The sooner we acknowledge that the United States has lost the war with Iran and stop fighting, the better. Because we now have a lot of work to do.
On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was pressed to explain before the Senate what the United States had accomplished in its war with Iran. Sputtering with fury at times, he claimed that Washington had won “a historic military victory.
In the summer of 2021, Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, were cruising the Mediterranean by yacht when they stopped for a swim off the Adriatic coast. They splashed over to an island and hiked, barefoot, across its hilly, rugged terrain. “Effectively that’s how we found it,” the president’s eldest daughter would later recount.
The Albanian island that the Trump heirs stumbled on, Robinson Crusoe–like, is called Sazan, once the site of a top-secret military base.
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.
One of the most gruesome murders in 19th-century America happened in a New York City office, just across the street from city hall. In 1841, Samuel Adams, a printer of no apparent relation to the famous Revolutionary, paid a visit to John Colt, the author of a popular bookkeeping manual and brother to a famous gunmaker. Adams had gone to see Colt about the $1.
Israeli American Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov says Israel’s assault on Gaza predicts “the future of genocide,” with the perpetrator not only enjoying impunity for crimes against humanity but also profiting from the death and destruction. He says Israeli leaders will almost certainly escape accountability because international allies, including the United States and many European states, have failed to uphold international law.
Palestinian activist Mohsen Mahdawi, whose arrest by masked and hooded ICE agents when he arrived for his naturalization interview to become a U.S. citizen made national headlines last year, is facing a new deportation threat after a three-judge panel overturned a lower court ruling that had freed him from ICE custody. Mahdawi was involved in pro-Palestine protests at Columbia University, where he was a student, demanding an end to Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
We speak with Salah Sarsour, a Palestinian community leader in Wisconsin, president of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee and a legal permanent resident of the United States for over 30 years. He faces possible deportation after being arrested in March and detained in an ICE jail for 80 days.
Beth Gardiner explains how we ended up holding the (plastic) bag for Big Oil’s wastefulness.
The rush to build more data centers is driving up electricity costs.
From Chipotle to Chopt, the cyclosporiasis outbreak is causing an implosion of sales—and an explosion of problems elsewhere.
It looks like Bending Spoons’ bet on nostalgia brands like AOL, Vimeo, and Evernote is playing off after its big IPO this week.
Nobel Prize winner Alvin Roth explains what we learn when markets are shaped by big ethical questions.
The deferrals are part of a nationwide crackdown on health fraud in government programs.
With drug deaths plummeting, state officials are wary of halting harm reduction initiatives.
The Trump administration said Monday Americans in Congo, where Ebola is spreading, must spend three weeks in a third country before coming home.
John Cornyn, Bill Cassidy and Thom Tillis are leaving the Senate after warring with Trump, but they still can block the president’s appointees.
The Trump administration’s crackdown on Medicaid fraud in Minnesota has upended finances and disrupted access to care.
Outward’s hosts sit down with the host and co-creator of When We All Get to Heaven.
The neighborhood changes, the church moves, people forget and remember “the AIDS years,” but AIDS isn’t over.
The AIDS cocktail opens new possibilities. And MCC San Francisco tries to use the experience of AIDS to make bigger social change.
The church’s minister gets sick and everyone knows it.
The church’s “it couple” faces AIDS, caregiving, and loss as part of a pair, part of families, and part of a community.
The tech company Flock, makers of traffic cameras that automatically record and log car license plates for law enforcement agencies, is facing increasing scrutiny over accusations that its vast, AI-sorted database has created a new, nationwide mass surveillance system.
The nation’s most scrutinized museum director showed up to Congress this week acutely aware of her audience. Anthea Hartig, the head of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, referred to the institution as “your” museum. She emphatically affirmed her love of this country. She even cited her family’s Revolutionary War roots.
If you’re confused about whether you can eat the shredded lettuce on your Doritos Locos tacos again, you’re not alone. I cover food safety for a living—and I love Taco Bell—and I’m not sure when I’ll be comfortable living más.
At the end of last week, the worst concerns about the ongoing cyclosporiasis outbreak seemed to be behind us.
For nearly five months, Donald Trump and his Cabinet have been misleading the American people about the war in Iran. When the president makes statements about the war, they are full of wishful thinking, hyperbole, and outright lies. He has devoted a full address to the topic only once—a rambling prime-time speech nearly four months ago that contained little substance.
Yesterday, OpenAI made an alarming disclosure: An assortment of its most advanced AI models, including one that has not yet been released, had autonomously broken out of the company’s internal systems and hacked into the databases of another tech firm, Hugging Face, to steal some information.
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On this week’s episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with his thoughts questioning whether the Trump administration has any plan at all to meet the challenge of debt and deficits.
Then, David is joined by Vincent Smith, director of agricultural policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and professor emeritus of economics at Montana State University.
On February 28, the first day of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, missiles landed on Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in the Iranian city of Minab, in a civilian area near the Strait of Hormuz. At least 121 schoolchildren were killed along with 26 teachers. Forensic Architecture and Sky News analyzed the attack, finding that the neighborhood was bombed a second time while families and rescuers were still on the ground.
The U.S. is continuing to strike Iran for an 11th straight day. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Tuesday revealed the cost of the war on Iran has soared to over $37 billion during an appearance before the Senate Appropriations Committee. However, independent estimates and media reports based on internal leaks suggest the true figure is much higher. Hegseth is now seeking $80 billion more from Congress, including $67 billion for the war on Iran.
Andrew and Tristan Tate have been arrested in Miami after British authorities issued new rape and sex trafficking charges against them. The brothers, dual British-U.S. citizens, are prominent in the far-right, hypermasculine online community known as the “manosphere.” They previously lived in Romania, where in 2023 prosecutors filed a criminal indictment against them for human trafficking, while Andrew faces a rape charge.