Few leaders have so visibly enjoyed being president as Joe Biden. That might explain why he took so long getting down the aisle of the House chamber tonight, shaking hands and taking selfies. When he finally made it to the dais, he soaked up the applause and then grinned. “Good evening! If I were smart, I’d go home now,” he said.
The joke acknowledged the stakes of the evening’s State of the Union address.
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.
Americans claim to dread a Trump-Biden rematch, but some Republicans seem more stunned than anyone else that Trump is back on the ballot. Now they are desperately trying to rationalize supporting their nominee.
Even after nearly three months of winter, the oceans of the Northern Hemisphere are disturbingly warm. Last summer’s unprecedented temperatures—remember the “hot tub” waters off the coast of Florida?—have simmered down to a sea-surface average around 68 degrees Fahrenheit in the North Atlantic, but even that is unprecedented for this time of year. The alarming trend stretches around the world: 41 percent of the global ocean experienced heat waves in January.
Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos have each taken a turn as technology’s alpha dog, but none of them can claim that title now. Musk has become a polarizing figure, drained of all mystique. Zuckerberg sold us on a social-media dream that turned out to be a nightmare. Bezos self-ejected from the CEO chair at Amazon, so he could make rockets and frolic on his yacht with his fiancée. (Good for him.)
At the top of the tech world, a vacancy now looms like a missing tooth.
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.
“Hollywood is easy to hate, easy to sneer at, easy to lampoon,” Raymond Chandler wrote in The Atlantic in 1945.
Chandler, at the time already a popular author of detective fiction, had lately begun working as a screenwriter, but he still considered himself an outsider in the movie business.
In Pakistan, Shehbaz Sharif was sworn in Monday as prime minister for a second time, days after newly elected members of Parliament were seated amid protests by lawmakers from the party of ousted and jailed former Prime Minister Imran Khan. Sharif will lead a coalition government after none of the major parties won a majority of parliamentary seats in February’s election, when Khan supporters accused the military of election tampering.
While the Biden administration has been publicly voicing reservations over the mounting death toll in Gaza, a Washington Post investigation revealed the administration has quietly approved and delivered more than 100 separate weapons sales to Israel over the last five months, amounting to thousands of precision-guided munitions, small-diameter bombs, bunker busters and other lethal aid.
As Israel continues its relentless bombardment and siege of Gaza, where hunger and dehydration have reached deadly levels, Hamas has accused Israel of “thwarting” efforts to reach a ceasefire deal. A Hamas delegation in Cairo said that Israel has insisted on rejecting elements of a deal for a phased process that would culminate in an end to Israel’s assault on Gaza, as well as ensuring the entry of aid and facilitating the return of displaced Palestinians back to their homes in Gaza.
Kate Cox’s fight for an abortion in Texas highlights Dobbs’ knock-on effects.
Democrats are working to make abortion and reproductive health care a central issue in the 2024 election.
The announcement is expected to be touted this week, alongside efforts to increase competition in food, housing and other kitchen table issues.
Eighty-six percent of those surveyed said IVF should be legal for women trying to get pregnant.
Policymakers were determined to avoid the mistakes of the Great Recession — and they succeeded. But now they are in a mood of “fear and introspection.
“You can’t blame the president when policies go wrong, and then say he’s not responsible if things are going right.
The unemployment rate stayed at 3.7%, just above a half-century low.
The strategy shift focuses on Trump’s tax law and poses a simple question to voters: Whose side are you on?
Ahead of the 96th Academy Awards, we’re joined by James Wilson, producer of the Oscar-nominated film The Zone of Interest, who raised Israel’s assault on Gaza in his BAFTA Award acceptance speech last month. The film follows the fictionalized family of real-life Nazi commandant Rudolf Höss as they live idyllically next to the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Gov. Kay Ivey signed the legislation as soon as it reached her desk Wednesday night.
Gov. Kay Ivey signed the legislation as soon as it reached her desk Wednesday night.
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.
This month marks four years since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. My colleague Katherine J. Wu recently published an article about what is driving the U.S. government to frame COVID-19 as being flu-like—and the problems with that approach.
This article is based on interviews and research by the Reckoning Project, a multinational group of journalists and lawyers collecting evidence of war crimes in Ukraine.
The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, in the city of Enerhodar, in eastern Ukraine, is Europe’s largest nuclear facility. For decades, it has supplied electricity to millions of households, not just in Ukraine, but in Hungary, Poland, Belarus, Moldova, Slovakia, and Romania as well.
On June 3, 2021, a roughly 60-year-old man in the riverside city of Magdeburg, Germany, received his first COVID vaccine. He opted for Johnson & Johnson’s shot, popular at that point because unlike Pfizer’s and Moderna’s vaccines, it was one-and-done. But that, evidently, was not what he had in mind. The following month, he got the AstraZeneca vaccine. The month after that, he doubled up on AstraZeneca and added a Pfizer for good measure.
Artificial intelligence can appear to be many different things—a whole host of programs with seemingly little common ground. Sometimes AI is a conversation partner, an illustrator, a math tutor, a facial-recognition tool. But in every incarnation, it is always, always a machine, demanding almost unfathomable amounts of data and energy to function.
AI systems such as ChatGPT operate out of buildings stuffed with silicon computer chips.
Sign up for The Decision, a newsletter featuring our 2024 election coverage.
No one alive has seen a race like the 2024 presidential election. For months, if not years, many people have expected a reprise of the 2020 election, a matchup between the sitting president and a former president.
But that didn’t prevent a crowded primary.
We speak with Palestinian novelist, poet and activist Susan Abulhawa, who is in Cairo and just returned from two weeks in Gaza. “What’s happening to people isn’t just this death and dismemberment and hunger. It is a total denigration of their personhood, of their whole society,” says Abulhawa. “What I witnessed personally in Rafah and some of the middle areas is incomprehensible, and I will call it a holocaust — and I don’t use that word lightly. But it is absolutely that.
We look at Monday’s unanimous U.S. Supreme Court ruling that states do not have the authority to remove Donald Trump from the ballot under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment with Slate senior writer Mark Joseph Stern, who calls the decision a “disaster” that appears tailor-made to let Trump avoid accountability for the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
On Super Tuesday, millions of voters cast ballots in primaries across the United States, and we look at key contests in California, North Carolina, Arizona and elsewhere with American Prospect executive editor David Dayen.
The president’s team thinks it’s had a historically successful first term, delivering victories on the economy, climate, drug pricing and more. But many Americans aren’t feeling it.
Opponents of the reproductive rights referendum are waging a campaign to discourage voters from signing petitions.
The announcement is expected to be touted this week, alongside efforts to increase competition in food, housing and other kitchen table issues.