podcast. The two discussed many things (including Klosterman’s then-new book, But What If We’re Wrong?, which he was there to promote), but one of them was sports—and the particular th … | Continue reading
June 4, 1965The Zika epidemic—thankfully now in the past but still without a vaccine—spread throughout 60 countries and affected thousands of pregnant women in 2015 and 2016. The disease is most dangerous for pregnant women due to the risk of birth defects as severe as microcepha … | Continue reading
President Donald Trump was 3,000 miles away from the Academy Awards on Sunday night, but his presence loomed larger in the Dolby Theatre than anyone else in the room. From Jimmy Kimmel’s opening monologue to acceptance speeches to the ads punctuating the ceremony, it felt at time … | Continue reading
During an unusually charged race for leader of the Democratic Party, analysts and liberal commentators argued that former Labor Secretary Tom Perez, who won, was basically just as progressive as Representative Keith Ellison, who was backed by progressive standard-bearers Senators … | Continue reading
It’s a good time to be interested in the brain. Neuroscientists can now turn neurons on or off with just a flash of light, allowing them to manipulate the behavior of animals with exceptional precision. They can turn brains transparent and seed them with glowing molecules to divi … | Continue reading
Bill Nye, of the popular former PBS show Bill Nye the Science Guy, had an untraditional path to stardom. He quit his engineering job in 1986 and started working for a television show. When a guest cancelled, Nye filled in doing “science stuff” under the moniker Bill Nye the Scien … | Continue reading
Two years ago, at a retail-marketing conference called “The Internet of Things: Shopping,” a consultant took the stage and predicted that by 2028, half of Americans will have implants that communicate with retailers as they walk down stores’ aisles and inspect various items. By 2 … | Continue reading
It’s difficult to piece together, in the moment, which of the events we live through will be remembered over time. Will it be the resignation of a national security advisor weeks into a new presidency? Will it be the sight of people wearing shorts in the middle of winter, a chase … | Continue reading
Humans, when you train them, can be phenomenally good at pattern recognition. Our long history as the descendants of organisms who could spot a predator in dappled grass probably has something to do with it, but today, this ability makes all manner of things possible. For instanc … | Continue reading
It was a crazy idea, and even today no one is sure who thought of it.It was the researchers. No, the screenwriters. Or maybe the advisers? Whomever it was, seven years ago, dozens of Sesame Workshop team members were sitting in a room preparing for the 41st season of Sesame Stree … | Continue reading
—The New York Times is reporting that President Trump’s budget will seek a steep increase in spending for the Defense Department, sharp cuts in other areas, but will leave Social Security and Medicare alone.—Islamist militants in the Philippines beheaded a German tourist whom the … | Continue reading
On a steamy Tuesday, I sat in the passenger side of Emelina Martinez’s car as she wove through Overtown, a neighborhood in Miami notorious for opioid drug use, sales, and overdoses. Martinez, 48, is an outreach coordinator at IDEA Exchange, Florida’s first needle exchange that op … | Continue reading
Last week President Trump condemned attacks against American Jews, which is good. So why won’t he condemn attacks against American Muslims? Why is there so little political pressure on him to do so?Numerically, the problem appears roughly similar. In the ten days following Trump’ … | Continue reading
Rodney Cruz was born an American citizen. He did a tour in Iraq during 10 years in the Army, and was wounded on the battlefield three times, eventually suffering a traumatic brain injury. His enlistment followed in the footsteps of many of his relatives, an unbroken line of milit … | Continue reading
American citizens had their introduction to the Trump-era immigration machine Wednesday, when Customs and Border Protection agents met an airliner that had just landed at New York’s JFK airport after a flight from San Francisco. According to passenger accounts, a flight attendant … | Continue reading
Nearly every faction that opposes Trump seems to have organized its own protest in recent months. The women have already marched, and now they’re doubling down with a day without women. (They’ve taken a page from immigrants, whom we also went a day without.) Soon, many scientists … | Continue reading
The endocrinologist-turned-entrepreneur Deepak Chopra is back on the list of The New York Times bestsellers this week, as he often is. According to The Chopra Center, the leader has authored “more than 85 books.” At some point keeping an exact tally may have become difficult.I tr … | Continue reading
In the 25 years that John Boehner served in Congress, the former House speaker said on Thursday in his eye-opening moment of candor, “Republicans never, ever, one time agreed on what a health care proposal should look like. Not once.”The happily-retired Ohioan was explaining to a … | Continue reading
After the typically interminable slog of awards season, tonight brings the Oscars, the yearly glitzy celebration of moviemaking, celebrity, and industry back-patting held at Los Angeles’ Dolby Theater. (Our writers will be following along live and breaking down the ceremony, whic … | Continue reading
—A pickup truck plowed into a crowd at a Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans Saturday night, injuring 28 people. No one was killed in the incident. More here—We’re tracking the news stories of the day below. All updates are in Eastern Standard Time (GMT -5). Read On » | Continue reading
Bill Gates, the world’s richest man, and Warren Buffett, the third richest, are—not entirely coincidentally—two of the most unremittingly optimistic men on the planet. So when I met the two of them in New York recently to talk about the state of humankind, and about the future of … | Continue reading
Sunday In the Park With George, currently playing in a limited run at New York’s Hudson Theatre starring Jake Gyllenhaal, is blissfully free of politics—a two-and-a-half hour respite from contemporary anxieties, a holiday on the banks of the Seine, bathed in sunlight and glorious … | Continue reading
Had the Allies landed on the Western coast of Denmark on D-Day, the Nazis would have been ready. The German forces had built up the defensive Atlantic Wall, which stretched along the European coast from the top of Norway to south of France, to protect against an invasion launched … | Continue reading
Historians have looked harshly on the FBI’s legacy in dealing with religious groups. The Bureau famously investigated and threatened Martin Luther King Jr. at the peak of the civil-rights movement. A 1993 standoff with a group called the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, ended wit … | Continue reading
The Democratic National Committee on Saturday elected former Labor Secretary Thomas Perez as its new chairman, choosing a close ally of both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to lead the out-of-power party in the era of Donald Trump.Perez defeated Representative Keith Ellison of M … | Continue reading
Katie Martin / The AtlanticIn this week’s Atlantic coverage, our writers explored the changing movie industry, the history of stardom, Ireland’s national-park invasion, a popular hair-care solution, the future of the U.S. economy, and more.Can you remember the key facts? Find the … | Continue reading
OXON HILL, Maryland — If you want to take the temperature of the conservative movement at CPAC, you need to know where to stick the thermometer. It’s not in the onstage speeches, or the myriad policy panels, or the boozy after-parties—it’s inside Exhibit Hall D on the ground floo … | Continue reading
This week, our “Americans at Work” photo essay features photographs of Melissa Eich, a speech pathologist in Charlottesville, Virginia, taken by her husband Matt Eich:“When we met in 2005, I was 19 and Melissa was 18. I was a sophomore studying photojournalism and she was a fresh … | Continue reading
—Al-Qaeda-linked insurgents stormed two Syrian security offices in Homs, killing at least 32 people, including the official that leads the Military Intelligence service.—We’re tracking the news stories of the day below. All updates are in Eastern Standard Time (GMT -5). Read On » | Continue reading
30 Years After His Death, Andy Warhol’s Spirit Is Still Very Much AliveR.C. Baker | The Village Voice“How much responsibility does a mirror bear for whatever beauty or ugliness it beholds? Warhol loved both the heights and depths of American culture, and reflected it back at us t … | Continue reading
Last week, the House Science, Space and Technology committee invited four witnesses from NASA’s past to discuss the agency’s future endeavors, including a human mission to Mars, a possible return to the moon, and the commercial space sector. NASA consistently polls as Americans’ … | Continue reading
Even though research has shown that there are concrete benefits to hiring and promoting more women into leadership positions, progress remains stilted in corporate America—especially at the top. Only 14 percent of executives at Fortune 500 companies are women. While the number of … | Continue reading
Why do the girls of Girls act that way? That’s the question underlying five years of baffled cultural responses to Lena Dunham’s epic of questionable decisions, cruelty, narcissism, and grace. Girls has never given a straightforward answer to the question. Despite unflinching con … | Continue reading