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Today:
Something Feels Different About the Economy

NEWS | 15 November 2025
“The numbers are so big, they are hard to comprehend,” Jeff Sommer recently wrote in The New York Times. Sommer was referring to the stock market, which has been on an outrageous tear, with the gains concentrated among a tiny number of unfathomably valuable companies. Nvidia’s $5 trillion valuation last month surpassed the first-ever $4 trillion valuation, which was also achieved by Nvidia, in July. That is exactly what linear graphs of the U.S. stock market look like right now, which suggests that we have achieved escape velocity and entered the vertical part of the curve. In just a few years, a $5 trillion valuation might sound as quaint as a $2,000 two-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn does today.

Top Stories:
Four Simple Questions for Marjorie Taylor Greene

NEWS | 15 November 2025
Marjorie Taylor Greene’s critics are starting to think they got her all wrong. Read: Marjorie Taylor Greene knows exactly what she’s doingOn the few occasions when she has been confronted with her past positions and incendiary assertions, Greene has deflected or pleaded ignorance. But long before Fuentes joined Carlson, Greene joined Fuentes. But it poses a question: Does Greene agree with either Fuentes or Carlson about Hitler, Black people, women, and the rest? “Everybody’s like, ‘Marjorie Taylor Greene has changed,’” she said of herself on The View.

World:
Sympathy for a Handsome Devil

NEWS | 15 November 2025
It’s hard to know why anyone should feel a pang of understanding for Jay Kelly (played by George Clooney), but Baumbach relishes the challenge. Jay Kelly is Baumbach’s fourth movie in a row that will be released to Netflix, with a short theatrical release. His last work was a fascinating, flawed, staggeringly ambitious adaptation of Don DeLillo’s White Noise; with Jay Kelly, he’s charting a gentler, more familiar path, in terms of plot and setting. And Jay gets to have a particularly luxe midlife crisis, fueled by the resources of a rich movie star. The final notes of Jay Kelly are played for pure sympathy, and it’s Baumbach’s biggest storytelling gamble.

Current Events:
The Dumb Truth at the Heart of the Epstein Scandal

NEWS | 15 November 2025
Others get the communal adrenaline rush of frantically “CTRL-F”-ing a House Oversight Committee trove of Jeffrey Epstein’s emails. In some instances, Epstein responds pompously (“Needs edit,” he wrote in one message, when asked to forward an invitation). Read: You really need to see Epstein’s birthday book for yourselfBut perhaps most striking is how unimpressive Epstein seems. (Reached through a spokesperson about his email correspondence with Epstein, Chopra told me, “I’m always cognizant of Dr. and patient privilege. “I want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is trump,” Epstein wrote in 2011 to Ghislaine Maxwell, his co-conspirator, who is serving time in prison for child sex-trafficking.

News Flash:
Epstein Returns at the Worst Time for Trump

NEWS | 15 November 2025
“The Democrats are trying to bring up the Jeffrey Epstein hoax again” to distract from the shutdown, Trump posted. For months, White House aides have snapped at reporters who even mentioned the word Epstein. Four of them—Mace, Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Thomas Massie—defied Trump to vote with Democrats this week on the Epstein discharge position. Few people in the White House believe that the Epstein matter will swing many votes next year. Read: Donald Trump is a lamer duck than everTrump is set to depart Washington tomorrow for another weekend at Mar-a-Lago, according to the White House.

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Remote Monitoring App

SPONSORED | 15 November 2025
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Latest:
Doomscrolling in the 1850s

NEWS | 15 November 2025
The precise causes of the panic were fuzzy, though there were plenty of newspapers and magazines ready to venture explanations. Book publishing and magazines expanded at no less prodigious rates: The 1850s saw the publication of Atlantic founding contributor Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which became a best seller of previously almost unimaginable proportions. There were magazines dedicated to just about every subculture, health fad, and reform movement: photography, phrenology, abolition, and more. At a long dinner in the spring of 1857, the group resolved on going forward with the venture. Subsequent events, beginning with the Civil War, would show that the world was not, in fact, anchored anywhere.

Breaking:
What Reconstructing Gaza Really Means

NEWS | 15 November 2025
According to UNICEF and other United Nations agencies, Gaza now has the highest number of child amputees per capita in the world. Political factions in Ramallah and Gaza have spent the war years fighting over authority and legitimacy, often seeking comfort in slogans rather than solutions. That promise must be kept as soon as basic necessities are restored in Gaza, because legitimacy cannot wait for perfect conditions; it is their precondition. But the healing of our nations must begin in Gaza, Ramallah, and Jerusalem—with Palestinians and Israelis deciding that coexistence is not naivete but necessity. An enduring peace requires us to rebuild the moral architecture of our shared humanity.

Trending:
Today’s Atlantic Trivia: Welcome to My Quiz

NEWS | 15 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. 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]. Wednesday, November 12, 2025From the edition of The Atlantic Daily by Will Gottsegen:Elon Musk and other critics have taken to deriding the internet’s most popular encyclopedia by altering one letter of its name. Federal law in 1971 bumped Veterans Day, Memorial Day, and Washington’s Birthday to always-on-a-Monday status.

This Just In:
Why Hotel-Room Cancellations Disappeared

NEWS | 15 November 2025
But my hotel room in Charlotte, North Carolina, appeared to be another matter. Its policy on cancellation was austere: You could void your reservation only if you did so three days in advance. In the past, a hotel booking had been an easy thing to cancel. Hotel cancellation has been canceled. As a result, they started offering a bunch of different rates for the same room with varying degrees of flexibility.

Today:
Trump’s Animal-Research Plan Has a Missing Step

NEWS | 15 November 2025
Blood transfusions, antibiotics, cardiac pacemakers, organ transplantation, insulin for diabetes, and inhalers for asthma all resulted from animal research. Thus far, the White House hasn’t publicly proposed any changes to federal policy for tracking research animals. Sally Thompson-Iritani, an assistant vice provost at the University of Washington, has worked in animal research for more than 30 years. The White House declined to comment on the bill, citing delays in communications due to the government shutdown. Perhaps one day, technological advances will make animal models obsolete; lately, the White House has been promoting AI’s potential to replace some animal testing.

Top Stories:
An Evening Ritual to Realize a Happier Life

NEWS | 15 November 2025
This column outlines the evening protocol I have developed to match my morning one. In contrast, the architecture of the evening protocol aims to create a calm, positive mood and prepare me for sleep. Alcohol tends to have a negative impact on sleep quality, and caffeine is a no-no any time late in the day. As one 2024 study on college students showed, auditory “reading”—listening to an audiobook, for example—improves sleep quality even more than reading a physical book. The goal of an evening protocol is calm, positive affect and restful sleep.

World:
What If AI Is a Bubble?

NEWS | 15 November 2025
Nvidia, which makes chips for pretty much all of the big AI companies, recently became the first business to be valued at $5 trillion. So the obvious questions have started coming up more and more: Is this AI boom actually a bubble? This narrative of the AI bubble right now, it definitely exists in media; it definitely exists in the tech analyst space. Rosin: After the break, the case for boom, not bubble: how the AI companies say they actually plan to make money. Warzel: I think that the best cases for “We are not in a bubble right now” from the AI industry that I’ve heard—the first is: Everyone says we’re in a bubble, and everyone’s watching it.

Current Events:
What Tariffs Did

NEWS | 15 November 2025
Trump’s tariffs are certainly not the cause of sky-high rents, obscene utility bills, child-care shortages, and ridiculous out-of-pocket health costs. For many lower-income households, the tariffs will end up swamping the tax cuts Republicans passed this summer. Moreover, the tariffs have forced the Federal Reserve to keep borrowing costs relatively high to tamp down on inflation—perhaps 0.5 percentage points higher than they would be otherwise. The Yale Budget Lab estimates that the tariffs have depressed real GDP growth by 0.5 percentage points this year, lifted the unemployment rate by 0.3 percentage points, and cost the economy close to half a million jobs. The tariffs on steel and aluminum will still stand, for instance, because Trump did not invoke the same economic-emergency authority when making them.

News Flash:
The Left’s New Moralism Will Backfire

NEWS | 15 November 2025
Consider the left’s appropriation of the term moral clarity. In The Message, a 2024 essay collection by Ta-Nehisi Coates, the progressive writer recalls encouraging his students at Howard University to employ overtly moral language. But moral clarity, like beauty, is perishable and—at least in practice—subjective. Thomas Chatterton Williams: To see how America unraveled, go back five yearsAt first glance, the left’s appeals to moral clarity might not seem controversial. In this sense, urging moral clarity can really be an obstacle to insight.