Wiki News Live
Today:
The Mounting Cost of War
NEWS | 26 July 2026
President Trump weighs escalation of the war with Iran as criticism of the conflict grows. On Washington Week With The Atlantic, panelists joined to discuss some of the frustration from Republican lawmakers, voters, and conservative media. Among Republicans in Congress, discontent is growing over “a lack of answers from this administration on what the objective is, what the timeline is, what the ramifications are, and what the end game actually is” in Iran, Leigh Ann Caldwell, the chief Washington correspondent at Puck, said last night. “When members of Congress are asked to fund billions and billions of dollars, when their constituents are the ones being put on the line for this, patience obviously wears quite thin.”Joining guest moderator Vivian Salama, a staff writer at The Atlantic, to discuss this and more: Caldwell; Adam Harris, a host of Radio Atlantic; Jonathan Karl, the chief Washington correspondent for ABC News; and David Sanger, a White House and national-security correspondent at The New York Times. Watch the full episode here.

Top Stories:
When Middle Age Actually Starts
NEWS | 26 July 2026
The only thing anyone can reliably tell you about middle age is that it’s in the middle of life. One reason for that fuzziness, Lachman told me, is that how you think about middle age depends on what age you currently are. The older people are, the later they tend to think middle age starts and ends. But despite the vagueness around when middle age actually is, both she and Conley believe it’s a useful term. Ultimately, middle age might be better understood as a feeling that creeps up on you than as a clear turning point.

World:
How to Open Yourself Up to a New Passion
NEWS | 26 July 2026
Today’s newsletter explores how to seek out—or just open yourself up to—a unique new hobby. On Unique HobbiesThe True History of New England’s Stone WallsBy Matt SeatonWhy we love them, and why I build themRead the article. Eight Books for DabblersBy Sophia StewartCasual pursuits can enrich our lives, regardless of whether we’re any good at them. How hobbies infiltrated American life : America has a love affair with “productive leisure,” Julie Beck wrote in 2022. America has a love affair with “productive leisure,” Julie Beck wrote in 2022.

Current Events:
How the Trump Administration Made George Washington an Abolitionist
NEWS | 26 July 2026
For more than two centuries, highlighting Washington’s antislavery bona fides has functioned as a politically convenient rhetorical tool. For the entirety of his adult life, George Washington enslaved other human beings. To counter these claims, the report leans on the antislavery Washington. “No monument commemorates their dismal toil.” The President’s House Site exhibit once corrected that imbalance. Time and again, a majority of Americans express their desire to engage with a full and accurate American history.

News Flash:
Even Trump Can’t Spin This One
NEWS | 26 July 2026
If President Trump has one true skill, it is conjuring up alternate realities and getting his supporters to accept them. Trump seems unable to spin this conflict, divert sufficient attention away from it with a new controversy, or end it outright. On June 23, in response to rising gas prices, Trump posted on Truth Social, in all caps, to nobody in particular, “EVERYONE, KEEP OIL PRICES DOWN. Trump currently owns 41 percent of the stock through a family-run trust in Trump Media and Technology Group, the owner of Truth Social. (Trump Media and Technology Group did not respond to a request for comment.)

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SmartSync Data Sync App
SPONSORED | 26 July 2026
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Latest:
Public Health Needs MAHA
NEWS | 26 July 2026
But when I share what I’m hearing with my colleagues in medicine and public health, many chide that engaging with MAHA is completely pointless. And they are concerns that many in public health share—if only they could see beyond that label, and make common cause. In her view, public health steps up to the plate only when it already knows the outcome. The path forward for the field is simple, but requires public health to do something it has been reluctant to do: Show up. These are issues where public health can stand next to communities, name what is harming them, and fight like it means something.

Breaking:
Trump’s Trigger Warnings
NEWS | 26 July 2026
Instead, the call to place trigger warnings outside the museum reflects the limitations of the Trump administration’s power in this instance, as well as a weakness in its campaign to seize control of the American story. The Smithsonian occupies a strange place as a public-private partnership and “independent federal trust instrumentality” of the U.S. government. The Great American State Fair, the signs plastered with Trump’s slogan “We are making D.C. Still, these incoming signs will mark a new kind of outward hostility, falling somewhere closer to putting Trump’s name on the Kennedy Center. Some of them might even see these signs outside the museum and have all the more reason to walk right on in.

Trending:
The Saudis Learn the Truth About Trump
NEWS | 26 July 2026
With the return of Donald Trump to the presidency in 2024, the Saudis surely hoped their moment had arrived. Saudi Arabia has invested heavily in Trump and the Trump family, including licensing deals with the Trump Organization potentially worth billions of dollars and a huge commitment to the private-equity firm founded by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. Details on Wednesday’s agreement are sparse, but The Washington Post reported that the pact, by clearing a way to nuclear enrichment, opened a path to an eventual Saudi nuclear weapon. This turnabout comes at a very bad time for Saudi Arabia. In 2023, Saudi Arabia signed a Chinese-brokered rapprochement with Iran, but China’s friendly relations with Tehran did nothing to protect Saudi Arabia from Iranian missile attacks in recent months.

This Just In:
Five Theories of the Jon Ossoff Moment
NEWS | 26 July 2026
“Jon Ossoff, he’s terrible,” Trump said. Now buzz has begun over whether Ossoff might be a strong Democratic candidate for president in two years. Ossoff may not end up running for president—and, indeed, may not win his reelection race—but here are a few theories on why he’s capturing 2028 attention right now. When rumors circulated that Trump might declare Ossoff and his fellow Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock “illegitimate,” Ossoff had a crisp response. He doesn’t frantically jump into every ephemeral news moment, and he hasn’t taken up swearing to try to show that he’s not a regular senator; he’s a cool senator.

Today:
The U.S. Is Subtly Shifting Its Iran Strategy
NEWS | 26 July 2026
On July 14, the United States returned to the field of battle. The Washington Post reported last weekend that U.S. intelligence doubts that the new attacks will force Iran to change course. But Iran inflicted so much pain on the economy of the United States and its allies that their will to fight petered out first. These points were each raw nerves, and Iran vivisected them adeptly while attributing the pain to the United States. But Iran has gone from attacking its neighbors because they are helping the United States to attacking them because the United States is helping them.

Top Stories:
Why Would Meta Download So Much Porn?
NEWS | 26 July 2026
Strike 3 also presents evidence that Meta made some content publicly available in addition to downloading it. When you download files via BitTorrent, you typically share those files with other people at the same time; if nobody is sharing the files, then nobody can download them. Meta additionally used BitTorrent to acquire large quantities of copyrighted books around the same time, as shown in testimony from another lawsuit. He reviewed a technical description of Strike 3’s data-collection methods and told me that, assuming the records weren’t tampered with, “they have established that people at Meta were uploading” Strike 3’s videos. Strike 3 claims that this was the home of a Meta contractor’s father, and that the file transfers stopped when the contractor stopped working for Meta.

World:
The Fear of Black Greeks
NEWS | 26 July 2026
The actual reason they hate the film is that there are Black and trans people in it. You cannot cast Black people in The Odyssey, because The Odyssey is a pillar of “Western civilization,” which they consider to be white. The fact that the cast of Nolan’s Odyssey, an American film, looks like America is the least innovative thing about it. I have seen conservatives accuse liberals of dismissing the classics as the province of “dead white men,” but that was not what I was taught in the 1990s by Black teachers, in a Black school, in what was then a mostly Black city. As I was watching Nolan’s Odyssey, I recognized an actor playing Polybus, one of Penelope’s suitors: It was Corey Hawkins, an Ellington alumnus.

Current Events:
What Truly Imaginative Fiction Can Do
NEWS | 26 July 2026
So why is it so hard to point to literary fiction that successfully conveys the uncanny sensation of waking up in a different world? But when I read through the comments on his article, I saw readers arguing that plenty of writing does address global overheating, and expressing the opinion that the genre known as “climate fiction” wasn’t getting its due. They’re right—lots of genre fiction deals with apocalyptic climate disruptions. Climate anxiety is also trickling into literary fiction, as Rubsam points out. Similarly, I don’t need fiction to describe how dangerous a flash flood is, or what it’s like for a tornado to rip through your town.

News Flash:
Is AI the End of Cheap Tech?
NEWS | 26 July 2026
AI companies are so hungry for memory that manufacturers can’t keep up, meaning that there are production shortages, and there’s no real end in sight. Warzel: So there’s this chart in your piece from Epoch AI, this organization that tracks the operating costs of major AI models. And they used several public AI models to show the exponentially increasing costs of serving more tokens. If you look back historically, you know, AI was about trying to figure out how people use their own brains and translate that into code. Warzel: Hana, AI companies are not exactly beloved by the general public right now.