For President Donald Trump, inheriting a relatively quiet and orderly southern border with Mexico is a political inconvenience. During his campaign, he painted an apocalyptic picture of migrants swarming the frontier, and he returned to the White Hou

Joe Biden has now left office, but the fight over the meaning of his Middle East policies is only just beginning. Biden’s defenders argue that he left the incoming Trump administration with the strongest American position in the region in decades—and

Greenland’s prime minister, Múte Egede, looked like he was being chased by an angry musk ox. “Mr. Prime Minister, have you spoken to President Trump yet?” I asked as he fled a lunchtime news conference on Tuesday in the capital city, Nuuk (population

“I was okay with being a convict,” Jason Riddle told me this week, not long after learning that he was among the roughly 1,500 recipients of sweeping presidential pardons. Some Americans, including President Donald Trump, believe that Riddle and othe

You’d be forgiven for thinking that America’s continental shelf couldn’t get any bigger. It is, after all, mostly rock, the submerged landmass linking shore and abyss. But in late 2023, after a long and expensive mapping project, the State Department

The Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh announced that he was retiring from filmmaking in 2013. By 2017, he had returned to work, releasing the delightful heist caper Logan Lucky, and in the years since, new Soderbergh films have become as seemi

In Blaine, Washington, there is a very special Starbucks. Like every Starbucks, this one has tables and chairs and coffee and pastries and a pacifying sort of vibe. Also like (most) Starbucks, it has a bathroom, open to anyone who walks in. The bathr

Dear Mr. Secretary, Tradition dictates that I begin by congratulating you on your confirmation. You seem like a man who appreciates frankness, and so I will spare you empty decorum: It would be disingenuous of me to deny that I have been opposed to y

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. “The thing about dinner,” Rachel Sugar wrote recen

Some presidents turn to think tanks to staff their administrations. Others turn to alumni of previous White Houses. Donald Trump has turned to Fox News to fill the ranks of his Cabinet. Former Fox & Friends host Pete Hegseth was confirmed to be secre

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. I’ve been on trial half my life. Yesterday, my 18-year legal drama finally came to an end when the Court of Cassation, Italy’s highest court, definitively convi

In his inaugural address on Monday, Donald Trump declared himself God’s chosen instrument to rescue America. He recalled the assassination attempt he survived last year: “I was saved by God to make America great again.” Just a few minutes earlier, a

No one would blame you for thinking that we’re in the midst of an unprecedented global loneliness emergency. The United Kingdom and Japan have named “loneliness ministers” to tackle the problem. In 2023, the World Health Organization declared lonelin

When wildfires broke out across Los Angeles earlier this month, many publications began to frame the incalculable tragedy through the lens of celebrity news. As flames engulfed the Palisades, a wealthy neighborhood perched along the Pacific Coast Hig

So much political news over the past four years has been astonishing: Joe Biden’s disintegration on a debate stage, Donald Trump’s return to power, the possible U.S. annexation of Canada. But New York Mayor Eric Adams’s MAGA turn, by contrast, seems

It is not unusual for clerics to address their leaders directly. King James regularly caught hell from the pulpit. So when Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde went for the king, at the end of an interminable sermon on Tuesday morning in the National

To see how far the lines of normal have moved since President Donald Trump freed the January 6ers, briefly return to the closing days of the 2024 presidential campaign. At the time, a hot issue was whether Trump harbored fascist tendencies, as some o

Ask a Democrat about Merrick Garland, and they will likely mutter something impolite. But, for a brief moment, Joe Biden’s attorney general could trumpet a monumental achievement. In the course of prosecuting the perpetrators of January 6, he dismant

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 to The Daily’s culture edition, in which one

The fight-or-flight response typically kicks in when a dangerous situation arises. But for Pansy Deacon, the protagonist of the writer-director Mike Leigh’s sublime Hard Truths, self-defense is more of a default mode. Played by the excellent Marianne

This is Atlantic Intelligence, a newsletter in which our writers help you wrap your mind around artificial intelligence and a new machine age. Sign up here. Earlier this week, Donald Trump unveiled perhaps the most ambitious infrastructure project in

“I’d summarize it as: fuck.” That’s what one senior university administrator told me when I asked about the chaos that erupted at the National Institutes of Health this week. Academics are in panic mode in the face of sudden new restrictions from the

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here. Violence and strife feel unavoidable these days. When we’re not encountering them personally, we see them on our phone or in the news. Even

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts This week, House Republicans created a select subcommittee to investigate the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and uncover the “full truth that is owed to the American

When David Lynch died last week, it was almost hard to know whom exactly to mourn. He was a Renaissance man: musician, painter, meditation instructor, YouTube personality. Most, of course, mourn him as a filmmaker, the medium in which he left his mos

Things were not looking great for OpenAI at the end of last year. The company had been struggling with major delays on its long-awaited GPT-5 and hemorrhaging key talent—notably, Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever, Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati, a

On Monday, Stewart Rhodes, the eye-patched founder of the far-right militia known as the Oath Keepers, was in prison, which is where he has been since he was convicted of seditious conspiracy for his role in the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

On Monday, in one of his first acts as president, Donald Trump defrocked 50 high priests of U.S. national security. Now deprived of their clearances, if they want to know what’s happening in the world, they are reduced, like the rest of us, to readin

Shortly after taking the oath of office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order revoking the security clearances of about four dozen former national-security officials. Their offense was that in 2020, they had signed an open letter suggesti

Over the past several years, a medication called mifepristone has been at the center of intense moral and legal fights in the United States. The pill is the only drug approved by the FDA specifically for ending pregnancies; combined with misoprostol,