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Today:
The Spectacle of 1980s Hollywood
NEWS | 12 September 2026
Jackie Collins, who wrote flashy, sex-filled Hollywood thrillers, isn’t often thought of as a canonical Los Angeles novelist. Until I learned more about these works, they felt to me like a surface treatment of the complex city best captured by Raymond Chandler, Joan Didion, Octavia Butler, and Eve Babitz. “I don’t live the Hollywood lifestyle,” she told an interviewer (while sitting poolside at her stark-white mansion, mind you). Their books don’t repudiate the existence or value of Collins’s 1980s spectacle: They’re proof that L.A. is constantly evolving, and also that it is perennially, insistently itself. Dina Litovsky for The AtlanticJackie Collins Wrote Her Own RevolutionBy Sophie GilbertThe novelist imagined women enjoying equality in the bedroom and the boardroom.

Top Stories:
Trump Loses the Other Strait
NEWS | 12 September 2026
That loss leaves Trump, who had been hoping to win back control of the Strait of Hormuz from Iran, with a bitter surprise. (The Saudi leader, Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, called Trump twice yesterday urging him to strike the Houthis, Axios reported.) The mess that Saudi Arabia faces in Yemen is partly of its own making. The various Yemeni factions continued to squabble among themselves even as their Houthi enemies were at the gates. Islamabad and Ankara have shown no inclination to help the Saudis, despite a rash of recent Houthi strikes on targets in southern Saudi Arabia.

World:
Postscript to American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center
NEWS | 12 September 2026
American Ground was originally an Atlantic series, and an attempt to respond usefully to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. It is worth remembering that the Trade Center site was an intensely chaotic place. Predictably, they had a more heroic “united we stand” view of the Trade Center site than did I. It was reassuring to know that before publication, American Ground had been heavily vetted by The Atlantic’s rigorous fact-checking department. The World Trade Center site was an extremely complex place, loaded with emotion and political symbolism, full of action and confusion, with many interpretations possible.

Current Events:
Rules Designed to Create Chaos
NEWS | 12 September 2026
Postal Service. States must also upload a full list of every voter receiving a mail ballot to a so-called federal ballot mail portal. Now the Postal Service claims that its work is ready—mostly—to be rolled out, if the justices will let it. “If this actually happens, the burden is going to fall hardest on the most vulnerable of our voters—the elderly, the disabled, rural voters, voters on reservations, voters in the military,” Hasen said. Still, the widespread confusion that the USPS rule would inevitably create may have its own appeal to the White House.

News Flash:
Photos of the Week: Night Harvest, Heavy Surf, Pumpkin Kong
NEWS | 12 September 2026
Patricia De Melo Moreira / AFP / GettyWorkers from the Herdade das Servas winery take part in a nighttime grape harvest in Estremoz, Portugal, on September 3, 2026. Night harvesting is a strategic wine-making technique adopted mainly in regions with very hot climates, such as the Alentejo or the Douro, where summer daytime temperatures can exceed 104 degrees Fahrenheit. Harvesting grapes between sunset and sunrise offers technical advantages for wine quality and winery sustainability.

Sponsored:
Remote Monitoring App
SPONSORED | 12 September 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:
How to Kill a Franchise Before It Even Starts
NEWS | 12 September 2026
The marketing for Hope, the new film by the South Korean horror master Na Hong-jin, presents it on an epic, otherworldly scale. Yet the entire time I was watching it, I had one overriding feeling: Everything could perhaps be a little bit smaller. Bum-seok’s fears of an escaped zoo animal escalate as he returns to the town of Hope Harbor to find that carnage has erupted. Entries in this genre tend to pose the question of what would happen if a few oversize monsters trashed a town with impunity. Recent reports put its budget at nearly $75 million, which is a considerable amount for the South Korean film industry, but is still on the lower end for a project this ambitious.

Breaking:
A Quarter Century of Pain
NEWS | 12 September 2026
I wanted the United States to find and kill whoever had planned this attack on my country. In the first days after the attack, the United States acted wisely. First and foremost, we all still live with the only danger that qualifies as existential: nuclear war. Nuclear-armed Russia is perpetrating the largest war in Europe since World War II. During the Cold War, Americans (mostly) managed to avoid becoming the thing we were fighting against.

Trending:
The Original Sin of AI
NEWS | 12 September 2026
When it comes to generative AI, lawmakers can’t spend the next decade essentially documenting what we already know about how intimate relationships with bots compromise real-life relationships with parents, friends, and other humans. Amogh Dimri: The people who marry chatbotsEven AI companies recognize that guardrails are necessary for chatbots that communicate with young people. The original sin of AI is granting chatbots the use of the first person. Unless lawmakers mandate a non-personified default setting for underage chatbot users, unhealthy attachments between young people and bots are inevitable. The momentum pushing AI forward may seem irresistible, but lawmakers are clearly alert to the mounting skepticism about AI.

This Just In:
Trump’s Weird Loyalty Pledge
NEWS | 12 September 2026
A confident president does not hold a faux convention. And a leader who believes in his voters does not make them recite weird pledges in the middle of a speech. This vow was a weird moment in a short speech of weird moments. You see, the president continued, he knew Pavarotti, Pavarotti was a great friend of his, but Macchio is better than Pavarotti. And Macchio, Trump went on, was too modest to admit it, but …You get the picture.

Today:
The MAGA Movement Is Splintering Without Charlie Kirk
NEWS | 12 September 2026
When Charlie Kirk was assassinated last September, many of his allies on the right memorialized him as a hero of free speech and the founder of an enduring political movement. Since his death, the MAGA movement has stumbled: Its factions are bickering, and Republicans are facing potentially disastrous midterm elections. President Trump seems disconnected from his base and reality. Just how fragile a peace Kirk had managed to keep became clear three months after his killing, at an annual conference of Turning Point USA, the organization he’d co-founded. Wired reports that Turning Point once again plans to spend large sums on field operations from now until the midterms.

Top Stories:
What Makes Tennis One of the Greatest Games
NEWS | 12 September 2026
The American tennis player Ben Shelton blasted a 146-mile-an-hour ace past the Spaniard Carlos Alcaraz at 3:33 a.m. yesterday. Far from being only amusements or diversions then, sports were considered serious undertakings that had the job of making men men and rescuing the nation from softness and degeneracy. The inherent dangers were fewer, the injuries less “heroic.” But perhaps the calm of tennis was a good thing. Tennis offered another way to make men of strength and vigor while allowing them to remain gentlemen with their bodies fully intact. But the subtle graces of the “lawn tennis” Pier wished to promote were still there, in the complex calculations and fluid coordination that clinched each point.

World:
Bush Understood Something Trump Doesn’t
NEWS | 12 September 2026
Some believed that the United States was at war with Islam itself. One of the most important and ominous notions that Trump has seized upon and legitimized is that Muslims are inherently un-American. After Coulter called on the United States in 2001 to “invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity,” National Review dropped her column. Trump inserted himself into the controversy, proposing that he purchase the property to halt construction on the putatively offensive site. It is that Bush denied and suppressed contempt for Muslims, while Trump has honored and nurtured this hatred.

Current Events:
The Los Angeles Rams Are Trying to Defeat Time
NEWS | 12 September 2026
Usually, when the San Francisco 49ers and the Los Angeles Rams play, it’s a relatively short commute. One study that analyzed every NFL game from 1970 to 2011 with a kickoff after 8 p.m. Last year, the Rams arrived in London the day before a game against a strong Jacksonville Jaguars team and won. Meeta Singh, a doctor who has served as a sleep consultant for multiple NFL teams, thinks that players simply won’t be able to sleep. Many NFL teams now have a sleep specialist and a performance-science team working on circumventing jet lag.

News Flash:
How Colin Powell Spent 9/11
NEWS | 12 September 2026
Countries across Latin America were emerging from a long period of despotism and military dictatorship. Democratic backsliding has also occurred on Latin America’s left. Based on my years of working in Latin America, the long shadow of yanqui meddling is hard to overstate. And polls show that many people in Latin America today see China, not the United States, as the more reliable superpower. That conclusion underpins the Trump administration’s approach in Latin America and beyond.