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Today:
‘I Genuinely Am Upset That Your Kids Are Vaccinated’
NEWS | 25 February 2026
Over coffee at a Starbucks just outside Austin, Texas, Del Bigtree told me he wants his teenage son to catch polio. These days, Kennedy chooses his words more carefully, whereas Bigtree has remained just as proudly committed to discouraging Americans from getting vaccinated. “I genuinely am upset that your kids are vaccinated, because it’s keeping my kids from getting chickenpox. If that study doesn’t happen, Bigtree told me, then Kennedy’s tenure will have been mostly a failure. The two had dinner together late last year, Bigtree told me.

Top Stories:
Tales From Kash Patel’s FBI
NEWS | 25 February 2026
But now Kash Patel is in charge, which has meant a slight reordering of the agency’s priorities. Fairy tales tell children that dragons can be killed.” Inside the airplane, Kash Patel sits alone. Agent Angelo Pappas: Is this about how the FBI director wants to conduct all his meetings on a Jet Ski? Frank Costello: Then why did Kash Patel just post a photograph of you online with “#FBITEAMBONDING! He pushes open a door to reveal Kash Patel chugging champagne with the triumphant U.S. Men’s hockey team.)

World:
250 Years of the American Experiment
NEWS | 25 February 2026
Sign up for The Unfinished Revolution, our newsletter course in which Atlantic writers and editors explore 250 years of the American experiment. Today, Stuart’s unfinished painting, known as the Athenaeum portrait, has become one of the most memorable images of America’s first president. Our newsletter course The Unfinished Revolution explores this special issue and features original conversations from around our newsroom. And as the American experiment endures a moment of particular challenge, David Brooks argues that the country needs a mass movement. Like Stuart’s portrait of Washington, the project of the United States “is still unfinished, and troubled,” Goldberg concludes.

Current Events:
The Deaths Doctors Never Thought They’d See in the U.S.
NEWS | 25 February 2026
Of every 1,000 people the measles virus infects, it may kill as few as one to three. This year, just 4 percent of measles cases have led to hospitalization, compared with 11 percent last year. The majority of measles cases will remain somewhat mild. And studies have consistently found that when vaccinated people do contract measles, their cases are much milder and potentially less contagious than unvaccinated cases. But uptake of the MMR vaccine has ticked steadily down in recent years.

News Flash:
Slow Down, Charli XCX
NEWS | 25 February 2026
She’s the kind of person who is praised with the term je ne sais quoi, even though fans can list exactly what makes Charli Charli. Charli earned cult acclaim throughout the 2010s by blending archetypes cunningly: She was part Britney Spears, part Siouxsie Sioux, part guerilla-marketing exec. Following Brat, she’s working to extend the Charli XCX experience into a new medium for her: film. He tries, in other words, to make Charli XCX more like Taylor Swift. And it makes a fascinating point about what really sets Charli apart from her more earnest contemporaries.

Sponsored:
Remote Monitoring App
SPONSORED | 25 February 2026
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Latest:
The Edge of Mathematics
NEWS | 25 February 2026
When I called Tao earlier this month to get his take on what AI can offer mathematics, he was more tempered. Read: We’re entering uncharted territory for mathTao has long been intrigued by, but reserved about, what AI tools can do for his field. Terence Tao: There’s a big crowd of people who really, really want AI success stories. AI tools are like taking a helicopter to drop you off at the site. But AI tools do not rate their own confidence accurately.

Breaking:
The Meme From 2016 That Explains 2026
NEWS | 25 February 2026
All times are interesting times, but the summer of 2016 was especially interesting. It is a vestige of 2016 that, precisely because it is self-consciously speechless, captures the tensions of life in 2026. “May you live in interesting times,” as the old line goes, is never quite the blessing it seems. Interesting times can be incoherent. But it has also become a way to wonder: What do we do if the interesting times never end?

Trending:
Gavin Newsom’s Father Issues
NEWS | 25 February 2026
Compared with some on this roll call, Gavin Newsom’s father was practically a saint. He is a great reader, whereas the young Gavin has undiagnosed dyslexia. Despite the cautionary example provided by his father, Newsom took a long time to realize that he had been on the same path. The young Gavin goes on holiday with the Gettys to meet the king and queen of Spain. Read: Gavin Newsom’s record is a problemNot having a strong sense of identity means that he can get pushed around in his personal life.

This Just In:
The White House Urges Republicans to Ignore Trump’s Diversions
NEWS | 25 February 2026
Last Thursday, the White House tried to get President Trump to focus on the economic concerns driving the midterm elections. “Republican leadership is building a brighter, more prosperous future for all Georgians—and today’s visit underscores President Trump’s unrelenting commitment to finishing the job,” the press release said. That difficulty is amplified because Trump is now in the White House, and this is his economy. Inside the White House, aides have tried to keep Trump from becoming fatalistic about losing the House, after he told a reporter, “When you win the presidency, you don’t win the midterms,” in January. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has for months summed up his party’s argument as a focused antidote to Trump’s more scattered priorities.

Today:
Trump’s Suddenly High-Stakes State of the Union
NEWS | 25 February 2026
But tomorrow night, when he returns to the Capitol to deliver the State of the Union address, he will be trying to turn around a stumbling presidency. Tehran has, once more, drawn Trump’s ire, for its crackdown on protests and for allegedly continuing its nuclear-enrichment program. And that may continue: Aides told me that foreign policy is unlikely to be a central theme to his State of the Union address. Trump has long groused about how, in his first term, he felt upstaged during the State of the Union addresses by then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi being positioned behind him. Tomorrow’s State of the Union might just be Trump’s best chance to begin the sort of comeback he needs to avoid that fate again.

Top Stories:
Sam Altman Is Losing His Grip on Humanity
NEWS | 25 February 2026
Last Friday, onstage at a major AI summit in India, Sam Altman wanted to address what he called an “unfair” criticism. The OpenAI CEO was asked by a reporter from The Indian Express about the natural resources required to train and run generative-AI models. “It also takes a lot of energy to train a human,” Altman told a packed pavilion. The energy used by the brain is significantly less than even efficient frontier models for simple queries, not to mention the laptops and smartphones people use to prompt AI models. And a week ago, Dario Amodei—the CEO of Anthropic, and Altman’s chief rival—made a similar analogy, likening the training of AI models to human evolution and day-to-day learning.

World:
What the Roberts Court Is Actually Trying to Accomplish
NEWS | 25 February 2026
By striking down President Trump’s tariffs, the Supreme Court has once again shown that it is no partisan instrument of Republican power. And almost half of the Court’s cases were unanimous. But in his first term, Trump had the lowest success rate at the Supreme Court of any president in at least a century. Too often, casual Court watchers think that the Supreme Court is deciding whether policy X is good policy. The Supreme Court didn’t decide in West Virginia v. EPA and Garland v. Cargill whether banning carbon emissions (under Biden) or banning bump stocks (under Trump), respectively, was constitutional.

Current Events:
The Revenge of the Dummymander
NEWS | 25 February 2026
But partisan gerrymandering does have one ultimate weakness—a foe that doesn’t always win, but whose victories are especially satisfying. If you have never heard of a dummymander, this is probably a good time to learn the word. Dummymander is the term that the political scientists Bernard Grofman and Thomas L. Brunell coined for what happens when a gerrymander backfires, hurting the party that it was designed to help. But if they spread them too thin and Democrats have a good year, Republican candidates will become vulnerable. Whatever the results, any dummymander that emerges in 2026 might be short-lived.

News Flash:
America Doesn’t Need a Deal or a War With Iran
NEWS | 25 February 2026
The United States does not need a comprehensive deal with Iran now, and may be better off without one for the time being. The summer’s campaign also reset expectations about what the United States and Israel are willing to do. The United States does not need a comprehensive deal with Iran now. A comprehensive nuclear deal that requires Iran to abandon enrichment entirely would almost certainly involve sweeping sanctions relief. The United States now faces a choice, but it is not the one most often presented between a sweeping deal and a major war.