This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
Sickness, like love and grief, is a universal part of the human condition—but it also feels completely subjective, so much so that conveying the accompanying sensations and emotions can be hard. Doctors sometimes ask patients to rate their pain on a scale of 1 to 10: Are you at a 5 or an 8? My mind always freezes in such moments.
This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.
One evening in March 2018, I joined some friends at a bar in Washington, D.C., to watch a live broadcast of Anderson Cooper’s interview with the adult-film actor Stormy Daniels on 60 Minutes.
For high schoolers across America, prom season means heady nights of corsages, limousines, broken curfews, and gaudy, bedazzled gowns—except, maybe not that last part anymore. The words prom dress once conjured images of shimmering taffeta and poofy princess skirts and other cringeworthy fashion choices only teens would make.
The play Grenfell: In the Words of Survivors, which is being staged this week in Brooklyn, tells the story of the 2017 apartment fire at Grenfell Tower in London that killed 72 people. It was the worst fire in Britain since World War II, and survivors blamed the government for mismanaging the public housing block and neglecting maintenance.
Gaza solidarity encampments, which started on U.S. college campuses, have now spread worldwide as students call on their educational institutions to divest from companies profiting from Israeli apartheid and occupation. The uprising echoes the anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s, when many in civil society called for divestment from companies that profited from South Africa’s system of racial domination.
Larry Hamm is chair of the People’s Organization for Progress and a Princeton alumnus who took part in protests at the school in the 1970s to call for divestment from apartheid South Africa. He visited the Princeton student encampment earlier this week and says he is “really proud of the students” for their protest against the war in Gaza. Hamm, who is running in the Democratic primary for the U.S.
Over a dozen students at Princeton University have been on hunger strike for the past week as part of a Gaza solidarity encampment on campus protesting Israel’s war on Gaza and calling on the university to disclose and divest from companies with ties to Israel, among other demands. The hunger strikers are also calling for all charges to be dropped against a number of students arrested on campus in late April as part of the encampment.
The first faculty-led Gaza solidarity encampment in the United States was launched Wednesday at The New School in New York City, where nearly two dozen professors and lecturers pitched tents inside the lobby of the university’s main building on Fifth Avenue. The encampment is named after the Palestinian writer, poet and professor Refaat Alareer, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza in December.
Federal health officials estimate that roughly 100,000 people enrolled in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program will sign up for subsidized plans through the health insurance marketplace over the next year under the rule.
Dairy cows in nine states are infected and hospitals are looking to the government for guidance.
Anti-abortion and abortion-rights groups fear the Kennedy scion will peel off voters disillusioned with Trump and Biden.
The legislation, which is expected to be soon signed into law by Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs, will preserve access to the procedure for millions of women.
The president is getting more micro in his economic sales pitch as the landscape loses its luster.
Friday’s government report showed that last month’s hiring gain was down sharply from the blockbuster increase of 315,000 in March.
Biden and Trump are both campaigning on warped economic statistics, cherry-picking weird data from the Covid crisis.
By any measure, it amounted to a strong month of hiring.
The concern is that higher rates are putting pressure on households and businesses looking to borrow, weighing on hiring, investment and the housing market.
A historic case against U.S. military contractor CACI brought by three Iraqi survivors of torture at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq ended in mistrial in Virginia last week after the jury failed to reach a unanimous verdict. The lawsuit against CACI — which was hired to provide interrogation services at Abu Ghraib — was first filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights in 2008. Since then, CACI repeatedly attempted to have the case dismissed.
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.
If Kristi Noem never actually met the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, then how did that anecdote make it into her memoir? The answer, after these three stories from The Atlantic:
It’s not a rap beef. It’s a cultural reckoning.
Trump flaunts his corruption.
It used to be that whenever someone on TV or in a movie fell off the roof or had a skiing mishap or got into any sort of auto accident, the odds were pretty good that they’d end up in a neck brace. You know what I mean: a circlet of beige foam, or else a rigid ring of plastic, spanning from an actor’s chin down to their sternum. Jack Lemmon wore a neck brace for a part. So did Jerry Seinfeld, Julia Roberts, and Bill Murray.
In 2017, Rihanna posted a photo of herself on Instagram in which she appeared to have an extra thumb. It was, in retrospect, the thumb-shaped canary in the coal mine. Although far from the first celebrity “Photoshop fail,” it just so happened to predict the era of faux-finger drama we now live in: AI image generators are universally, horrifically bad at rendering human hands. Today, an extra finger is a telltale sign of digital manipulation.
Flaws aside, faking it has never been easier.
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.
Some 50 years ago, the architect and writer Peter Blake put himself on trial in the pages of The Atlantic.
Late last month, the Federal Trade Commission issued what’s called a final rule—a new regulation—banning noncompete clauses in contracts for nearly all American workers. Once the rule goes into effect, it will have a dramatic impact on the U.S. labor market. Workers will have an easier time starting new companies and bringing new products to market.
Millions of voters in India are casting their ballots in the third of seven phases in the country’s mammoth general election. The election pits Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist BJP party against an alliance of more than two dozen opposition parties led by the Indian National Congress.
Jerusalem-based journalist and author Nathan Thrall has been awarded the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for his book, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy. It tells the story of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank through one Palestinian father’s quest to seek answers and accountability after his 5-year-old son is involved in a deadly accident.
Tens of thousands of displaced Palestinians are fleeing Rafah as Israeli airstrikes and shelling hammer the eastern part of the city. Fuel, food, medicine and other supplies have been cut off following Israel’s seizure and closure of the border crossing with Egypt. The main hospital in the area has also been shut down. Over 1.4 million people are seeking shelter in Rafah, the southernmost city of the Gaza Strip.
Federal health officials estimate that roughly 100,000 people enrolled in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program will sign up for subsidized plans through the health insurance marketplace over the next year under the rule.
Dairy cows in nine states are infected and hospitals are looking to the government for guidance.
Anti-abortion and abortion-rights groups fear the Kennedy scion will peel off voters disillusioned with Trump and Biden.
The legislation, which is expected to be soon signed into law by Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs, will preserve access to the procedure for millions of women.