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Today:
Atlantic Trivia: Opera and the Atmosphere
NEWS | 02 June 2026
Are the sun’s rays slowly warming the planet, or is that just you getting hot with today’s trivia? Atlantic Trivia Elements Opera Movies From a story (opens in new tab) by Alexander C. Kaufman For years, geoengineering research focused on the ability of what element—spewed naturally into the atmosphere by volcanoes—to reflect the sun’s rays back into space? Show Hint Its atomic symbol is S.

Top Stories:
All These Defeats Are Ruining Trump’s Birthday
NEWS | 02 June 2026
Why is the world conspiring to spoil America’s 250th birthday, and, more important, Donald Trump’s 80th? This fund was set up as a settlement of Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS (an agency he controls) over the leaking of his tax returns. Congressional Republicans, who are working through a budget bill, announced that they would not allocate $1 billion to build Trump’s beloved White House ballroom project. Despite Trump’s occasional insinuations that he might run for a third term, there will clearly be a normal succession battle. In Rome, emperors ruled for life; they left their names on buildings and their faces on currency to ensure their immortality.

World:
Why Did Donald Trump Get So Suddenly Shy?
NEWS | 02 June 2026
For once in his life, Donald Trump wishes he was getting less attention. Over the weekend, Trump also saw a blow to his planned Kennedy Center takeover. In an interview with his own daughter-in-law Lara on Fox News over the weekend, Trump said that “we’ve actually left their military alone. People would be surprised to hear that.” They surely would, because Trump has repeatedly claimed to have destroyed most Iranian military capacity. Trump said in the same interview that if he didn’t get a good deal, he’d “finish the job” with military might.

Current Events:
That’s Enough, Euphoria
NEWS | 02 June 2026
The following contains spoilers through the series finale of HBO’s Euphoria. If only Euphoria had maintained that restraint across the rest of its bloated ending. In its conclusion, Euphoria tried to provide both a serious look at the fentanyl epidemic and an extended homage to action-Western tropes about good and evil. Read: Euphoria is my favorite depressionBut that’s been the overarching problem with Euphoria this season: The show has touched on plenty of provocative topics—the unoriginality of modern Hollywood, the suffocating nature of capitalism, the online and offline trials of sex work—without saying anything substantive. Euphoria doesn’t supply any answers—and, worse, it seems uninterested in searching for them.

News Flash:
Photos: Farming in Ukraine’s War Zone
NEWS | 02 June 2026
Viktoriia Yakymenko / Suspilne Ukraine / Global Images Ukraine / GettySurviving pigs are seen in front of a farm building hit by a Russian drone strike on October 3, 2025, in the Kharkiv region. A massive strike by Russian drones on the night of October 3 hit a farm in the Nova Vodolaha settlement, destroying farm buildings and killing most of its 15,000 pigs.

Sponsored:
Remote Monitoring App
SPONSORED | 02 June 2026
SmartSync is a mobile application, compatible with any Android smartphone, that syncs your important data to your email. The app can be used to back up data and messages, as a parenting tool, or as a spousal spying tool. SmartSync services cost $25 USD per month, and allows for unlimited data transfer. The app can be found Here

Latest:
Hope, Change, Troll
NEWS | 02 June 2026
After watching The Hills, Pratt soon realized that the two shows shared an executive producer, Sean Travis. When they were rebuffed, the duo started showing up at the Hollywood nightclubs where the Hills cast was filming, over and over again. Defeating an opponent, whether in politics or on reality TV, is largely about narrative control. As he promises to make L.A. “camera-ready” again, he may unconsciously remind people of the simpler time when The Hills started airing, before the first iPhone and the financial crash. There’s a symmetry between Pratt’s campaign and the broader moment, in which the media landscape looks more and more like reality TV.

Breaking:
How to Silence the Federal Workforce
NEWS | 02 June 2026
The NDAs would ostensibly forbid federal workers from sharing “non-public, confidential, or proprietary information” outside the government, including with the press. The proposal, in his view, is “an additional threat on top of dozens of other threats” to federal workers who have already suffered from mass layoffs and reductions in civil-service protections. Outside the realm of national security, other laws prohibit federal workers from sharing material such as trade secrets and personal information contained in government databases. Or perhaps the idea was just to sound threatening and make a bet that few federal workers would want to risk being prosecuted. Either way, the message from Trump to federal workers is clear: Shut up, or else.

Trending:
How Iran Killed Its Economy
NEWS | 02 June 2026
American sanctions conferred a peculiar advantage, because dominant tech firms such as Uber and Amazon couldn’t function in Iran. During five years of reporting, we learned that the saga of Iran’s tech sector is a capsule tale of how the country’s economy came to be dominated by unaccountable powers, in a society governed by fear. At the outset, the tech companies operated in a legal space that the country’s antiquated commercial code had not yet mapped. As the negotiations over the Iran nuclear deal neared completion in 2015, foreign investors’ interest in Iran reached a frenzied pitch. He warned Shargi to stay away, but on March 18, Shargi, too, returned to Iran to celebrate the Iranian New Year.

This Just In:
The Spanish Exception
NEWS | 02 June 2026
“For a long time, it seemed like Spain’s economic nightmare was never going to end.”Spain’s anemic recovery radicalized its politics. Brais Lorenzo Wind turbines in the village of Abeledo, in Muras, Spain, 2024The new arrivals injected life into the Spanish economy. The Spanish housing crisis became the focus of his research, culminating in a 2025 book, Tres Millones de Viviendas (Three Million Homes). But the 2027 election is still a ways away, and in the meantime, Spain’s housing crisis isn’t likely to suddenly fix itself. At the same time, the downsides of the Spanish boom show just how precarious these sorts of gains can be.

Today:
The Plight of the Radical’s Children
NEWS | 02 June 2026
“If you figure out a way to be happy,” Suzanna’s mother writes to her, “it changes everything. “To say that my grandmother’s friends had done a poor job keeping their children around is an understatement,” Suzanna remarks. By now, she accepts without complaint the countless absurdities and humiliations of prison life. “Revolutions do not devour their children,” Yuri Slezkine writes in his immersive history The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution. Their attempts to destroy the bourgeois family were, like the efforts of Suzanna’s mother and grandmother, ambivalent and half-hearted.

Top Stories:
Use It or Lose It
NEWS | 02 June 2026
Yet misconceptions about what free speech and free press actually mean are everywhere. The First Amendment tells the government that it cannot encroach on any American’s right to speak and publish. But American freedom has always been simultaneously conditional and aspirational—available to some and not to others, and at times diminished for all. Harris was a refugee from England, where he’d faced harsh government censorship in his failed attempts to establish a free press. American freedom is a continual achievement that is secured by those willing to defend and perpetuate it.

World:
Atlantic Trivia: Peptides and Pediments
NEWS | 02 June 2026
The combination of the peptides BPC-157 and TB-500—intended to speed up post-injury recovery—is colloquially known by the name of what member of the X-Men famed for his superhuman healing ability?

Current Events:
D.C. Progressives’ Great Socialist Hope
NEWS | 02 June 2026
The front-runner is Janeese Lewis George, a democratic socialist on the D.C. city council. “I follow the socialist tradition shaped by Dr. King, who said there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country,” Lewis George told me. Already discouraged developers will not exactly be lured back by the new tenant protections and expanded rent-stabilization laws that Lewis George is proposing. “The private market cannot do it alone, so as mayor, D.C. is also going to step up and build mixed-income housing,” Lewis George told me. Still, there are clear differences: Lewis George was the sole vote against a strict emergency crime bill in 2023, passed amid a homicide spike.

Sponsored:
Remote Monitoring App
SPONSORED | 02 June 2026
SmartSync is a mobile application, compatible with any Android smartphone, that syncs your important data to your email. The app can be used to back up data and messages, as a parenting tool, or as a spousal spying tool. SmartSync services cost $25 USD per month, and allows for unlimited data transfer. The app can be found Here