[The presidents stare out from their portraits along the White House Corridor of Misleading Presidential Facts.]
Thomas Jefferson: Well, lads, we did it: 250 glorious years. The American experiment is—dare I say it?—a success!
[Donald Trump and Dana White, the Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO, stroll past the wall of paintings.
President Trump has announced that the United States and Iran have reached a deal to end their war. “Congratulations to all!” he said in a posting on his Truth Social site this evening. He then headed off to oversee the garish public spectacle he’d arranged for his birthday on the South Lawn of the White House. The United States, however, has little to celebrate: Trump and his team, in record time, just lost a war to a militarily mediocre—but nonetheless extremely dangerous—adversary.
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New York Knicks fans climb on buses in Times Square as they celebrate after their team won the NBA Finals, in New York City.Darren Abate / AP
The New York Knicks celebrate with the Larry O’Brien Championship Trophy after defeating the San Antonio Spurs in Game 5 of the NBA Finals in San Antonio on June 13, 2026.
In the small oblong that was our living/dining room, the carpet was maroon (the color of dried blood) and the walls were light yellow. Did my mother think this combination was cheerful? She did value cheer. It was somehow inconceivable to ask what she was thinking. The couch and two rockers were covered in a brown-and-white fabric depicting farm scenes. Gauzy drapes were pulled across the front windows, softening the bright sun on parked cars and a few ragged palms.
Graham Platner’s victory this week in Maine’s Democratic Senate primary would have been a stunning achievement for a political newcomer under any circumstances.
Is the industry screwed?
Brendan Greeley offers up the surprising origin story of our favorite currency.
Guest host Mary Childs explains why index funds are bending their rules and giving investors little choice but to opt into the AI boom.
The people now running CBS seem really determined to undermine the best thing going.
Chris Klomp is working to boost morale and deliver results at the Health Department after a year of upheaval.
The American Medical Association has sought a working relationship with the health secretary. Members saw moral compromise.
Lawmakers will question the billionaire Microsoft founder and global health philanthropist about his ties to the late sex offender.
Trump administration wants ill recipients to prove they can’t work every six months. Doctors, advocates and state officials wonder how.
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.
“We have to take care of ourselves because we can’t rely on one foreign partner,” Mark Carney said in a video address. “We can’t control the disruption coming from our neighbors.
We speak with Oscar-nominated filmmaker Rick Rowley about his new documentary, Hell’s Army. The film tracks the Wagner Group, the notorious Russian mercenary army that has fought in Ukraine and other parts of the world. The group’s founder, Yevgeny Prigozhin, was a confidant to Putin until a failed 2023 mutiny against the government. He died in a suspicious plane crash two months later.
Palestinian activist and green card holder Mohsen Mahdawi, who was targeted by the Trump administration last year as part of a crackdown on pro-Palestinian campus activism, faces a new deportation threat. A federal immigration judge has sided with the administration and renewed removal proceedings against him, reviving a case that had been dismissed by an earlier immigration judge. Now he is taking his case directly to the U.S.
The Trump administration is continuing its assault on higher education, but in a departure from its earlier high-profile fights with individual institutions like Harvard, it is now rewriting the federal rules that govern all universities and colleges.
We continue our conversation with acclaimed Iranian environmental scientist Kaveh Madani, who comments on U.S. strikes targeting Iranian water reservoirs, which have exacerbated the country’s water shortage. He criticizes the “normalization of targeting civil infrastructure as a part of a war.”
“Who suffers from the consequences of this? The poor community, the vulnerable communities,” says Madani.
The environmental toll of the artificial intelligence boom continues to mount as tech companies use ever more power to run their data centers and enormous amounts of water for cooling. A new investigation by U.N. scientists warns that AI’s water use in 2030 will match the needs of 1.3 billion people, while its power use will be triple that of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nigeria combined — countries with a total population of 650 million.
Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings, watch full episodes here, or listen to the weekly podcast here.
Last night, panelists joined a special edition of Washington Week With The Atlantic to discuss the state of democracy 250 years after the Declaration of Independence, and the successes and challenges of the American experiment.
But inside the health department, workers say the dysfunction of the DOGE era persists.
“We know of nothing,” Henry James observed in 1875, “that is a better proof of the essential impotence of criticism, in the last resort, than Mr. Church’s pictures.” James wasn’t (in this instance) being spiteful.
When David Hockney in the 1960s turned his attention to a photograph of a splash-splattered swimming pool, he did what most of us today, immersed in an endless stream of digital images, do not. He kept looking.
For two weeks, the artist worked tirelessly from the photo to perfect his rendition in his acrylic painting A Bigger Splash, of the dancing droplets that erupted when some long-forgotten swimmer threw themselves into the deep end. The splash ended in an instant.
Given President Trump’s disregard for long-standing political norms and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, many Americans fear that he is hostile to democracy. According to this view, the 49.8 percent of voters who supported him in 2024 must simply be unaware of the existential threat he poses to our republic. The logic, to Trump’s critics, is therefore simple: Once voters fully grasp that democracy is under threat from creeping authoritarianism, then surely they will turn against Trump.
It was a simple plan, but somehow, as he and his men followed the shackled man through the hills, Khawar wondered if it should have been simpler still. If they had been able to shoot him close to the police station earlier in the day, a story about a thwarted escape might have played out quite nicely. But his skinny constable, Javed, had noted that at that hour, there were too many day laborers passing by who knew the man, which could have created “complications.