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.In 1980, the film critic Roger Ebert attended a conference filled with discussion about “new home video entertainment centers.” When he left, he was disturbed.
Since the pandemic’s earliest days, epidemiologists have been waiting for the coronavirus to finally snap out of its pan-season spree. No more spring waves like the first to hit the United States in 2020, no more mid-year surges like the one that turned Hot Vax Summer on its head. Eventually, or so the hope went, SARS-CoV-2 would adhere to the same calendar that many other airway pathogens stick to, at least in temperate parts of the globe: a heavy winter peak, then a summer on sabbatical.
Nearly everyone I grew up with in my childhood church in Lincoln, Nebraska, is no longer Christian. That’s not unusual. Forty million Americans have stopped attending church in the past 25 years. That’s something like 12 percent of the population, and it represents the largest concentrated change in church attendance in American history. As a Christian, I feel this shift acutely.
When UPS delivery workers last went on strike, in 1997, the nature of their job was very different. Amazon, then merely an online bookstore, was barely two years out from its very first sale. Buying jeans, or new furniture, or really anything, still required most people to get in their car and head to the local mall.
Republicans rejected a Democratic bid to re-up PEPFAR via the annual defense policy bill.
Medicaid expansion is set to begin October 1 if Republican lawmakers fund it.
The administration is proposing rules to force them to cover mental health like other care.
The Republicans’ health care hopes are riding on the must-pass bills.
Four veterans are dead and the projected budget for the system has ballooned to more than $50 billion.
Thursday’s estimate from the Commerce Department indicated that the gross domestic product picked up from the 2% growth rate in the January-March quarter.
A shocking new investigation by Insider reveals patrol dogs in U.S. prisons have attacked at least 295 people since 2017, with Virginia setting dogs on prisoners more than any other state. These attacks can leave people with grievous physical and psychological scars, sometimes permanently disabling and disfiguring them. The report also finds ties between procedures in U.S. prisons and the abuses committed by U.S.
Christie named the prosecution he “absolutely” believes in and argued that Americans should be “frowning upon” Trump’s conduct in one case.
Republican presidential candidate Will Hurd took aim at Trump before the former president’s speech at the same event on Friday.
In an interview in the Wall Street Journal’s Opinion section, he says there’s no room for Congress to set rules for the court.
On Friday, the president publicly acknowledged his seventh grandchild, Navy, a four-year-old girl fathered by his son Hunter with an Arkansas woman, Lunden Roberts.
Updated at 6:48 p.m. ET on July 28, 2023This 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.Beer was once king. Now, with seltzers, canned cocktails, and other tasty beverages on the rise, what will become of brews?First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:
Barbie is everything. Ken is everything else.
Thomas Sibick was sentenced to more than four years in prison for his role in the attack on Metropolitan Police Officer Michael Fanone.
“Actually, we have Starry,” the counter clerk said. It was early spring of this year, and I was ordering a lemon-lime soft drink. I had asked for Sprite but was told that the establishment, a Pepsi shop, had Sierra Mist instead. But wait, it didn’t have that either, because Pepsi had just killed off its 22-year-old lemon-lime brand and replaced it with a new one: Starry. Did I want a Starry? I guessed so.
In this summer of heat domes and record-breaking global temperatures, finding a place to cool off is more important than ever. You can go to a movie or a museum—if you want to buy a ticket. You can head to an air-conditioned bar—if you don’t have kids who also need to escape the heat. Or you can just stay at home and blast your own air conditioner—a rather lonely prospect, if you ask me.
Updated at 8:09 p.m. ET on July 28, 2023Yesterday, Special Counsel Jack Smith secured a superseding indictment in the classified-documents case against Donald Trump and his aide Waltine Nauta in federal court in Florida. The revised indictment adds a new defendant, Carlos de Oliveira, a property manager at Mar-a-Lago, as well as two new obstruction-of-justice counts for attempting to “alter, destroy, mutilate, or conceal evidence.
More than a decade ago, in a prescient essay for Scientific American, the inventor of the World Wide Web denounced what Facebook and other tech giants were doing to his signature invention. “Why should you care?” Tim Berners-Lee wrote at the time. “Because the Web is yours.
On what would have been Emmett Till’s 82nd birthday, President Joe Biden designated a new national monument in Mississippi and Illinois honoring Emmett Till and his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley. Emmett Till was just 14 years old when a white mob abducted him from his great-uncle’s home in Money, Mississippi, in 1955 before torturing and lynching him.
As nearly half of Americans face heat advisories, President Biden announced new steps Thursday to provide relief, and Texas Congressmember Greg Casar held an eight-hour thirst strike Tuesday on the steps of the U.S. Capitol to highlight the need for a federal workplace heat standard, including mandatory water breaks for workers. This comes as Texas Governor Greg Abbott recently signed legislation overturning local rules for mandatory workplace water breaks. “It is a slap in the face.
July is on pace to be the hottest month ever recorded, and the impact of the soaring temperatures is being felt across the globe in massive heat waves, wildfires, flooding and more. On Thursday, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said the world has entered the “era of global boiling,” and President Joe Biden gave a major speech to unveil new measures to combat the crisis but resisted calls to declare a climate emergency.
On the wonky right, it’s a battle over manifestos — and the GOP’s future.
Medicaid expansion is set to begin October 1 if Republican lawmakers fund it.
The administration is proposing rules to force them to cover mental health like other care.
The Republicans’ health care hopes are riding on the must-pass bills.
Four veterans are dead and the projected budget for the system has ballooned to more than $50 billion.
The push to own the economy, by literally branding it with the president’s name, is not without risk.