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.
Even for Silicon Valley, where executives have spent the past two years likening their chatbots to fire, electricity, and nuclear weapons, the past few months have been extraordinary.
Muah.AI is a website where people can make AI girlfriends—chatbots that will talk via text or voice and send images of themselves by request. Nearly 2 million users have registered for the service, which describes its technology as “uncensored.” And, judging by data purportedly lifted from the site, people may be using its tools in their attempts to create child-sexual-abuse material, or CSAM.
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books.
Plagiarism is constantly in the news. In politics alone, the charge has been leveled at Melania Trump, former Harvard President Claudine Gay, President Joe Biden (long ago), and Vice President Kamala Harris (just this week). In literature and journalism, the accusation is even more commonly thrown around, generating decades-long controversies, resignations, and lawsuits.
Tributes have poured in from across the globe for 19-year-old Sha’ban al-Dalou, a software engineering student who burned to death after Israel bombed Gaza’s Al-Aqsa Hospital in central Deir al-Balah on Monday. Photographs and footage of his final moments shocked millions around the world as Sha’ban laid in a hospital bed with an IV attached to his arm as the flames engulfed him.
Israel announced Thursday it had killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in Gaza, releasing a video allegedly showing Sinwar’s final moments before his death after Israeli forces in Rafah attacked the building he was in. After the announcement, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared “this is not the end of the war in Gaza.” In Tel Aviv, Israeli families called for Netanyahu to refocus efforts on negotiating a deal to free the hostages.
Hamas has confirmed Israel killed the organization’s leader, Yahya Sinwar, marking what could be a turning point in its yearlong war. Sinwar was apparently not killed as part of a targeted strike, but in the course of Israel’s indiscriminate assault on the Gaza Strip. “It’s not a war that’s happening against Hamas … This is an Israeli genocide against the Palestinian people,” says Palestinian analyst Tareq Baconi, author of Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance.
Uber and Lyft want to pit struggling workers against customers with disabilities. But the corporations are the problem.
The FTC is finally doing something about hard-to-cancel subscriptions.
You might never get on its planes—but it’s already done more for you than you know.
In the age of climate change, is owning your home a bigger liability than an asset?
Arizona is one of several states where right-leaning groups are backing conservative judges as they prepare to challenge newly passed ballot measures protecting abortion.
Missteps by the World Health Organization, a vaccine manufacturer and an African country led to another health emergency, experts say.
Trump says he’ll veto legislation to ban the procedure.
The ruling allows abortions to resume beyond six weeks into pregnancy.
Still angry about the Covid response, GOP lawmakers want to overhaul the National Institutes of Health if they win in November.
The Democratic nominee isn’t campaigning much on the Biden administration’s bigger, slower-moving policies.
The Treasury secretary is defending her legacy — and warning that the stability of the U.S. economy is at stake.
It was her first solo interview with a national network as the Democratic presidential nominee.
Interest rate cut “is not a declaration of victory, it’s a declaration of progress.
The move signals that the central bank is growing nervous about the declining labor market.
With just 19 days until the presidential election, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are ramping up efforts to appeal to a major voting bloc in battleground states: Latinx voters. This comes as both major candidates are boasting hard-line immigration policies that impose harsh conditions on those entering the United States. “It will not be a solution for Vice President Harris to mimic Donald Trump’s policies on immigration.
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.
Election Day is in a few weeks, but for millions of Americans, early voting in the presidential and downballot races is already under way. Over the next 19 days, how people vote in dozens of swing districts will determine which party takes control of the House of Representatives.
In 2021, Israel bombed Gaza for 11 days in a campaign known as Operation Guardian of the Walls. At the end of the battle, Yahya Sinwar, the head of Hamas in Gaza, posed for a photograph in broad daylight. Surrounded by rubble, he sat in an armchair. On his face, he wore a defiant smile.
Sinwar—obsessed with operational security, paranoid about Israeli collaborators in his midst—possessed a genius for survival that inflicted death on his own people.
Kamala Harris’s fate in the remaining weeks of the presidential campaign may turn on whether she can shift the attention of enough voters back to what they might fear from a potential second White House term for Donald Trump.
Since replacing President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee this summer, Harris has focused her campaign message above all on reassuring voters that she has the experience and values to serve in the Oval Office.
In 2008, Yahya Sinwar—then an inmate in Israel’s Eshel Prison—developed a brain tumor. An Israeli surgeon operated on his head and saved his life. Today, Israel announced that one of its snipers had done the opposite. Photos of the Hamas leader’s body, half-sunk in rubble and dust in Rafah, show a massive head wound. Sinwar’s killing ends a one-year manhunt but not the invasion that his decision to attack and kidnap Israeli civilians last year all but guaranteed.
We look at Israel’s threats to launch retaliatory strikes against Iran as fears grow of a broader regional war. We speak to analyst Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, about the Biden administration sending U.S. troops and the top-of-the-line THAAD missile defense system to Israel. “There are no direct and clear U.S. interests at stake here,” says Parsi.
Aid groups warn Israel is wiping northern Gaza off the map, and the Biden administration is threatening to cut military assistance to Israel — but not for at least 30 days. This comes as the U.S. has continued to arm Israel despite findings by its own experts at USAID and the State Department that Israel has routinely impeded delivery of food and medicine to Gaza.
We get an update on Israel’s war on Lebanon from journalist Rania Abouzeid in Beirut. “We are seeing a definite escalation that started a month ago and doesn’t show any sign of letting up,” she observes, describing unrestrained attacks by Israel throughout the country, on all sectors of society, as Israel carries out its “Dahiya doctrine” in an attempt to foment division among the Lebanese population. “This is the Gaza playbook.
