Updated at 7:31 p.m. ET on August 26, 2025
One of the more surreal knock-on effects of the gutting of USAID is that the U.S. government is now holding a massive fire sale for mosquito nets, water towers, printers, iPads, chairs, generators, defibrillators, textbooks, agricultural equipment, motorbikes, mobile health clinics, and more. Until recently, these items supported the 5,000-plus foreign-aid projects that the Trump administration has now canceled.
Five months into its unprecedented dismantling of foreign-aid programs, the Trump administration has given the order to incinerate food instead of sending it to people abroad who need it. Nearly 500 metric tons of emergency food—enough to feed about 1.5 million children for a week—are set to expire tomorrow, according to current and former government employees with direct knowledge of the rations.
This week, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. used his address to a global vaccine summit to disparage global vaccination. The conference was organized by Gavi, the world’s leading immunization program, and in a recorded speech, Kennedy accused the organization of collaborating with social-media companies to stifle dissenting views on immunization during the coronavirus pandemic and said it had “ignored the science” in its work.
Gambling has swallowed American sports culture whole. Until early 2018, sports betting was illegal under federal law; today, it’s legal in 39 states and Washington, D.C. (and easy enough to access through backdoor channels even in the states where it isn’t). During NFL games, gambling commercials air more often than ads for beer. Commentators analyze not just whether a team can win, but if they might win by at least the number of points by which they’re favored on betting apps.
After Elon Musk made a public show of remedying an apparent error in DOGE’s massive cuts to foreign aid, the Trump administration has quietly doubled down on its decision to stop sending emergency food to millions of children who are starving in Bangladesh, Somalia, and other countries. Without urgent intervention, many of these children are likely to die within months, experts told me.
It took the Trump administration—and, really, Elon Musk—all of 10 days to dismantle USAID, the world’s single largest humanitarian donor. On January 24, a memo from the State Department ordered virtually every foreign-assistance program funded by the United States government to halt work for 90 days. Four days later, the State Department said that lifesaving humanitarian assistance should continue, and that special waivers could be granted to select programs.
There are times when, deep into a scroll through my phone, I tilt my head and realize that I’m not even sure what app I’m on. A video takes up my entire screen. If I slide my finger down, another appears. The feeling is disorienting, so I search for small design cues at the margins of my screen. The thing I’m staring at could be TikTok, or it could be one of any number of other social apps that look exactly like it.
Since September 29, when the smell of chlorine first began to waft over metro Atlanta, Georgia residents’ lives have been upended by an enormous chemical fire. That day, a chemical plant containing millions of pounds of pool sanitizer burned to the ground in Conyers, Georgia. The blaze was extinguished in hours, but an enormous plume of orange and black smoke remained for days, so thick that drivers on Interstate 20 struggled to see past their windshield.
This year, just like last year, the nearly 200,000 kids in Chicago’s public elementary schools spent recess indoors during the first week of school, when the heat index hit 114 degrees. In the past few weeks, outdoor activities were canceled at schools in and around Washington, D.C., where temperatures exceeded 100 degrees last month, and in Southern California too.