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Why should a teenager bother to read a book, when there are so many other demands on their time? In this episode of Radio Atlantic: a dispatch from a teenager’s future. We hear from Atlantic staffers about the books they read in high school that stuck with them.
More than 3,100 Indigenous students died at boarding schools in the United States between 1828 and 1970 — three times the number of deaths reported earlier this year by the Department of Interior, according to a new investigation by The Washington Post. Many of the students had been forcibly removed from their families and tribes as part of a government policy of cultural eradication and assimilation.
We go to Damascus for an update on the state of affairs in Syria after the surprise collapse of the long-reigning Assad regime, with BBC Middle East correspondent Lina Sinjab. She is reporting in Syria for the first time in over a decade, after she was forced to flee the country in 2013.
After a 15-year career in the Foreign Service, Michael Casey resigned from the State Department in July over U.S. policy on Gaza and is now speaking out publicly for the first time. He was deputy political counselor at the United States Office for Palestinian Affairs in Jerusalem for four years before he left. Casey says he resigned after “getting no action from Washington” for his recommendations on humanitarian actions for Palestinians and toward a workable two-state solution.
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“The art of life lies in taking pleasures as they pass,” said the ancient Greek philosopher Aristippus, “and the keenest pleasures are not intellectual, nor are they always moral.” In other words: If it feels good, do it.
Aristippus was a student of Socrates who founded a minor school of philosophy called Cyrenaicism. As Cyrenaic thinking evolved, it centered on two ideas.
When the South Korean drama Squid Game hit Netflix in 2021, the show became a bona fide cultural phenomenon. The story of people in debt competing to the death for a massive cash prize looked like nothing else on television, juxtaposing candy-colored children’s games with horrifying hyper-violence. Squid Game soon turned forest-green tracksuits into a trendy Halloween costume. It helped enter the word dalgona—the sugary treat used in one of the contests—into the pop-culture lexicon.
The story behind the Swedish start-up’s ambitious rise and massive downfall
If you ask a Bogotáno where they learned to ride a bike, they all have the same answer.
Credit cards make sports betting dangerously easy—but they also come with hidden fees and risks that sportsbooks won’t tell you about.
The move, welcomed by conservative organizations, leaves in place a Trump rule allowing more employers to opt out of providing coverage.
Republican lawmakers are looking past Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s views as they consider his nomination to lead HHS.
Public health officials see promise in some of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s plans to prevent chronic disease but despair at his vaccine conspiracy theories.
Trump’s pick to lead HHS heads to the Hill this week.
Cinematic history has long been lousy with Draculas: Dozens of remakes, sequels, and spin-offs of Bram Stoker’s seminal gothic novel have graced the screen over the years. But F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu is a rarer breed. The 1922 German expressionist film cribbed the plot of Stoker’s Dracula (with some alterations) and created the first horror-movie masterpiece, conjuring a unique take on one of the genre’s hoariest texts.
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Around the world, authoritarians seem to be regaining their strength and daring. In the United States, a political coalition—one that includes people for whom, as my colleague Adam Serwer has memorably written, “the cruelty is the point”—is returning to power.
The Waves also discusses the Riverside Church controversy and the case of Sarah Milov.
What we say matters, especially depending on whom we say it to.
The Waves also discusses the case against Jeffrey Epstein and Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Fleishman Is in Trouble.
Miran has called for a sweeping overhaul of the Fed to ensure greater political control over the central bank, including giving the president the power to fire board members at will.
Five weeks after the election, the president took his sharpest swing at Trump’s policy plans.
A pair of POLITICO|Morning Consult polls, one conducted in the final days of the election and the other conducted after Trump won, show how public opinion has changed.
The final paid messages: Economy, culture wars and character.
Harris has ratcheted up her warnings about the dangers of a second Trump term in recent weeks.
As foreign powers look to shape Syria’s political landscape after the toppling of the Assad regime, the country’s Kurdish population is in the spotlight. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan continues to threaten the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia, which Turkey regards as an extension of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party militants who have fought an insurgency against the Turkish state for 40 years.
The U.S. House Ethics Committee has released its damning report on former Republican Representative Matt Gaetz, whom Trump had picked to be his attorney general before the Florida politician was forced to withdraw from consideration. The bipartisan committee’s report found Gaetz “regularly paid women for engaging in sexual activity with him” and possessed illegal drugs, including cocaine and ecstasy, on “multiple different occasions.
President Biden has spared the lives of 37 of 40 federal death row prisoners by commuting their sentences to life in prison. This comes just weeks before President-elect Donald Trump is set to return to the White House with a promise to restart and expand federal executions.
