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.For months, the FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried has regularly engaged with the outside world and lived in relative comfort under house arrest. Now the judge presiding over his case has had enough.
What follows is not news.Earlier today, Elon Musk furthered the narrative that he wishes to engage in hand-to-hand combat with Mark Zuckerberg, tweeting in such a way as to suggest that he was at Zuckerberg’s front door. (Previously, he called Zuckerberg a “chicken.”) By typing these words, I am complicit in what has been a months-long bit of posturing over the ridiculous premise that the pair will fight in a “cage match.
Last April, I decided to break up with my gas company. It wasn’t me; it was them. Like so many other fossil-fuel companies, SoCalGas was lobbying against clean energy while it continued to spew carbon pollution into the atmosphere. Yet here I was, an academic who had devoted my life to advancing clean energy, still paying them money, month after month. I’d had enough.But like a divorce after a long marriage, the process was even more complicated than I had thought.
In the sweltering heat of downtown Pittsburgh, on the last Friday of June 2022, a 25-year-old from Tennessee named Dalton Smith stood in the middle of a throng of about 100 people in Market Square, clicked the strap of his helmet into place, and climbed atop his pogo stick. He tightly gripped two handlebars, his sneakers resting on two pegs affixed to the bottom of the aluminum cylinder. Then he started bouncing. He took several small hops, then one massive leap, and his body was airborne.
Ecuador is reeling from the assassination of presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio, who was shot dead Wednesday after a campaign rally in the capital Quito less than two weeks before the August 20 general election. Villavicencio was running on a platform opposing corruption and organized crime. Authorities have arrested six Colombian nationals and say they are members of a drug trafficking group, but many questions remain about who was behind the murder.
We speak with leading climate scientist Michael Mann about the devastating Maui wildfires and how the climate crisis makes such disasters more frequent and more intense. “This is the climate crisis. It’s here and now,” says Mann, director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, pressure is mounting for President Biden to declare an official climate emergency.
The death toll from the Maui wildfires is now about 100 and is expected to continue to climb in what is now the deadliest U.S. wildfire in a century and the worst natural disaster in Hawaii’s history. As recovery efforts continue, many residents are asking why Hawaii’s early warning system, with about 80 alarms on the island of Maui alone, did not get activated to alert residents about the approaching flames.
From Congress to the Biden administration, there’s enthusiasm for the drugs’ ability to treat mental illness.
More than 4 million people have had their Medicaid benefits terminated in the last four months, including nearly three-quarters who have lost coverage because of paperwork problems.
This soul-searching on the right shows how fractured the anti-abortion movement remains on both tactics and messaging more than a year after they achieved their decades-long goal of toppling Roe v. Wade.
The new coronavirus strain, while fast-spreading, does not appear to cause significant illness.
A Republican co-sponsor and a conservative political group say abortion-related language in proposed regulations violate the law’s intent.
The president made a big bet on owning the economy. His team says give it time.
The Florida governor has made a name for himself with the fights he’s picked.
Trump saw slightly more support from his base than Biden, with 88 percent of registered Republicans selecting Trump versus 83 percent of Democrats choosing Biden.
The president pledged to weigh eliminating the debt limit — for good. Instead, he’s got a group weighing options.
We speak to a fire scientist about how the climate emergency fueled this week’s historic wildfires on the Hawaiian island of Maui. “This is something that is absolutely unprecedented,” says Clay Trauernicht, a professor in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Management, University of Hawaii at Mānoa, where he focuses on wildland fire management in Hawaii and the Pacific.
In Lahaina, the area in west Maui that is of historical importance to Indigenous people, entire neighborhoods were wiped out by this week’s historic wildfires, including the Na ‘Aikane o Maui Cultural Center, which had a massive archive that was lost to the flames. We are joined by Noelani Ahia, a Kanaka Maoli activist, who describes the community’s reaction to the destruction of Indigenous cultural documents, art and artifacts.
We speak with Kaniela Ing, national director of the Green New Deal Network and seventh-generation Kanaka Maoli, Native Hawaiian, about the impact of this week’s devastating wildfires and their relationship to climate change. The catastrophic fires have destroyed nearly all buildings in the historic section of Lahaina, which once served as the capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom.
From Maui, we hear from a survivor of Hawaii’s historic wildfires, which have taken at least 55 lives to date. Vixay Phonxaylinkham, a resident of California, was on vacation with his wife and five children when they had to jump into the ocean to escape the raging fires and floated on a piece of wood for hours. “We stuck together. We held on. We’re not going to die this way. We’re here. We’re alive,” said Phonxaylinkham.
A common practice in drawing state legislative districts has come under question in Wisconsin.
Renato Mariotti highlighted a “big challenge” for the former president’s legal team.
Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis looks poised to become the third person to levy criminal charges against Trump.
The messages and court documents suggest Trump’s team was connected to the January 2021 voting systems breach.
Harris explained why she’s “always concerned” about voters’ opportunity to cast a ballot before appearing to torch Republicans in an MSNBC interview.
We park beside the lighthouse keeper’s garden.
A hummingbird is unbalancing hibiscus flowers;
a nuthatch, tidying up the trunks of trees.
I didn’t know its name the last time we were here.
What else did I not know? What else has happened?
This is a place we don’t seem to mind returning to
after the dog, without him, maybe because
it looks like time made walkable.
The escalating political struggle over abortion is compounding the GOP’s challenges in the nation’s largest and most economically vibrant metropolitan areas.The biggest counties in Ohio voted last week overwhelmingly against the ballot initiative pushed by Republicans and anti-abortion forces to raise the threshold for passing future amendments to the state constitution to 60 percent.
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.Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer reveals what’s keeping them entertained.Today’s special guest is Atlantic staff writer Marina Koren. Marina reports on astronomy, space flight, and all else that’s going on in our universe.
Out on the bow of the R/V Nathaniel B. Palmer, the air is dense and almost warm. We have punched through miles of Antarctic ice floes to reach the Amundsen Sea’s foggy interior.
