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The list of Nobel laureates reads like a collection of humanity’s greatest treasures: Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Francis Crick, Toni Morrison. As of this morning, it also includes two physicists whose research, in the 1980s, laid the foundations for modern artificial intelligence.
Mexico has sworn in its first woman president. This looks like a bold step for equality and progress—all the more impressive because the new president, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, is of Jewish origin. Her father’s parents immigrated to Mexico from Lithuania in the 1920s; her mother’s parents escaped to Mexico from Axis-aligned Bulgaria in the early 1940s.
But Mexico is not advancing toward an egalitarian future. It is regressing into an authoritarian past.
When the Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel wrote his will in 1895, he designated funds to reward those who “have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind.” The resulting Nobel Prizes have since been awarded to the discoverers of penicillin, X-rays, and the structure of DNA—and, as of today, to two scientists who, decades ago, laid the foundations for modern artificial intelligence.
As the war on Gaza enters its second year and Israel expands its attacks on Lebanon, we continue our conversation with the acclaimed writer Ta-Nehisi Coates. His new book, The Message, is based in part on his visit last year to Israel and the occupied West Bank, where he says he saw a system of segregation and oppression reminiscent of Jim Crow in the United States. “It was revelatory,” says Coates.
We spend the hour with the acclaimed writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose new book The Message features three essays tackling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, book bans and academic freedom, and the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade. The Message is written as a letter to Coates’s students at Howard University, where he is the Sterling Brown Endowed Chair in the English department.
It’s rough waters for labor
From the street, this conflict is invisible; for city governments, it’s inescapable.
It’s not cars that are more sophisticated.
It turns out no one wants to hear these guys debate policy at all.
Trump says he’ll veto legislation to ban the procedure.
The ruling allows abortions to resume beyond six weeks into pregnancy.
Still angry about the Covid response, GOP lawmakers want to overhaul the National Institutes of Health if they win in November.
Some see the politicking as a moral obligation, but others see a threat to the doctor-patient relationship.
The case is part of a concerted effort by the Biden administration to lower drug prices.
The Treasury secretary is defending her legacy — and warning that the stability of the U.S. economy is at stake.
It was her first solo interview with a national network as the Democratic presidential nominee.
Interest rate cut “is not a declaration of victory, it’s a declaration of progress.
The move signals that the central bank is growing nervous about the declining labor market.
Biden is determined to convince a skeptical public that he strengthened the economy.
One of Donald Trump’s signature rhetorical moves—and there are many—is wrapping his most heinous and controversial public statements in the faintest patina of ambiguity. Not enough to obscure his point. Not even enough to give actual plausible deniability. But enough for Trump and his followers to wave away their critics as hysterical.
In 2015, when Trump famously said that Mexican immigrants are criminals and rapists, he also said, “Some, I assume, are good people.
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
A Donald Trump rally is always a strange spectacle, and not only because of the candidate’s incoherence and bizarre detours into mental cul-de-sacs.
Very few podcasters would apologize to their fans for clogging up their feed by interviewing a presidential candidate. But Alex Cooper—the host of a podcast variously described as “raunchy, “sex-positive,” “mega-popular,” and “the most-listened-to podcast by women”—is an exception. “Daddy Gang,” she began her latest episode, “as you know, I do not usually discuss politics, or have politicians on this show, because I want Call Her Daddy to be a place where everyone feels comfortable tuning in.
Over the past three years, as I worked on a book about the history of the video-game company Blizzard Entertainment, a disconcerting question kept popping into my head: Why does success seem so awful? Even typing that out feels almost anti-American, anathema to the ethos of hard work and ambition that has propelled so many of the great minds and ideas that have changed the world.
But Blizzard makes a good case for the modest achievement over the astronomical.
The stakes of overpriced dinner delivery have never been higher.
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
In her new short story, “The Ghosts of Wannsee,” the author Lauren Groff captures the precise moment when a friendship changes forever. “Wannsee” follows two friends from high school who reunite one afternoon after many years apart; the encounter alters their understanding of each other in ways that neither anticipated.
Today marks both the first anniversary of the October 7 attack on Israel from the Gaza Strip and one week since Israel began its ground invasion of the neighboring country of Lebanon. Israel’s brutal military response to the Hamas-led October 7 incursion has shown no sign of slowing down as the United States, its primary supplier of military aid, continues to commit weapons, funding and rhetorical support to its deadly assault on Arab populations in Gaza, the West Bank and now Lebanon.
The Palestinian poet and author Mosab Abu Toha, who fled Gaza in December after being detained by the Israeli military, is releasing his second book of poetry, Forest of Noise, next week.
The Path Forward is a new documentary that weaves together the voices of Palestinians and Israelis in their efforts for peace and reconciliation. The short film features the stories of Israeli and Palestinian peace activists who have worked together before and after October 7 and Israel’s relentless war on Gaza. We play excerpts from The Path Forward and speak to one of the activists featured, Aziz Abu Sarah, as well as to co-director Julie Cohen.
Today is the first anniversary of the October 7 attack on Israel, when Hamas’s military wing broke out of Israeli-constructed barrier fencing in the Gaza Strip. In the ensuing firefight, an estimated 1,200 people died. About 250 people were taken hostage and brought back to Gaza in a bid to pressure Israel to release some of the thousands of Palestinian political prisoners it holds in Israeli custody.
It’s rough waters for labor