They should allow Gary, Ron and Keith to drink in the booth

The FBI Director Is MIA Kash Patel has alarmed colleagues with episodes of excessive drinking and unexplained absences.

A request for “breaching equipment”—normally used by SWAT and hostage-rescue teams to quickly gain entry into buildings—was made last year because Patel had been unreachable behind locked doors, according to multiple people familiar with the request.

www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...

Kash Patel’s Erratic Behavior Could Cost Him His Job The FBI director has alarmed colleagues with episodes of excessive drinking and unexplained absences.

This is a big one. Stellar reporting from Sarah Fitzpatrick. To call it a must-read is an understatement: www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...

(Squids in Chapel Hill)

I Found It: The Best Free Restaurant Bread in America Thirteen thousand miles. Infinite contenders. One beautiful loaf.

Since hush puppies count as bread I have a vastly different (and under-researched) answer than @caity.bsky.social here

I Am Here to Watch the Birthright-Citizenship Arguments, but Not in a Threatening Way Can’t a president go watch his justices?

oh no he’s got Mr Marbury www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/...

College Basketball Is Not Dead Nostalgists worried that giving players more rights would ruin the game. This year’s NCAA tournament is proving them wrong.

Cash hasn't killed caring or quality in college ball. My latest after that stunner of a @ncaa.bsky.social Sweet 16, looking forward to #FinalFour www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026...

What Tracy Kidder Stood For His deep, immersive writing had moral stakes and changed people’s lives.

I will read everything Cullen Murphy writes, obviously, and this one is particularly lovely. Not to be missed: www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026...

The Lesson of a Thrilling March Madness Nostalgists worried that giving athletes more rights would ruin college sports. This year’s NCAA basketball tournament is proving them wrong.

"For all of the economic evolutions in the NCAA, the qualities of a championship team haven’t changed," @sallyjenx.bsky.social writes

Pain

Tottenham Hotspur owners Daniel Levy and Joe Lewis turned a mid-table football team into a European heavyweight. Now the partnership is collapsing spectacularly — just as the club faces being dumped from the Premier League. Read more: bloom.bg/4bVPG5Z

📷: AMA/Corbis via Getty Images

The Evidence That God Exists Searching for scientific proof for faith misunderstands faith.

www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

Comment from user amcclory says: "I remember the exact moment when I received incontrovertible proof that there is no God. It was Game 6 of the 1993 NBA finals. My beloved Phoenix Suns lost the first two games of that series to Michael Jordan's two-time champion Chicago Bulls. Somehow, the Suns improbably won two out of three games in Chicago, staving off elimination, and bringing the series back to Phoenix. They were cruising to victory in Game 6, only to have John Paxon drain a three-pointer to take the lead in the last 4 seconds of the game. With that dagger three, the Suns season and all possibility of the existence of a loving, powerful deity came to an end."

My favorite comment on Elizabeth Bruenig's latest Atlantic story: www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

MARCH

The wisdom of the 5:30 am diaper package. Take note, UNC Athletics.

I would pay thousands of dollars a year (think very low thousands) for access to the mobile Bloomberg Professional app

Finance Bros to Tech Bros: Don’t Mess With My Bloomberg Terminal Some spend more time with the computer system than they do with their spouse. So when techies declared it “cooked,” it was war.

After working at Bloomberg for eight years, it's been very difficult to adjust to a Terminal-less world. News alerts and stock-watching just feel different. www.wsj.com/tech/ai/bloo...

My Self-Driving Car Crash The Tesla was driving perfectly—until it wasn’t.

“The pattern is everywhere: Condition people to rely on the system. Erode their vigilance. Then, when something breaks, point to the terms of service and blame them for not paying attention.”

Last year, The Atlantic gave me $10,000 to gamble with. What started as a journalistic gimmick turned into something more... unnerving.

My cover story on the online betting boom that's warping sports, culture, politics, and the psyches of millions of young men: www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

The Highly Exclusive Way That Everybody Shops Now When everything’s a drop, what’s the point of a drop?

In which @elcush.bsky.social explains why scarcity is in demand for companies (and uses variations of the word “drop” 23 times in doing so):

Arizona Is Now at the Center of Election Investigations Both the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI are probing the results of the 2020 election in Arizona.

Exclusive: HSI, a branch of DHS that usually investigates drug cartels and human-trafficking networks, is probing the 2020 election results in Arizona, Yvonne Wingett Sanchez, Sarah Fitzpatrick, and Nick Miroff report.

The Central Lie of Prediction Markets Polymarket and Kalshi promise the wisdom of the crowds. They deliver something very different.

Wrote about the central lie of prediction markets. How they are the perfect technology for a low-trust society, simultaneously exploiting and reifying an environment in which believing the motives behind any person or action becomes harder. www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

The US Has Enough Missiles for This War But Not the Next One The decline of missile stockpiles, which spurred the Department of Defense’s arm-twisting in January for Lockheed Martin Corp. and RTX Corp. to boost production, is worsening by the day.

Trump is burning through missile stockpiles as if the inventories were endless. And they aren’t. And China and Russia are watching.
www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...

The Kids Trump Sent to ICE’s Dilley Detention Center ProPublica went inside the immigrant detention center for families in Dilley, Texas. Children held there told us about the anguish of being ripped from their lives in the United States and the fear of...

While he was detained at Dilley for over four months, 13-year-old Gustavo Santiago said he felt as if he would “never get out.”

“I just ask that you don’t forget about us,” he told ProPublica in a video call.

This is actually a fun all-star game

Normalize Heelys

The Democrats Aren’t Built for This They say they want to save democracy. First they’ll need to get out of their own way.

Testing something www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

America Isn’t Ready for What AI Will Do to Jobs Does anyone have a plan for what happens next?

This @tyrangiel.bsky.social story has everything: the importance of the BLS, the one tech leader that worried CEOs will talk with candidly, and the deepest challenge AI poses outside of jobs

‘Together, We Are America’ Bad Bunny’s critics said his Super Bowl halftime show would be divisive. They were totally wrong.

This is a great piece by my colleague spencer on the bad bunny helftimeshow but of course there’s never been a more divisive idea in American history than all of us being American, we fought a civil war over it and Trump is nothing if not manifest opposition to it www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026...

The Bad Bunny halftime show immediately chased by the AI slop Svedka ad was incredible whiplash