Even by the standards of shocking Michael Jackson jokes, it was a shocking joke. “Michael Jackson did nothing wrong,” Michael Che, a co-anchor of Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update,” said during last night’s episode. “He was right to molest all those kids.” This was delivered with palpable surprise at the words coming out of his mouth, but Che kept going: “They were lucky. I would have paid him to do it.
Roosevelt Montás grew up in a small mountain village in the Dominican Republic. Two days before his 12th birthday, his mother flew him up to New York, where she had found a minimum-wage job in a garment factory. A few years later, when he was a sophomore in high school, some neighbors in his apartment building threw out a bunch of books. One of them was a finely bound volume of Socratic dialogues. Montás snagged it—and Socrates changed his life.
Tender shrub, green leaves of its foliage,
the curl of a baby’s fingernail, knocked
over by storm, its brush crumbling to touch—
how did I miss it—it’s all that I can
do—for those I could not save—but twist
the stubborn bush from its tangled roots
& turn it upright as if giving birth
to a baby in breach. I don’t mind mud
underneath my nails, worms my fingers touch
(they enrich the soil), mosquitos swarming
crazily (it’s one hundred degrees!),
circling my head like a halo of distrust.
Barney Frank might not draw a connection between his coming out as gay nearly four decades ago and his coming out against left-wing dogmatism in the Democratic Party today. But the parallel is unmistakable: The 86-year-old former Democratic congressman from Massachusetts is shining a light on a sensitive subject that many people wish he would keep quiet about.
George Washington has long been something of an American visual cliché. When the Russian diplomat and artist Pavel Svinin visited the United States in the early 19th century, he found it “noteworthy that every American considers it his sacred duty to have a likeness of Washington in his house, just as we have images of God’s Saints.”
Today, the country is no less prone to canonizing versions of patriotism, though they go well beyond art.
The incoming IPO wave is rewriting stock market rules in real time—and setting us up for a lot of risk.
The Iran war and fuel prices are driving up airfare—but travelers are about to find out which costs may never come back down.
Managers received notices Friday that job classifications were changing.
Kyle Diamantas, who was elevated to FDA acting commissioner earlier this week, is telling anti-abortion groups he asked to be taken off a case defending Planned Parenthood due to moral objections.
Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented from the majority decision.
CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz has repeatedly targeted the state over hospice care.
Trump says vaccines are off the agenda. Kennedy’s next moves may say otherwise.
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 to two prominent Israeli thinkers, historian Omer Bartov and journalist Gideon Levy, about the founding beliefs of Zionism. Bartov, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, is the author of the new book Israel: What Went Wrong? Bartov says the early Zionist movement had liberatory intentions, aiming to emancipate the persecuted Jewish minority in Europe and modeling itself after other contemporary ethnonationalist movements.
Palestinians around the world are marking Nakba Day, 78 years after their forced mass displacement led to the establishment of the Jewish-majority state of Israel. Decades later, Palestinians still face widespread oppression and violence from the Israeli state as it continues its expansionary project. “Israel tried, since 1948 until today, to destroy us as a people, as a group, and they failed at it.
We speak with the acclaimed artist and author Molly Crabapple about her new book, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund. Although largely forgotten today, the Jewish Labor Bund was once a powerful secular, socialist revolutionary party that fought for freedom and dignity for Jews in Europe.
U.S. President Donald Trump is in Beijing for a highly anticipated summit with his Chinese counterpart President Xi Jinping. It is the first U.S. state visit to China since 2017, during Trump’s first administration. Trade, the Iran war, artificial intelligence and the fate of Taiwan are some of the issues being discussed, although it’s not clear if any new agreements are likely.
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.
Donald Trump met with Chinese President Xi Jinping for a high-stakes summit in Beijing this week. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined to discuss potential takeaways from the visit, and more.
The new Fed Chair is inheriting an inflation conundrum: appease Trump or hold out on rates?
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.
Growing up has become associated with outgrowing certain pleasures: picture books, fairy tales, stories that speak openly about wonder and fear, villains and heroes. But adulthood does not actually require abandoning the things that first shaped how we experience the world.
The forced excitement accompanying each new iteration of the Venice Biennale, I’ve heard it said, is akin to a faked orgasm—at some point, it’s probably better to stop. Yet among this magical city’s spells, as the novelist Mary McCarthy once wrote, is “one of peculiar potency: the power to awaken the philistine dozing in the sceptic’s breast.” McCarthy had in mind “dry, prose people” who object to “feeling what they are supposed to feel, in the presence of marvels.
A few years ago, Magic Johnson told a story about Michael Jackson that seems almost unimaginable today. In the 1980s, the former Los Angeles Lakers superstar invited Jackson to a Lakers game, an invitation the singer was initially hesitant to accept because he was worried that his presence would create too much of a frenzy. As it turned out, those fears were justified. “He sat down; people went crazy,” Johnson recalled to Variety. “They were running from upstairs, the sides.
Last fall, in the sunroom where we eat our meals, my 11-year-old son and I sat at the dining table—he on one side, I on the other. Because of my low immunity, I sat apart from him, by an open window.
Six months before this, a doctor had phoned me with the news: suspicious for malignancy. For quite some time, my body had been sending signs—fatigue, bloating, light bleeding—but I had dismissed them for various reasons.
