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Today:
Why Maduro Probably Can’t Count on Putin
NEWS | 13 November 2025
Earlier this year, Maduro signed what he called a “historic and strategic” pact with Putin to expand trade and military cooperation. Putin has said nary a word about Maduro or Venezuela lately. Even if Putin wanted to bolster Venezuela’s military and weaken the U.S. in its own neighborhood, he may not get the chance. If Putin figures Maduro is doomed, he may be reluctant to risk gifting Russian weapons to a new regime in Caracas. Starting in 2015, the Russian military spent years propping up the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

Top Stories:
Today’s Atlantic Trivia: Conspicuous Contemplation
NEWS | 13 November 2025
For you and this trivia, it’s right here in The Atlantic. Find last week’s questions here, and to get Atlantic Trivia in your inbox every day, sign up for The Atlantic Daily. For this fact, I must thank Atlantic Trivia reader Jeff A., who additionally argues that the letter technically shouldn’t be followed by a period: “Harry S. Truman” would be like writing “Franklin Delano. And if you think up a great question after reading an Atlantic story—or simply want to share a wild fact—send it my way at [email protected]. Federal law in 1971 bumped Veterans Day, Memorial Day, and Washington’s Birthday to always-on-a-Monday status.

World:
America’s Best Pasta Is Slipping Away
NEWS | 13 November 2025
Each shape requires a different insert, Tony Adams, the owner of Mill Valley Pasta, told me. Barilla, known in the United States for its inexpensive American-made products, launched its Al Bronzo line of imported Italian pasta in 2022. Even midrange stores such as Target and Wegmans sell their own bronze-cut pasta. On TikTok, lifestyle influencers encourage viewers to seek out bronze-cut pasta because it is supposedly healthier than its Teflon-extruded kin. If the pasta tariff goes into effect, bronze-cut pasta will almost certainly be rarer on U.S. shelves.

Current Events:
Bill Gates Said the Quiet Part Out Loud
NEWS | 13 November 2025
When Bill Gates published his latest essay on climate change, the response was immediate. In wealthy countries, adaptation is often seen as a technical or an engineering fix: installing air-conditioning, restoring wetlands, building seawalls. Every tenth of a degree of warming will compound the damage from climate change. But, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change notes, climate disasters don’t devastate in a vacuum. Although Gates argued for human welfare as a climate strategy, he stopped short of what a growing movement is now demanding.

News Flash:
Inside the Sandwich Guy’s Jury Deliberations
NEWS | 13 November 2025
I threw a sandwich,” Dunn confessed to law enforcement upon being apprehended—a sort of modern Williams Carlos Williams (“I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox …”) for the more carnivorous, angrier set. Although it was widely reported at the time that the sandwich was salami, Dunn later said it was turkey. “It was like, Oh, you poor baby,” the juror told me. The juror told me that she and her fellow jurors used words like absurd, laughable, and waste of government money. “Even the fact that I am reluctant to give you my name—in any other situation, I probably wouldn’t mind, but I feel like somebody might come after me,” the juror told me.

Sponsored:
Remote Monitoring App
SPONSORED | 13 November 2025
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:
MAGA Has Repulsed Young Women
NEWS | 13 November 2025
That means that 81 percent of young women under 30, 81 percent, voted for Mikie Sherrill. Before 1980, men and women voted almost exactly like each other and were defined by their group, so Black men and Black women;white men, white women; blue-collar men, blue-collar women; white-collar men, white-collar women. Just the way that young men have gravitated more toward Donald Trump, young women are repelled by him. If you were gonna bring young men in, if you wanna do more with young men, go on all the podcasts. They’re saying, I can’t and won’t even try to compete with young women.

Breaking:
Donald Trump Is a Lamer Duck Than Ever
NEWS | 13 November 2025
Above all, Trump, who is not eligible to run for reelection in 2028—at least that’s what some people think—is loath to be seen as a lame duck. “Donald Trump Enters His Lame Duck Era,” declared one post-election headline in Politico. (Mike Rounds of South Dakota apparently “laughed out loud.”)No officeholder welcomes being labeled a lame duck. But lame duck also carries deeper connotations of diminishing cachet, relating to a leader’s lost status and creeping powerlessness. Beyond the undertones of lost influence, being a lame duck can also suggest a president distracted, disengaged, and biding time.

Trending:
Well, That’s Definitely Frankenstein
NEWS | 13 November 2025
It’s hardly a surprise, then, that he’s been trying to get an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein off the ground for many years. Frankenstein is del Toro’s third take in a row on a classic novel, after his remake of Nightmare Alley and his Oscar-winning, stop-motion version of Pinocchio. Read: Why Guillermo del Toro made FrankensteinThe film begins, as Shelley’s novel does, on a giant ship that’s trapped in the Arctic ice—one that is clearly a physical, colossal prop. Oscar Isaac plays Baron Victor Frankenstein—the man responsible for animating del Toro’s latest lovable monster—with as much Gothic panache as he can summon. Del Toro, like Shelley, changes up the protagonists; the film focuses on Frankenstein before switching in the second half to the Creature’s point of view.

This Just In:
The Accidental Trailblazers of a New Global Condition
NEWS | 13 November 2025
Born in a country that would soon vanish off the map, these children became accidental trailblazers of a new global condition: life in the shadow of catastrophes that cross borders and don’t end when news cameras move on. Groups such as the Belarusian nongovernmental organization For the Children of Chernobyl, founded in 1990, drew global attention. Arndt shows that this act of global empathy was rooted in something deeper than pity for a former enemy: an understanding of humanity’s shared peril. Chernobyl Children is not just a story of ruined childhoods; it is also a portrait of life in the Anthropocene. Yet Chernobyl Children is an astute and thought-provoking work, connecting the unfinished past to a present and future in which disasters travel faster and wider.

Today:
All the Ostriches Must Die
NEWS | 13 November 2025
All of her ostriches must die. Some ostriches on Dave and Karen’s farm had names: Barney, Peter, Q-Tip, Sarah. Alana Paterson for The Atlantic Dave and Karen told the Canadian government that their surviving ostriches would lay eggs that were full of valuable bird-flu antibodies. Dave and Karen first learned about Tsukamoto’s work in March 2020, when he was inoculating ostriches with SARS-CoV-2 antigens. “We are respectfully requesting CFIA to consider not culling the entire flock of ostriches at Universal Ostrich Farm,” it said.

Top Stories:
What Democracy in Venezuela Would Require
NEWS | 13 November 2025
The man who took power, Rómulo Betancourt, became known as the father of Venezuelan democracy. A coup toppled his government in 1948, and democracy would not reemerge in Venezuela for another decade. The administration cut off dialogue with the Maduro regime earlier this month. In today’s Venezuela, the military is dug into power and faces considerable risk if Maduro is ousted. The Venezuelan state needs to be rebuilt almost from the ground up.

World:
Baseball’s Big Whiff on Gambling
NEWS | 13 November 2025
Gambling is a numbers game, so here are a few: The pitcher Emmanuel Clase’s 2025 salary from Major League Baseball’s Cleveland Guardians is 4.5 million dollars. Traditional sports fandom involves rooting for your team to win; traditional sports gambling involves putting money on the game results too. Yet the big corporations of the sports world are doubling down on gambling. The answer from the leagues has been to try to cut back on prop bets. But prop bets focus on smaller outcomes over which one player can have a great deal of influence, such as their point total (in basketball) and yardage (in football).

Current Events:
The Patches That Want to Fix Your Sleep, Sex, and Focus
NEWS | 13 November 2025
So-called wellness patches have recently flooded big-box stores, promising to curb anxiety, induce calm, boost libido, or dose children with omega-3s. But the appeal of wellness patches seems to have less to do with their effects and more to do with how they look. “We want the experience to feel joyful and intuitive, not clinical,” Ivana Hjörne, the founder of Kind Patches, told me. (Wellness patches, too, don’t come cheap: My pack of 36 was $15, and other brands charge significantly more.) Not all wellness patches are beauty products, but many are meant to enhance appearance nevertheless.

News Flash:
The Moral Cost of the Democrats’ Shutdown Strategy
NEWS | 13 November 2025
From the beginning of the shutdown, the Democrats’ challenge was one of optics and substance. Read: Why the Democrats finally foldedEverett Kelley, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal-employee union, usually supports Democrats. “It’s a Hobson’s choice,” he told the Senate Democrats. “Either proceed with the bill before us, or risk Donald Trump throwing America into the chaos of a shutdown.” Schumer chose the former. Senate Republicans also agreed to a vote on the ACA subsidies, which could set up a difficult decision for GOP members.