Wiki News Live
Today:
The Trump Administration Casts Out the ‘Soul’ of MAHA
NEWS | 01 May 2026
(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.) She believes, based on her conversations with Murkowski and Collins, that concerns about the anti-vaccine coalition in the MAHA movement helped tank her nomination, she told me. Means’s defeat comes at a time when MAHA seems to have lost much of its momentum. The White House has reportedly told Kennedy to stop talking about that topic, for fear that it could hurt Republicans in the midterms. But now the White House and Republican lawmakers seem conflicted about just how much they’ll tolerate Kennedy’s MAHA movement.

Top Stories:
Vance Denies and Confirms Atlantic Reporting in One Breath
NEWS | 01 May 2026
Vice President Vance hasn’t mastered this balance either. Vance called The Atlantic’s reporting false and then pivoted instantly to verifying that it was true. Although the vice president has displayed a great deal of ideological flexibility during his career, one of the few consistencies has been his opposition to foreign military interventions. When the vice president eventually emerged, it was to give tepid defenses of the war. (He’s right to say that a prudent vice president should be raising issues such as the adequacy of missile stores.)

World:
Seven Death-Defying Books for the Adventurous Reader
NEWS | 01 May 2026
I know that not because I’ve been there myself, but because I’ve read Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air and other books about the world’s highest mountain. The shine of this magic trick hasn’t worn off, and my favorite place to encounter it is in a truly harrowing adventure story. Here are seven books that I promise will spirit you to some of the planet’s wildest landscapes and greatest human feats, even when read in total comfort. He travels to South America himself, looking for clues about the mystery of both the city and its seekers. As a result, the book chronicles two parallel preoccupations, linked across a century: the subject’s and the author’s.

Current Events:
Making America’s Houses Bigger May Have Been a Mistake
NEWS | 01 May 2026
I own a row house, and when I fantasize about something more suited to my romantic nature, what I’m picturing is a slightly bigger row house in a neighborhood with more restaurants. Row houses have a prestige issue, too. The architect Witold Rybczynski observed in this magazine in 1991 that the average new single-family house had grown by more than a third from 1963 to 1989. In his view, row houses are an ideal design. But with those annoyances comes what Rybczynski calls “the gregariousness of living in relatively close proximity.” Encountering a single block of row houses in isolation is rare; more frequently, they make up whole neighborhoods.

News Flash:
The Iran War’s Ramifications Have Only Just Begun
NEWS | 01 May 2026
Iran now has greater authority over the strait than before the war began and stands to benefit from its closure. Or a consortium of nations, including Iran, might manage the waterway and split the profits. In addition to shutting down traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, Iran in the past two months has hit energy infrastructure in neighboring countries. But that also would not preclude Iran from someday moving to shut the strait again. “One of the ironies of this war is that Iran discovered that it had this weapon,” he said.

Sponsored:
Remote Monitoring App
SPONSORED | 01 May 2026
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Latest:
The ‘Great Man’ Presidency
NEWS | 01 May 2026
President Trump: Well, thank you very much. I do not think Trump read this. But what I think Trump liked is to consider himself in the long scope of immortal history. What’s the likelihood that he is correct, that he is, in fact, a great man of history—[Laughter]Rosin: —he is a norm-defying world-historical figure? There’s other cases that he looks like he’s going to lose going to the Supreme Court.

Breaking:
The Era of Normie Extremism Is Here
NEWS | 01 May 2026
In this sense, he represents the relatively new phenomenon of normie extremism, in which people who hold otherwise mainstream political views carry out acts of political violence. I wrote about the ascent of normie extremism after Luigi Mangione allegedly killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in 2024. Today, acts of political violence in the United States are at their highest level in decades. This, the extremism expert Amy Cooter told me, is a recipe for political violence. And before long, there will likely be another apparently normal person, with ostensibly mainstream political views, who resorts to violence to make their point.

Trending:
The Secret Weapon Against AI Dominance
NEWS | 01 May 2026
More than 90 lawsuits have been filed by creators against AI companies for copyright infringement. Cutting out human creators in favor of AI could save producers enormous sums of money. Disincentivizing content companies from relying on AI benefits consumers too. Alex Reisner: Generative AI is challenging a 234-year-old lawThis is not an argument that using AI is unethical or inherently uncreative. As AI-generated content becomes harder to distinguish from human-authored work, the temptation to pass off AI-generated content as human-made will grow.

This Just In:
Child Care Is Buckling
NEWS | 01 May 2026
Child care is a vital piece of infrastructure. 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. The cost of child care has been rising for decades. This creates a vicious circle: Families that can’t afford child care tend to opt out of it altogether. (New York City has also laid out an ambitious plan for universal free child care that could, if fully funded, pave the way for free child care statewide.)

Today:
Today’s Atlantic Trivia: ‘Great Men’ and Cataclysmic Events
NEWS | 01 May 2026
That depends on (among other things) how today’s trivia goes. Atlantic Trivia ‘Great Men’ Shakespeare Disasters From a story (opens in new tab) by Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer In his writing, the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel named most frequently three people as “world-historical individuals”: Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and what leader who was exiled to the island of St. Helena? Answer Submit Previous Question Next QuestionAnd by the way, did you know that St. Helena is home to the world’s oldest living land animal? His name is Jonathan, and he is a Seychelles giant tortoise that is at least 193—and very possibly several years older. (Jonathan is not, however, the third “world-historical individual” picked by Hegel.)

Top Stories:
Micah Lasher, Child Magician
NEWS | 01 May 2026
I’m meeting with Micah Lasher at a diner on the Upper West Side. But I worked for Lasher long before he turned 15. But they don’t know the Micah Lasher I knew. I met Lasher and his father, who had been an amateur magician, at a diner on the Upper West Side. He’s contemplated writing an essay about it, but feared outing himself as a weird child magician.

World:
This ABC Showdown Is Different
NEWS | 01 May 2026
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. 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. The groups reportedly control more than 25 percent of ABC affiliates across the country and represent 23 percent of all American households. But whether Disney comes out on top again may not matter to the White House.

Current Events:
Voters Can Be Disenfranchised Now
NEWS | 01 May 2026
And the decision fits just as well with Kilpatrick’s later spin on that philosophy: Attempts to ban racial discrimination are themselves discriminatory—against white people. In 2022, Louisiana lawmakers passed a redistricting plan that limited Black voters to a single congressional district out of six (“packing” them into a majority district and “cracking” the remaining Black population into other districts to limit their influence). The fact that discriminating against Black voters would give Republicans an advantage today is not exculpatory; it only establishes a motive for discrimination. Drawing a different map that did not disenfranchise Black voters, as a lower court had ordered, would itself be an “unconstitutional racial gerrymander,” Alito concluded. Trying to disenfranchise Black voters isn’t racist; preventing Louisiana from disenfranchising Black voters is racist.

News Flash:
The Fight-Club Rule on Gerrymandering
NEWS | 01 May 2026
Their goal is straightforward and universally understood: They want to bolster the GOP’s majority in Congress and retake the lead in a yearlong, nationwide partisan gerrymandering showdown with Democrats. Republicans can’t acknowledge the intent of their gerrymandering proposal, because the state constitution expressly prohibits partisan redistricting. It could lead other GOP-led states to eliminate House seats drawn to boost minority representation in Congress in the months and years ahead. The court did not touch Florida’s state ban on partisan gerrymandering, however. What seemed clear was that if Florida’s ban on partisan gerrymandering remained intact, the informal ban on copping to it was weakening.