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Ahead of next week’s closing arguments for Donald Trump’s hush-money trial, the former president’s allies took turns appearing outside the Manhattan courthouse. Speaker Mike Johnson, Senator J. D. Vance, and Representative Matt Gaetz were among those who made appearances.

On-screen, during an early scene in The Fall Guy, the stunt driver Logan Holladay pulls off a move that looks utterly chaotic. He steers an SUV that soars across a beach, parts of it breaking off as it tumbles over and over until landing upside down, in a mess of smoke and debris.  
But Holladay could feel, even before he was told, that he’d completed the stunt as planned.

Democrats and Republicans don’t agree on much, but for a long time, they agreed on this: the more free trade, the better. Now they agree on the opposite: Free trade has gone too far.
On Tuesday, President Joe Biden announced plans to impose steep new tariffs on certain products made in China, including a 100 percent tariff on electric cars.

Preparing a birth plan requires considering the many things that could go wrong during childbirth—or, in the best-case scenario of everything proceeding as normal, how you might attempt to mitigate earth-shattering pain. In Babes, a new comedy about two best friends navigating pregnancy and the delirium of postpartum life, one woman is determined to approach her birth plan differently.

This article was originally published by Hakai Magazine.
The last rat on Tromelin Island—a small teardrop of scrubby sand in the western Indian Ocean near Madagascar—was killed in 2005.
Rats had lived on the island for hundreds of rat generations.

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Ian Bogost has lived through more than a few hype cycles on the internet. The Atlantic contributing writer has been online, and building websites, since the early days of the World Wide Web.

Updated on Friday, May 17 at 3:27 pm
Three high-profile women in Congress got into it last night during a meeting of the House Oversight Committee, in what some outlets have described as a “heated exchange.” But that label feels too dignified. Instead, the whole scene played out like a Saturday Night Live sketch: a cringeworthy five-minute commentary on the miserable state of American politics.
Unless you are perpetually online, you may have missed the drama.

Allow me to explain my toilet theory of the internet. The premise, while unprovable, is quite simple: At any given moment, a great deal of the teeming, frenetic activity we experience online—clicks, views, posts, comments, likes, and shares—is coming from people who are scrolling on their phones in the bathroom.
Toilet theory isn’t necessarily literal, of course.

There may be an insurrectionist justice on the Supreme Court, perhaps two. The New York Times reported yesterday that 10 days after a violent mob ransacked the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election and keep Donald Trump in power, an upside-down American flag flew outside the home of Justice Samuel Alito. At the time, Trump supporters were using the upside-down flag as a symbol of their belief in Trump’s lies that the election had been stolen.

Every day, the blogger Alex Lyons orders the same salad from the same New York City bodega and eats it in the same place: her desk. She eats it while working so that she can publish a story before “prime time”—the midday lunch window when her audience of office workers scrolls mindlessly on their computers while gobbling down their own salad.