"'Real' people grow tired of their rulers. Old ideas become stale. Younger people question orthodoxy. Illiberalism leads to corruption. And if Orbán can lose, then his Russian and American admirers can lose too."
Gift article: '“We don’t want to see a potential rise in babies getting hurt or dying from vitamin K deficiency bleeding, when there’s a clear preventive measure,” Scott said.'
'They’ve forced so many families like Sam and Ava to hide. “Now we’re inside all the time,” Sam told me. They were scared to take their trash out. “You don’t know if you’ll see them along the way or encounter them on a walk. You don’t know if you’ll be able to come back.”'
"PAKTIAWAL: Around eight or nine people with no badges or any sign on the vehicles or any stickers that says the police or law enforcement, nothing. Just masked men surrounded him and told him that, you are going with us, and his kids were screaming for help."
"For practical purposes, the global refugee system is dead—killed by a worldwide plague of nationalism."
Gift article: "The deal is an extraordinary transfer of taxpayer dollars to a foreign company for the purposes of boosting the production of fossil fuels, a main driver of climate change, while throttling offshore wind power."
#Climate
'Trump’s approach is: “We control our hemisphere, and we have the ability to do this,” one person familiar with the planning told us. “We want these hostile regimes out of our hemisphere, and we’re going to set up the business community, because we don’t believe in diplomacy.”'
Gift article: '“The Department of State website says that a U.S. valid passport is sufficient to prove citizenship, but that is not preventing agents from detaining adoptees,” Ms. Dooner Lindgren said.'
Gift article: "Military might under Trump is all power and no purpose, all tactics and no strategy, all violence and no vision, all means and no ends. Having ditched any larger claims (building democracy, fighting tyranny, advancing freedom), it is its own justification."
Gift article: “When Washington was approached about it,” Turco noted, “he said that we literally fought a war against monarchy, and only monarchs put their faces on coins.”
'"Voting-rights advocates have a theory. “It’s a pretext for the next authoritarian escalation,” Alexandra Chandler, who oversees the elections team at the advocacy group Protect Democracy, told us.'
"Casualties: If you would stop reporting on them, we wouldn’t be having these problems! At least fix the headlines, substituting positive takes like “More Comrades Now Available to Greet Warrior Pete Hegseth When He Arrives in Valhalla” [...]"
"Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who founded an antivaccine group & once likened the immunization of children to a holocaust, is transforming a government that long championed the lifesaving benefits of shots into one that spreads doubts about their safety here & abroad."
"The bottom line is that the war Trump started has no good ending. And every day it goes on seems to delay a better future for the Iranian people. This is a tragedy that only Khamenei and Trump, together, could engineer."
"Public health officials have postponed tens of thousands of surgeries, and cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy have seen their treatments disrupted by power outages and a lack of refrigerated medicine."
"An international study in 2025 found about half of all AI-generated summaries had at least one significant sourcing or accuracy issue – with some tools, such as Google’s popular Gemini interface, that rose to 76%."
Gift article: "The science-fiction fantasy has always been that robots would liberate humankind, but now that future is almost here and it seems people are only going to be liberated from their paying jobs.
Then what?"
Gift article: "The basic premise of Trumpism is that the people of the United States are not the collected citizens of the United States, naturalized and natural born, but a particular caste and class of Americans, defined by race, religion and nationality and united by their devotion to Trump."
"Europeans might have tolerated the invective and even the trade damage had it not been for the real threat that Trump now poses to their security."
Gift article: "A rookie immigration officer fresh out of the Trump administration’s abbreviated basic training program made critical errors in paperwork that became the government’s justification for detaining a California man for days in December, federal court records show."
Gift article: "This time, the danger isn’t financial engineering. It’s that our financial system has attached itself to the vulnerabilities of our physical world — power grids, water, land, supply chains — and created hazards that markets have no framework to analyze."
"It would have been more accurate to have written, “We are currently clean on OPSEC, except that I’m sending this information to the editor of The Atlantic.” To honestly believe that this information was not secret would require Hegseth to achieve Olympian levels of self-deception."
Gift article: "Human pressures on nature are eroding the necessities it gives us, such as clean water, food, health, livelihoods and protection from storms and fire. But there is hope, and the authors emphasized the ability to chart a new course."
#Climate
Gift article: "The possibility of obtaining U.S. citizenship with his service was never on his mind, because he believed the green card he got as a child was just as ironclad, Mr. Park said."
Gift: “We see a pattern of celebrating enslavers while reducing teaching about slavery in the United States and limiting diversity, equity, and inclusion,” said Timothy Wellbeck [...]. “Caesar Rodney has components of character not worth celebrating despite his contributions to America’s founding.”
Gift article: "For many years, as they fought off the brutal dictatorship ruling over them, Iranians have worried that their struggle might lead to civil war and chaos. That scenario now seems closer than ever."
Gift article: 'Rachel’s father still couldn’t believe it had come to this. “I’m heartbroken because I believe in this country in an almost religious way,” Doug told me. But as a country, he said, “we fucked up.”'
Gift article: “Courage is contagious,” Oppenheimer said. “Everybody is waiting for somebody else to do something, but we have to be the ones.”
Gift article: "Critics of modern imperialism often did not carry the day. Their logic, however, could prove potent today, as no other president in modern history has so brazenly showcased the connection between lawlessness abroad and lawlessness at home, as has Mr. Trump."
