The Atlantic

Closing In On The Elusive

CLOSING IN ON THE ELUSIVEINSIDE THE RACE AGAINST CANCER Dr. Gregory Friberg is a former clinician who went into oncology when cancer was considered, he says, “a death sentence.” Today, as vice president for global development at Amgen, Friberg is part of a team closing in on once unthinkable gains against cancer, halting tumors long seen as perfectly weaponized against the human body. “I pinch myself almost every day,” says P.K. Morrow, vice president of Global Development at Amgen, “because I can’t believe we are sitting where we are, truly on the cusp of a potential cure for certain cancers.” The subject of almost four decades of research, the RAS gene family are the most frequently mutated oncogenes in human cancers.1, 2 Within this family, KRAS is the most prevalent variant and is particularly common in solid tumors.2 A specific mutation known as KRAS G12C is found in approximately 13% of non-small cell lung cancers, three to five percent of colorectal cancers and one to two percent of numerous other solid tumors.3 Although scientists have understood for decades how KRAS causes cancer, they’ve been unable to do anything about it. Morrow recalls attending a conference only two years ago at

Can caring for doctors create better patient care?

More than half of U.S. caregivers have experienced “burnout,” a syndrome marked by exhaustion, cynicism and feelings of purposelessness. Photo: Carlos Chavarría Bob Wenz is watching a team of pediatric cardiac surgeons operate. He’s supposed to be leading a tour of the newly expanded Betty Irene Moore Children’s Heart Center in Palo Alto, California—its expanded waiting area, four additional echocardiography labs, naturally lit patient rooms, staff-only garden, and other facilities. But instead of all that, Wenz is stopped outside the door of an operating room, watching a cardiac team enter their second hour of open-heart surgery. Fifteen years ago, Wenz might have been a nurse in that room, hovering over the operating table in five-hour intervals. But today he’s in charge of much more than that, overseeing outpatient cardiology, neurodiagnostics, and interventional services at Stanford Children’s Health and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford. It’s hard to know whether Packard Children’s Hospital attracts people like Wenz or they become this way after years of working with children, but simply put, he’s fun. He’s the type of person who wears a tailored suit to work but is in scrubs by noon. The type of person who turns on the new $2 million

The Power of Holding On

How additive manufacturing helped two world-class athletes start training at their full potential Illustrations by Chengtao Yi Two years ago, Anna Grimaldi, a Paralympic gold-winning athlete from New Zealand, felt that she had hit a wall with her training. Born without a right hand, she had been using a prosthetic to help her grip gym equipment. But it was difficult to find something suitable at her local prosthetics center; the prosthetic that fit her best was actually designed for children, and it was created for everyday activities like picking up a shopping bag, not for holding the 300-plus-pound weights she was lifting at the gym. Her teammate, javelin thrower Holly Robinson, felt similarly: She couldn’t find a prosthetic that felt safe for exercise. Both were frustrated: They were world-class athletes forced to train at less than their full capacity, at risk of competing at a disadvantage just because they couldn’t train the way they wanted. Dr. Stafford Murray, the head of innovation at the government-funded High Performance Sport New Zealand (HPSNZ), heard Robinson mention this at a conference. And when he talked to her afterward, he became determined to find a solution for her and Grimaldi. That’s why Murray, the

Building the Self-Driving Future? Don’t Forget the Passengers.

It won’t be long before self-driving cars become a concrete reality for consumers. In order to make the driverless future successful, however, auto companies need to take consumers along for the ride. A Capgemini study of more than 5,500 consumers and 280 executives can help auto leaders understand consumer expectations for a self-driving future and prepare their organizations accordingly. Here’s what they need to do: Keep the consumer informed Consumers don’t simply expect self-driving cars to get them from Point A to Point B. They also want them to perform a range of other tasks. According to the study, consumers say they would be willing to use these driverless cars to run errands or transport friends and family members. In consumers’ eyes, the car is moving from a means of transportation to a quasi-personal assistant. This shift places a significant responsibility on auto companies to be candid about the capabilities of driverless cars in order to avoid any risk of misrepresentation. Industry initiatives in this area are already underway. The Euro New Car Assessment Programme, for example, plans to have a ranking system in place by 2020 that will assess the technical systems, manuals and advertising materials of driverless cars.

They Tried to Move a Whale

One afternoon in November, just north of the small Oregon coastal town of Yachats, a juvenile humpback whale tumbled ashore. A few hours earlier, local residents had spotted it thrashing in distress half a mile out at sea, entangled in crabbing gear, with a rope bound around its pectoral fin and woven through its baleen. One resident had swum out and cut the whale free, but it didn’t turn itself around and was now lodged on sand in shallow surf. A few people gathered on the beach and called for help. It finally arrived, in the form of two representatives from the Oregon Marine Mammal Stranding Network, a collection of volunteer scientists and advocates based some 20 miles up the coast in Newport. The experts said that given the impending darkness, incoming tide, rough surf, and heavy fog, they couldn’t even assess the whale’s condition until morning.The onlookers scattered—all but one, a local named Amy Parker. She stayed long after sunset, listening to the whale’s haunting, high-pitched cry, a sound so plaintive and elemental that it cut through the roaring surf. The whale wanted help; you didn’t need a degree to interpret those sounds. And Parker, a longtime coast dweller,

Your Next Dog May Live Longer

One day last November, my dog, Forrest, sat on the cold marble steps of the Smithsonian’s natural-history museum in Washington, D.C., ready to meet Celine Halioua, a woman who may one day add a tail-wagging year or so to his life, and also the lives of millions of other dogs. In 2019, Halioua founded a company called Loyal, and in February 2025, a pill that she developed for dogs was deemed likely to be effective by the FDA. If the company ticks a few remaining boxes, the drug could soon be on sale, kick-starting a new era of longevity medicine that could eventually also lengthen humans’ lives.More than 10,000 years ago, dogs made a farseeing bet on humans. They padded carefully up to our campfires, ate scraps, and kept watch, hitching their fates to a species that would soon bestride the planet. They have since become the fourth-most-populous large land mammal, trailing only sheep, cows, and goats, which all lead less pampered lives. Now we’re trying to keep our best animal friends around longer too.If only I could have explained all of this to Forrest before our walk with Halioua. As a Portuguese water dog, he hails from a clever

Deepfakes Are Coming for Your Bank Account

Donald Trump is on TikTok doing his morning routine. “Get ready with me for a big day 💄🇺🇸,” reads the caption, as the president holds a makeup brush to his cheek. The scene is a still, ostensibly a screenshot of a TikTok clip. Like so much other AI-generated slop coursing through the internet, the image is fake and ridiculous. It also looks unnervingly real: There are no hands with six fingers, physics-defying angles, or other flagrant signs of AI-generated imagery. At quick glance, it really looks like the president is putting on bronzer.Created in ChatGPT with the prompt “Trump doing a makeup tutorial on TikTok”I made this deepfake with OpenAI’s new image-generation model. ChatGPT Images 2.0, released last week, can create photorealistic visuals that are noticeably more convincing than what its predecessors might have produced. The tool has flooded the internet with hyperreal fakes: for example, Jeffrey Epstein as a Twitch streamer. I created the “screenshot” of Trump’s fake TikTok after encountering a similar image on the ChatGPT subreddit, and I’ve since been able to use Images 2.0 to create all kinds of alarming deepfake images—including of Elon Musk getting whisked away by the FBI, world leaders suffering medical emergencies,

For a Time, the U.S. Protected Democracy

The best things shine bright, but never long. So it was for the Voting Rights Act, the 1965 legislation that protected Black suffrage by neutralizing voter suppression in southern states, and became the foundation for equal ballot access for all Americans. Of the 250 years since the country’s founding, less than a quarter unfolded under the aegis of universal suffrage. Color television, credit cards, and Barbie dolls arrived earlier than the VRA and will survive longer. The reign of Queen Elizabeth II lasted a decade longer than the guarantor of democracy in America.On Wednesday morning, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority completed its 13-year campaign against the law. In Louisiana v. Callais, the Court limited the use of race in drawing congressional reapportionment plans and the ability of minority groups to challenge potentially discriminatory maps. Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito declared that the only permissible consideration of race in creating new districts is when “present-day intentional racial discrimination regarding voting” can be proved. In doing so, he rejected any practical attempt to remedy past and present racism in redistricting plans.In the South, voting is intensely polarized along racial lines: White voters generally support the opponents of whomever Black voters

Trump’s Ballroom Sounds More and More Like a Fortress

One of the less-discussed traditions of American presidents is how they hide the reality that they need protection. Following the assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, however, Donald Trump and his allies have doubled down on their assertion that the ballroom he wants to build is essential to presidential safety.The justifications have been strikingly granular: The new building would have “bullet proof windows and glass,” “heavy steel,” and a “drone proof roof,” as Justice Department lawyers wrote in a court filing Monday night that echoed Trump’s recent posts on Truth Social. Congressional Republicans have shared that the building will have seven-inch-thick windows, amid their push to get taxpayers to spend $400 million on a project that Trump once billed as a gift from patriotic donors. As the Trump administration works to dismiss a lawsuit seeking to stop the ballroom’s construction, the structure sounds more and more like a fortress.It’s hard to keep track of the reasons to object to the president’s pet project, among them the administration’s bad-faith handling of the demolition and review processes, the structure’s unpopularity with Americans, and the way its composition violates rules of classical architecture. The latest reason emerged after a federal judge

My AI Matchmaker Let Me Down

In the Instagram video, a knockoff JFK Jr. towers over a beautiful woman with a raspy voice. “Are you single?” the woman asks. He smirks into the camera. “I am.”I had no choice: I clicked on the account, only to discover an endless stream of gorgeous single men looking for love. They were movie stars compared with the men I’d seen on dating apps. Where the hell was this woman finding these guys? And could I come?The man-in-the-street interviews had been filmed by Amata, one of a handful of new AI matchmaking companies that present themselves as the future of online dating. Instead of scrolling through thousands of options, users are presented with potential matches one at a time. Instead of paying to use the app, you can choose to pay only to set up a date. (Amata charges $20 a date.) There’s less chatting: On Amata, the communication window opens only two hours before a scheduled meeting, saving the getting-to-know-yous for the actual date. One woman who uses Amata told me she liked the mystery of this; the dates feel more like old-fashioned setups. And the apps attempt to limit ghosting—they don’t refund the fee if you back out

Congress Can’t Meet Its Own Iran-War Deadline

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.Most wars take a long time to achieve quagmire status, but Donald Trump’s Iran war is precocious. Just 60 days have passed since the president formally notified Congress about the military action there, on March 2. (The first air strikes had begun two days earlier.)That makes today the deadline, under the War Powers Resolution (WPR), for the president to end the war, Congress to authorize it, or Trump to invoke a 30-day extension for withdrawal. Even though the deadline is written into law, it seems likely that none of these things will happen. Given a chance to rein in a wildly unpopular, unsuccessful, and likely illegal war, Congress might just do nothing—the latest sign of how ineffectual the body has become.The administration and Republican leaders have decided to pretend the war is simply over, freeing themselves of any need to act. In a letter to Congress, obtained by Politico, the White House claims that the war has “terminated” because of the current cease-fire. House Speaker

Did a Human Write This?

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube What happens when the majority of content on the internet tips over into AI slop? On this episode of Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel talks to Max Spero, a co-founder of Pangram, an AI-detection company. They discuss how AI-detection tools work and how effective they can be at identifying what’s made by humans and what comes from a chatbot. They explore the cultural concerns around authenticity in the large-language-model era, and whether detection can keep up as models improve. The pair discuss how the speed of AI development and synthetic content threatens to degrade the quality of human writing and pollute the internet—and what, if anything, can be done to stop it.The following is a transcript of the episode:Max Spero: I want to see people using AI to cure cancer and, you know, make senior care easier and make all of our lives better. And I also don’t want to see AI polluting the internet. So sort of like: There’s these two sides, and I want to see the good side of AI flourish, and I want to help mitigate the harmful effects of AI as much as possible.[Music]Charlie Warzel: I’m Charlie Warzel,

The Real Reason Iran Hasn’t Struck a Deal

On Monday, Iran made Donald Trump an offer: It would open the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for lifting the U.S. blockade while nuclear negotiations continued. On Wednesday, Trump rejected this offer, promising to keep the blockade in place until Iran agrees to America’s terms on the nuclear issue. The blockade “is genius,” he said, and “now they have to cry uncle. That’s all they have to do. Just say, ‘We give up.’”The Trump administration’s explanation for this standoff is that there is an “absolute fracture” in the Iranian regime between the military and the negotiators. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Fox News that “unfortunately, the hard-liners with an apocalyptic vision of the future have the ultimate power in that country,” especially because the new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, is “untested” and “has not been seen.”The administration now appears to be gaming out a new course of action: strikes targeting not Iran’s military capacity but the faction inside the regime that it believes is blocking a deal. The president recently reposted a video of the Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen calling for an aerial campaign to do exactly this. According to Axios, the military has prepared options for a

Maybe AI Isn't a Bubble After All

Six months ago, the AI sector was looking pretty bubbly. Companies were plowing hundreds of billions of dollars, much of it borrowed, into building new data centers, but had no clear path to profitability. Experts and journalists, myself included, were comparing the AI build-out to the railroad bubble of the 1800s and the dot-com bubble of the ’90s, in which speculation led to overinvestment that eventually crashed the stock market. Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman voiced public doubts. “Are we in a phase where investors as a whole are overexcited about AI?” he said last year. “My opinion is yes.”Today, however, we’re in a very different world. Software developers are adopting AI tools en masse and reporting astronomical productivity benefits. The worry that the country is building too many data centers now coexists with the fear that we won’t have enough of them to satisfy the public’s growing appetite for these products. And the company previously known as OpenAI’s junior competitor has become possibly the fastest-growing business in the history of capitalism. Anthropic’s revenue is increasing faster—much faster—than Zoom’s during the pandemic, Google’s during the early 2000s, and even Standard Oil’s during the Gilded Age. If the company’s current growth

Iran’s Leaders Mostly Want a Deal

According to the Trump administration’s latest messaging, talks between the United States and Iran are deadlocked because of infighting in Tehran. The military hard-liners of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps must be stopping the civilian diplomats from making a deal. Or, to put it in President Trump’s words, “Iran is having a very hard time figuring out who their leader is!” (This supposition conveniently makes sense of the president’s claim that Iran has “agreed to everything” alongside Iran’s denial that this is so.)The explanation, which has gained some currency in U.S. media, is at best half-true. Quite a bit of infighting is indeed happening within the Iranian regime. However, it does not map neatly onto a military-versus-civilian divide, and it does not suggest that Iran’s negotiating team is disempowered to speak for the country. Such theories reflect a misunderstanding of Iran’s complex system and do little to advance American diplomatic aims.Consider the role of Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, the man who led the Islamabad talks with Vice President Vance. His American interlocutors can’t quite decide where to place him in their schema of Iran’s internal politics. That might be because the sources of, and limits on, his authority range across the

The Mysterious Obsession With Obama’s Fake Son

“If Obama had a son, he’d attack the White House Correspondents Dinner like Cole Allen,” Randy Barnett, a Georgetown law professor and prominent libertarian activist, wrote on X earlier this week.The claim that a former president’s hypothetical son would have attempted to assassinate President Trump is insane. Barnett’s hypothesizing about the motives of a nonexistent male child of Barack Obama is part of a conservative fixation that’s detached from historical reality. Yet it feeds a collective sense of victimization that Trump shares and has deftly exploited.Graeme Wood: The most frightening shooters are the smart onesThe reference, for those who don’t closely follow conservative news sources, was to a line Obama uttered in 2012. After Trayvon Martin, an unarmed teenager, was shot and killed by George Zimmerman, Black leaders criticized the president for failing to speak out. Obama, appearing in the Rose Garden, said, “My main message is to the parents of Trayvon Martin. You know, if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”Ever since, the political right has turned the phrase into a notorious synecdoche for the Obama presidency. Conservatives continue to repeat the line, years later, which is why Barnett was able to reference it as shorthand. For

The Trump Administration Casts Out the ‘Soul’ of MAHA

As of today, it seems likely that the nation’s next surgeon general will, at least, have an active medical license. President Trump announced that he was pulling his nomination for Casey Means, a wellness influencer who dropped out of her surgical residency in 2018, in a Truth Social post this afternoon. The move is the latest setback for Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again movement, which has embraced Means’s criticism of the medical establishment along with her fondness for raw milk and psychedelics. Her book, Good Energy, might as well be MAHA’s bible. Vani Hari, an activist and influencer better known as the Food Babe, told me recently that if Means wasn’t confirmed, it would “ruin the soul of MAHA.”Earlier this month, the White House seemed to still believe that Means could be confirmed. The president invited her to a roundtable for several MAHA influencers. (Among them was Kelly Ryerson, who told me that the group made clear to administration officials that Means’s troubled nomination was killing the mood of MAHA activists.) But when I spoke with Means this afternoon, shortly after Trump’s announcement, she told me that it had become obvious, over

Vance Denies and Confirms Atlantic Reporting in One Breath

The vice president’s comments on Fox News are the latest instance of his tortured attempts to navigate a path through Donald Trump’s war in Iran.Alex Wong / GettyApril 30, 2026, 4:33 PM ET 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.Staying in Donald Trump’s good graces while also protecting your own political future requires supreme political agility, and most people who try end up failing at both. Just ask Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, Paul Ryan, and any number of other faded GOP stars—if you can find them. Vice President Vance hasn’t mastered this balance either.Earlier this week, The Atlantic reported that during private meetings, Vance “has repeatedly questioned the Defense Department’s depiction of the war in Iran and whether the Pentagon has understated what appears to be the drastic depletion of U.S. missile stockpiles.” Vance’s inquiries echo concerns from some others inside the administration, as well as voices in Congress and elsewhere, who warn about American military readiness.Public figures occasionally deliver what’s known as a “non-denial denial,” in which they try to

The Iran War’s Ramifications Have Only Just Begun

President Trump, celebrating Tehran’s declaration that the Strait of Hormuz would reopen to commercial shipping, posted on Truth Social on April 17, “IRAN HAS JUST ANNOUNCED THAT THE STRAIT OF IRAN IS FULLY OPEN AND READY FOR FULL PASSAGE.” The opening didn’t last. But, in his haste, Trump had inadvertently spelled out possibly the most consequential result of his eight-week war: The Strait of Hormuz now looks, in practice, like the “STRAIT OF IRAN.”Although none of the Trump administration’s goals—an end to Iran’s nuclear ambitions, destroying Iran’s missile capability, neutralizing proxy forces, regime change—has been fulfilled, the war has led to enduring changes. Two sweeping conclusions—one short-term, one longer—have become clear, experts in defense, diplomacy, business, and economics told us.In the short term, despite an indefinite cease-fire that kicked in last week following an initial two-week pause in hostilities, a durable end to the war isn’t coming anytime soon. The disparity in U.S. and Iranian demands for how negotiations should proceed, along with blockades by their respective forces in the strait, has locked the two sides in a stalemate. Many Americans still expect a quick end to the war’s economic strain. But that’s unlikely. At a Vanderbilt University panel discussion

All the Sad Young Chinese Professionals

Earlier this year, one of the most popular apps in China was called Are You Dead?. This was not a game, but a handy way for the many young people who live alone across the country, mostly in cities, to keep tabs on one another. Users needed to check in with the app every 48 hours by pressing a big green button. If a user did not check in, the app promptly notified a designated contact. Designed as a source of comfort to those who worry about dying alone, the app became the top paid download for the iPhone in China in January.Then it vanished. Apple said in a statement that China’s cyberspace watchdog ordered the company to remove it from its Chinese store. The app seemed to challenge the Communist Party’s insistence that the Chinese people are content beneficiaries of economic and social progress. Instead, Are You Dead? exposed the unease felt by many Chinese urbanites, and it highlighted the depths of a major social problem facing China today: loneliness. In suppressing the app, China’s authorities have made plain that they are watching the public mood and not liking what they see.From the February 2025 issue: The anti-social centuryIn

The ‘Great Man’ Presidency

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket CastsThis week, the State Department released a mock-up of a new limited-edition passport designed to commemorate America’s 250th birthday. Previews show it including John Trumbull’s famous image of the presentation of the Declaration of Independence, but the image is small and crowded, so you can’t really make out any individual Founding Father. The inside cover across from that tableau has a markedly different layout: the robust head of Donald Trump, smirk-scowling, taking up as much space as the entire grouping of all the Founding Fathers on the opposite page. His portrait rises above the faded text of the Declaration of Independence. A man still alive, but pre-embedded in history.The new Trump passport joins a growing list of documents, monuments, and interior-design details that Trump has lately altered in his own image. As our staff writers Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer reported, Trump has even recently begun crazy-gluing presidential challenge coins—gold, palm-size souvenirs popular in military circles—onto many White House doors. Most presidents at least play-act modesty and let supporters rename the airports after they’re gone. But Trump isn’t bothering with those niceties. According to Ashley and Michael’s reporting,

Cole Allen Is Another Normie Extremist

On Saturday night, after Cole Tomas Allen’s alleged attempt to assassinate President Trump and administration officials at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, a familiar ritual began on the internet: compiling a portrait of the shooter, based on the digital breadcrumbs of his online life. Over the past decade, this trail has frequently led to a similar place. The suspect in many cases turned out to be a white man radicalized by spending time in the internet’s dark crevices. Payton Gendron, who killed 10 people in 2022 at a grocery store in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, posted a manifesto that quickly circulated on 4chan, in which he included neo-Nazi imagery and described himself as an “ethno-nationalist.” Before Robert Bowers shot and killed 11 people in 2018 at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, he posted bigoted content on the far-right social-media platform Gab.Allen, a tutor who traveled from California to the Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington, D.C., with a shotgun, a handgun, and knives, according to authorities, does not fit that profile. The 31-year-old had donated $25 to Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign. On what appears to be Allen’s Bluesky account, the posts that he has liked tend to be

The Secret Weapon Against AI Dominance

More than 90 lawsuits have been filed by creators against AI companies for copyright infringement. Authors, musicians, visual artists, and news publishers have all accused firms such as OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic of using their copyrighted works to train AI models without permission. (The Atlantic is involved in one such lawsuit, against the AI firm Cohere.) These cases are frequently framed as the defining fight over the future of creative labor and the entertainment industry as a whole. As one of these lawsuits put it, artists are seeking to end “infringement of their rights before their professions are eliminated by a computer program powered entirely by their hard work.”But the future of creative labor will more likely be decided through a different question within copyright law, one that has received far less attention: To what extent should AI-generated works receive copyright protection at all? In a 2024 case, Thaler v. Perlmutter, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia held that a work generated autonomously by an AI system cannot be protected by copyright, because copyright requires a human “author.” The Supreme Court declined to review that decision in March. With the lower-court decision left in place, the question

Child Care Is Buckling

At an Easter luncheon at the White House earlier this month, Donald Trump said to his guests that it is “not possible” for the federal government to “take care of day care” (or Medicaid, or Medicare), because “we’re fighting wars,” “we’re a big country,” and “we have all these other people.” Instead, he contended, such funding should be handled by the states. In response, some Democrats pointed out that the billions of dollars the administration is spending on its war in Iran could go toward helping many people indeed, including the millions who might benefit from investments in, say, free nationwide preschool.The White House later said that Trump’s remarks were taken out of context. But they were consistent with his well-articulated spending priorities—which have left many families scrambling to find affordable care.Child care is a vital piece of infrastructure. For one, child-care programs support the military’s ability to fight wars, given that roughly a third of active-duty service members are parents. More broadly, child care influences parents’ ability to participate in the labor market, which can have far-reaching economic consequences, as well as unmistakable social effects. Parents who can’t find caregiving help have less time to tend to their own

Micah Lasher, Child Magician

I’m meeting with Micah Lasher at a diner on the Upper West Side. The last time I saw him was also at an Upper West Side diner. That was 32 years ago. He was 12. I was 22. He was interviewing me for a job.Lasher is running for Congress in the June 23 Democratic primary for the smallest, richest, most educated district in the country, the one that Jerrold Nadler is leaving after 34 years. New York’s Twelfth District jaggedly stretches all the way across Manhattan from the top of Central Park down to 12th Street. It is so liberal that whoever wins the primary will likely get to keep the seat as long as they want. It’s so rich that whoever wins will have considerable power in Congress, thanks to Manhattanites’ ability to donate to other campaigns.In his Yankees jacket over a white button-down, Lasher doesn’t look that different than the last time I saw him, which is strange because he has since undergone puberty. He still has a boyish, earnest, Michael Cera energy. He has three kids and is married to a finance executive now, but he still lives in a building with his mom. When the waitress

This ABC Showdown Is Different

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.In September, FCC Chair Brendan Carr dangled a simple threat: Either ABC would “take action” against Jimmy Kimmel, or there would be consequences. The network promptly gave in—“Great News,” President Trump wrote at the time—suspending Kimmel’s late-night show only to reinstate it a few days later amid public backlash. Yesterday, just 24 hours after the president and the first lady publicly demanded that Kimmel be fired, the FCC went after the network once again, ordering an early review of all broadcast licenses owned by ABC’s parent company, Disney.In some ways, the situations rhyme. Both involve direct threats to ABC after a Kimmel joke, and both reveal how the FCC has been reconfigured to act on Trump’s personal grievances. But having failed in its previous attempt to oust Kimmel, the White House has now lost much of its leverage; this time, Disney has less of a reason to cave.Carr’s threat this past fall was a direct response to a joke the comedian delivered during a monologue,

The Perversion of the Voting Rights Act

For the conservative editor and columnist James Jackson Kilpatrick, the Supreme Court decision outlawing school segregation was an atrocity. Brown v. Board of Education, he wrote in the 1950s, was a “revolutionary act by a judicial junta which simply seized power.” He warned in 1963 that the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act would destroy “the whole basis of individual liberty.” And in a 1965 National Review cover story, he argued that in order to “give the Negro the vote,” the Voting Rights Act would repeal the Constitution.Kilpatrick did not hide the basis of his beliefs: In an article that was spiked after the 1963 Birmingham Baptist Church bombing, titled “The Hell He Is Equal,” he insisted that “the Negro race, as a race, is in fact an inferior race.”Read: KilpatrickismAs the historian Nancy MacLean wrote in Freedom Is Not Enough, by the 1970s, this segregationist had refashioned himself as an opponent of racial discrimination, a champion of color-blindness. Liberal egalitarians supporting race-conscious remedies, he argued, were “worse racists—much worse racists—than the old Southern bigots.” His transformation was so complete, he joked, that he was like the convert who “became more Catholic than the Pope.”In fact, Kilpatrick’s conversion was

The YOLO Presidency

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.Had President Trump, we wondered, possibly been reading or at least thumbing through—just maybe—the works of … Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel?Impossible. And yet. Hegel’s theory of “world-historical individuals,” men who redirected the course of humanity, focused on three figures: Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte. Hegel described them as unlikely “heroes of an Epoch” for upending established orders that had previously seemed fixed. They were “practical, political men” who were each condemned in their age for smashing norms and for other conduct “obnoxious to moral reprehension”—as Trump has been accused of, centuries later.And though Trump has long compared himself to America’s two greatest presidents, we were recently told by two people who are in a position to know such things—a senior administration official and a longtime Trump confidant—that the president had, in private conversations, begun thinking about himself less as a peer of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, and more as an addition to Hegel’s immortal trifecta.“He’s been talking recently about how he is the most powerful person to ever live,” the confidant told us. “He wants to be remembered as the

Vance Doubts Pentagon's Depiction of Iran War

Sign up for our newsletter about national security here.In closed-door meetings, J. D. Vance has repeatedly questioned the Defense Department’s depiction of the war in Iran and whether the Pentagon has understated what appears to be the drastic depletion of U.S. missile stockpiles.Two senior administration officials told us that the vice president has queried the accuracy of the information the Pentagon has provided about the war. He has also expressed his concerns about the availability of certain missile systems in discussions with President Trump, several people familiar with the situation told us. The consequences of a dramatic drawdown in munitions reserves are potentially dire: U.S. forces would need to draw from these same stockpiles to defend Taiwan against China, South Korea against North Korea, and Europe against Russia.Both Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, and General Dan Caine, who chairs the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have publicly said that U.S. weapons stockpiles are robust, and portrayed the damage to Iranian forces after eight weeks of fighting as drastic. Vance’s advisers, who spoke with us on the condition of anonymity, told us that the vice president has presented his concerns as his own rather than accusing Hegseth or Caine of misleading

The Most Frightening Shooters Are the Smart Ones

A manifesto-like email allegedly sent by the dinner shooter suggests a murderous obsession with Trump’s politics.An FBI tactical agent near a house associated with the suspected White House Correspondents’ Association dinner shooter in Torrance, California (Patrick T. Fallon / AFP / Getty)April 26, 2026 The line “I experience rage thinking about everything this administration has done” could probably have been written in an email to friends by any number of the attendees at last night’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. But the line was apparently written by a man who showed up with a shotgun and pistol and was ready to kill “most everyone” there to get to Donald Trump and assassinate him and his Cabinet. In a manifesto-like email that he reportedly sent to family minutes before allegedly shooting, Cole Tomas Allen wrote that the assembled journalists and machers “chose to attend a speech by a pedophile, rapist, and traitor, and are thus complicit.” Allen never came near the president or the gala floor. A Secret Service agent was shot in the vest before Allen was tackled and arrested.Random acts of violence by unstable individuals are unfortunately a feature of modern life. The most frightening shooters are not these