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Today:
Why Hasn’t Trump Mentioned Iran’s Oil?
NEWS | 07 March 2026
President Trump has rarely considered a foreign conflict without musing, sometimes bluntly, about what the United States might take in return for intervening: Iraqi oil. For a president who has treated natural resources as both leverage and loot, Iran’s oil fields would appear to be the ultimate temptation. The question of Iran’s oil hovered over the early days of the current conflict, with Trump-administration officials anxiously watching gas prices rise. Two years before the Eisenhower-ordered coup, Iran’s nationalist prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, moved to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, taking control of British-run oil resources. Virtually overnight, the abrupt change in leadership gave the U.S. and its oil companies significant access to Iran’s oil wealth.

Top Stories:
Today’s Atlantic Trivia: What’s Light, Sweet, and Undrinkable?
NEWS | 07 March 2026
Find previous questions here, and to get Atlantic Trivia in your inbox every day, sign up for The Atlantic Daily. Rogé explains that the United States extracts mostly light sweet domestically—but largely exports it, because most U.S. refineries (built long ago) are set up to process heavy sour. And by the way, did you know that just north of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula lies the largest island in the largest freshwater lake on the largest island in the world’s largest freshwater lake? For a time, it was claimed that a seasonal pond existed on Ryan Island and that out from the center of that pond jutted a boulder—the largest “island” in the largest “lake” on the largest island in the largest lake on the largest island in the largest lake. As Graeme writes, “Every candidate hopes to be the guy you want to have a beer and talk football with.

World:
The Economy’s Warning Light Is Flashing Yellow
NEWS | 07 March 2026
The job market is weakening, inflation is still too high, and we’re at serious risk of a once-in-50-years oil shock. The economy’s warning lights might not yet be flashing red, but they are certainly flashing yellow. The numbers for the previous two months, which had suggested decent job growth, were also revised downward: January now showed fewer job gains than initially estimated and December showed overall job losses. Economic growth plummeted, unemployment spiked, and the economy fell into recession. When Trump came into office, inflation was falling, job creation was strong, and the economy was projected to grow quickly.

Current Events:
The Gulf Countries Can’t Take Much More
NEWS | 07 March 2026
“Can’t wait to be back.”But even the optimists acknowledge that the longer the war goes on, the more the Gulf region’s extraordinary vulnerabilities will be exposed. Qatar has fewer air defenses than its larger neighbors, and its energy minister, Saad al-Kaabi, made the startling claim today that all Gulf oil and gas producers could be forced to stop production within days. The Arabian peninsula has no rivers or lakes, and all of the Gulf countries depend on enormous quantities of water pumped from a network of desalination plants on the coast. “This has been an existential worry in the Gulf,” the University of Utah professor Michael Christopher Low, who has written extensively about water scarcity, told me. And a destabilized Gulf could punch a hole in the global economy, which remains dependent on Arabian oil supplies.

News Flash:
Did Netflix Ruin Movies?
NEWS | 07 March 2026
Netflix has influenced the way that many movies look, feel, and sound— even how they’re conceived of and green-lit. So Netflix sort of starts to rush in to fill the more midsize movie space and TV space and everything like that. Like, everyone has Netflix, right? From that, what is the reputation of Netflix right now in Hollywood? And Netflix not getting to buy Warner Bros., you know, prompted a week of articles of people being like, “You know, Netflix isn’t so bad.”Warzel: The other elephant in the room is the pivot to the generative void.

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Remote Monitoring App
SPONSORED | 07 March 2026
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Latest:
Something New Is Happening in Lebanon
NEWS | 07 March 2026
Lebanon had once again been plunged into a war that had nothing to do with its national interests, by a militia group that has retained a private army and run its own foreign policy for decades. Hezbollah’s rationale for maintaining its weapons in 1989 was that Israel continued to occupy a large chunk of southern Lebanon, and this was widely accepted even by many who did not care for the organization. The Lebanese state is going to have to proceed with both determination and caution. Israel will be crucial in determining whether Lebanon succeeds. A perhaps even bigger threat is that Israel may seek to force Lebanon into Israel’s own sphere of influence.

Breaking:
Six Days of War, 10 Rationales
NEWS | 07 March 2026
So far, the Trump administration has offered at least 10 separate rationales in just six days. In an eight-minute address posted soon after to his social-media platform, President Trump outlined a few explanations. Later on Saturday, Trump revisited his second and third rationales for the strikes in an interview with Axios. “We’ve known for a long time that Iran had intentions on trying to kill President Trump and/or other U.S. officials,” he said. 4) but with the Caracas model in mind, rather than the toppling of the Iranian regime.

Trending:
Pushing the Limits of Historical Fiction
NEWS | 07 March 2026
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Enrigue’s “penchant for shooting the facts of history through the prism of the absurd,” as Miranda puts it, makes him singular—but it also puts him firmly in a long literary tradition. What Enrigue describes instead is a multilateral conflict whose most tangible result was the erasure of a Native society. This isn’t Enrigue’s first foray into historical absurdism. This particular approach to historical fiction is not to every reader’s taste.

This Just In:
What America’s Next Top Model Was Really Selling
NEWS | 07 March 2026
“I wanna marry American Idol and The Real World and set it in the modeling industry” is how she recalls things now, on the new Netflix series Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model. “Sometimes you have to go through pain, you know, to be beautiful,” Joanie, a former Top Model contestant, explains in Reality Check. But this things were different then line of defense does ward off a more crucial critique of the show—one that Reality Check doesn’t identify. The point of ANTM was not to create models, Reality Check suggests. No contestant on ANTM ever became a top model; the stigma of reality television was too strong.

Today:
‘We Need to Do McCarthyism to the Tenth Power’
NEWS | 07 March 2026
For decades, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s name has been used as shorthand for the opposite of the aspirational ideal of civilized American politics. In the way that Kleenex has become interchangeable with tissue, McCarthyism, for many, is an eponym for the unjust, reprehensible use of political power. Buckley called himself a “critic friendly to McCarthy” in 1959 and continued to defend the senator for decades. Should this new McCarthyism veer into proposing or doing anything violent, Walsh added, it “isn’t even really McCarthyism anymore—it’s just fascism.”The new McCarthyites also want to define their targets more broadly than McCarthy did. Read: Rod Dreher thinks the Enlightenment was a mistakeDitto for the new embrace of McCarthyism.

Top Stories:
Pete Hegseth’s Moral Unseriousness
NEWS | 07 March 2026
That’s been true of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon briefings since the war against Iran began. But the press conferences have reminded the world why he is exactly the wrong person to hold the position he does. Tom Nichols: Pete Hegseth treats fallen American soldier as a PR problemNow, it may be that none of this comes to pass. The defense secretary wants drill sergeants to be able to “put their hands on recruits,” and he wants to bring back “shark attacks” during basic training, allowing drill sergeants to swarm around recruits. But there’s a danger in that, too, when the person in question happens to be the secretary of defense.

World:
I Don’t Know How the War Is Going
NEWS | 07 March 2026
This war could indeed turn into a disaster, but if it does, the result will be a different kind of disaster than the Iraq War (not all of which was a disaster, either). Modern air power has become more and more precise, and further empowered by weapons that are tailored for various effects. The effectiveness of air power is, like any form of military power, a matter of quantity as well as quality. The claims that “It’s Donald Trump’s war” and (its cousin) “It’s Bibi’s war” tell us nothing. Is it enhancing or detracting from the reputation of American (and Israeli) military power?

Current Events:
Photos of the Week: Death Valley, Steam Train, Cherry Blossoms
NEWS | 07 March 2026
Iranian Press Center / AFP / GettyIn this aerial handout picture released by the Iranian Press Center, mourners dig graves during the funeral for children killed in a reported strike on a primary school in Iran’s Hormozgan province in Minab on March 3, 2026. Iranian media reported hundreds of Iranian casualties, including at the girl’s school, although AFP reporters have not been able to verify tolls independently.

News Flash:
Would Trump Risk an Oil Crisis?
NEWS | 07 March 2026
In recent days, oil prices have spiked by only about 20 percent. If anything, global oil markets might not be taking the current crisis seriously enough. That’s much harder to fix.”Immediately following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, oil prices spiked to more than $100 a barrel. The Trump administration has argued that the U.S. doesn’t have to worry about a global supply shortage because of how much oil we produce at home. But Trump understands the political salience of the price of gasoline as well as anyone, and the relative calm of the oil markets reflects that fact.