“You talk too damn much, and it’s too damn much about you.”
That quote from Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye is a good summary of the fiasco that Donald Trump has made of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
You might have thought that presiding over such a celebration would be an easy success for Trump. He is a showman, after all. He loves parades and extravaganzas.
States dealing with budget shortfalls are facing tens of millions of dollars in new costs ahead of the federal Jan. 1 deadline.
It’s happening again. In a big American city, a young Indian American democratic socialist is trying to unseat an unpopular Black incumbent on a platform of housing affordability. This time, the arena is not New York City but Los Angeles. Nithya Raman, the insurgent, has fashioned herself as a Zohran Mamdani of the West. Karen Bass, the embattled incumbent, is fighting to stay in office and make sure that lightning doesn’t strike on opposite coasts.
But the similarities mostly end there.
The nation’s welcome mats have been doing a lot less welcoming lately. Although Americans have been spending much more time at home in recent years—an hour and 39 minutes more a day in 2022 than in 2003—they aren’t inviting other people in. The percentage of people who hosted or attended a social event on an average day has fallen by 50 percent over the past couple of decades. Socializing of any kind declined over that same period, and isolation rose.
The malefactors in Roald Dahl’s fiction are easy to spot. “If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face,” the author writes in The Twits. “And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until you can hardly bear to look at it.” Miss Trunchbull, the abusive headmistress of Matilda, is a “gigantic holy terror” with “an obstinate chin, a cruel mouth and small arrogant eyes.
Author David Epstein breaks down the powerful effect of limitations.
Donald Trump’s investment portfolio’s frenzied stock trading is highly unusual to say the least.
The new Fed Chair is inheriting an inflation conundrum: appease Trump or hold out on rates?
The incoming IPO wave is rewriting stock market rules in real time—and setting us up for a lot of risk.
Tim Sheehy’s request comes after a monkey with Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever bit a researcher at the Rocky Mountain Laboratories.
Trump administration officials point to their work on fraud as the reason for dropoffs while states and insurers blame higher premiums.
Abortion opponents are demanding action from the FDA and other federal agencies.
She said the country has “a deep bench” even in federal agencies without a confirmed leader.
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.
Protests in Bolivia are demanding the resignation of Rodrigo Paz, the country’s first right-wing president in decades. Since Paz took office in November 2025, the country has been placed under austerity measures that have led to a surge in poverty rates for much of Bolivia’s rural and working-class population. We speak to Kathryn Ledebur, director of the Andean Information Network in Cochabamba, Bolivia, about the monthlong protests.
A jury in Chicago has ordered Boeing to pay nearly $50 million to the family of Samya Stumo, a 24-year-old who was one of a total of 346 people killed in a pair of Boeing 737 MAX jet crashes less than a decade ago. Stumo died aboard Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 in March 2019, just months after another 737 MAX jet, a recently introduced model at the time, crashed in Indonesia. “They knew that there was a malfunction with the plane.
We get an update on protests at Newark, New Jersey’s Delaney Hall, an ICE facility owned and operated by the private prison company GEO Group, where hundreds of immigrant detainees have been on a hunger and labor strike for the past week demanding their immediate release.
The Justice Department has reportedly launched a criminal investigation into the writer E. Jean Carroll, who successfully sued Donald Trump twice, for sexual abuse and defamation. According to CNN, The New York Times and other outlets, the investigation is focused on whether Carroll committed perjury in a deposition, even though a federal appeals court upheld the rulings in 2024.
This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.
Recently, Russell Shaw realized that he had texted his kids the same two words—Too loud—133 times since 2020. “The backstory to each, I’m sure, was relatively consistent,” he writes.
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.
In the summer of 1945, four days after Japan’s official surrender and a few weeks into the Atomic Age, President Harry Truman began floating the idea of an agency guided by “the free intelligence of the scientist” that would fund investigations into how the world works. As of 2024, the agency that Truman had envisioned, the National Science Foundation, supplied about one in every 10 federal research dollars going to U.S. universities.
Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical “on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence,” has received widespread praise. This isn’t surprising. A popular and learned world leader with a significant degree of moral authority is pointing out the dangers of a deeply unpopular technology created by deeply unpopular people.
The laudatory coverage of the encyclical is justified, but it has obscured perhaps Leo’s most important insight.
The World War II drama has been a hearty staple of the film industry’s diet for more than 80 years—even as Hollywood has turned away from the kind of meat-and-potatoes offering that the genre represents. And after so many decades, directors somehow still keep finding new narrative nooks and crannies to explore.
The Trump administration has implemented some of the United States’ most stringent travel restrictions for infectious disease ever.
The new EV from the iconic Italian sportscar maker is so underwhelming it had to be memed.