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Today:
The Texas GOP’s Disturbing Request for the FBI
NEWS | 10 August 2025
No Texas sheriff can go to Chicago, find the missing legislators, and drag them home. Senator John Cornyn of Texas has asked the FBI to help his state track down the missing legislators. For one thing, the Texas lawmakers’ flight from the state isn’t even criminal under Texas law. For the FBI to become involved in the enforcement of civil law would be an extraordinary expansion of its authority. Second, the Texas state matter is—well, a state matter.

Top Stories:
What’s Really Driving Netanyahu’s Decisions
NEWS | 10 August 2025
Netanyahu’s hard-right Israeli coalition partners have pushed for full occupation of the area; the military and security establishments were against that entirely. Netanyahu split the difference and said, Okay, we’re not going to occupy all of Gaza, and we’re not going to do anything right away. Isabel: Talk me through why Netanyahu is so deferential to this part of his coalition, and what exactly it wants. Isabel: The Israeli security establishment and the Israeli public do not support annexing Gaza. But despite holding this leverage, in practice, Trump has largely permitted Netanyahu to do whatever he wants in Gaza.

World:
The Giant Asterisk to MAHA’s Food-Dye Crackdown
NEWS | 10 August 2025
There was a reason to celebrate: The dairy industry, like many of America’s largest food makers, had acquiesced to the “Make America Healthy Again” movement’s crackdown on synthetic food dyes. By the end of 2027, Hershey’s birthday-cake ice cream won’t have Yellow 5 or Red 40, nor will its “blue moon” flavor have Blue 1. Many companies—including Kraft Heinz and General Mills—don’t mention titanium dioxide in their promises to replace similar dyes. The FDA, however, allows food companies to simply label titanium dioxide as an “artificial color,” given that technically titanium is a mineral. (Ice cream still generally tastes the same with or without titanium dioxide.)

Current Events:
Reading Mrs. Dalloway Again and Again
NEWS | 10 August 2025
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway turned 100 this spring—not quite double the age of its protagonist, Clarissa Dalloway, who, as Woolf writes, “had just broken into her fifty-second year.” The book pops up less frequently on lists of the best fiction of the 20th century than James Joyce’s Ulysses, the libidinous classic to which Dalloway is often read as a side-eyed response. But I would put it right alongside that epic, near the very top, because it rewards rereading at various stages of life. The juxtaposition of life and death, war and peace, youthful fury and wistful wisdom, reflects Woolf’s ambition to deploy stream-of-consciousness style in the service of deep emotional realism. Woolf writes that Clarissa, setting off to buy flowers, “felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged.” I know the feeling—now.

Sponsored:
Remote Monitoring App
SPONSORED | 10 August 2025
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News Flash:
Pete Hegseth Doesn’t Want to Talk About Golden Dome
NEWS | 10 August 2025
Donald Trump wants to spend billions of dollars on a successor to President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, and he’s calling it “Golden Dome,” inspired by both Israel’s Iron Dome defense and Reagan’s early-1980s concept of a “peace shield” over North America. But one would be wrong: The Pentagon has barred anyone from speaking about Golden Dome in public. A more likely explanation is that no one is supposed to talk about Golden Dome because no one knows what it is yet. It’s also already a flawed concept: If Trump is indeed basing Golden Dome on Iron Dome, then he doesn’t understand the Israeli system. When the Cold War ended, no one was quite sure what to do with the idea of national missile defense.

Latest:
America Is Living in a Climate-Denial Fantasy
NEWS | 10 August 2025
ET on August 8, 2025Last month, the world’s highest court issued a long-awaited opinion on how international law should regard climate harm. The ICJ opinion was the first time the world court has expressly addressed climate obligations under international law, and it did so with unusual clarity. In some countries, including the Netherlands and Kenya, international law is incorporated into domestic law at the point of ratification. In prior international climate negotiations, America has tried to minimize its responsibility as the largest cumulative emitter of greenhouse gases. Its intent to roll back the endangerment finding is at odds with recent domestic legal opinion.

Breaking:
Photos of the Week: Alligator Dip, Steeplechase Stumble, Friendship Day
NEWS | 10 August 2025
Olivier Chassignole / AFP / GettyTourists walk on a beach as smoke from wildfires raging in France’s Aude department is visible from the Mediterranean Coast in Banyuls-sur-Mer, in southwestern France, on August 5, 2025. The fire broke out earlier that afternoon in Ribaute, burning more than 9,000 acres of forest and scrubland in just a few hours, before reaching the village of Saint-Laurent-de-la-Cabrerisse, where a number of houses burned down.

Trending:
Twenty Years After the Storm
NEWS | 10 August 2025
It was practically a routine: The meteorologists would warn residents about a storm. Some would decide to stay home and ride out the storm; some didn’t have the ability or means to leave even if they wanted to. We had been told so many times that this storm would be different, only for it not to be. He’d turned on the TV and seen that meteorologists were predicting that Katrina would develop into a Category 5 hurricane—the highest category possible for a storm. Alongside the albums sat a ziplock bag of other images—photos we took of our home when we returned to examine the damage after the storm.

This Just In:
So Much for the ‘Best Health-Care System in the World’
NEWS | 10 August 2025
Here’s a piece of Republican rhetoric that used to be ubiquitous but that you never hear anymore: America has the best health-care system in the world. American health care at its finest offered the most advanced treatments anywhere. “Obamacare will bankrupt our country and ruin the best health-care-delivery system in the world,” then–House Speaker John Boehner said in 2012. The line about the world’s best health care always had a grain of truth. Kennedy is not wrong about the bottom line; American health care is costly, and the results are poor.

Today:
So, About Those Big Trade Deals
NEWS | 10 August 2025
On Thursday, Jamieson Greer, Trump’s top trade official, published a New York Times op-ed boasting that, with the completion of these deals, the administration had successfully “remade the global order.” But upon closer inspection, Trump’s trade deals aren’t nearly as impressive as they sound. In fact, they aren’t really trade deals in the traditional sense, and they might not benefit the U.S. at all. The whole point of Trump’s dealmaking strategy was supposedly to get foreign countries to lower their existing trade barriers—the classic purpose of a trade agreement. The main difficulty in trade negotiations with the EU has long been its barriers on agricultural products, which appear to have been untouched by these deals. “Everyone has figured out that Trump really likes big numbers to sell his trade deals and doesn’t need much substance to do so.” Recent history supports this view.

Top Stories:
Six Books to Read Before You Get to the Airport
NEWS | 10 August 2025
The modern air-travel industry goes to great lengths to prevent passengers from having to think about what they’re doing. A better way to dispel anxieties about flying might be to explore the feat of aviation. The six books below explain the art and science of piloting, and riding in, aircraft from a range of perspectives: poetic and technical, celebratory and cautionary. The question that lingers unanswered at the book’s end: Will the company, and the industry, learn their lesson? “We see place more clearly than ever” in the sky, he writes, “unmoored and frictionless in the world made by airplanes.”

World:
The Man Who Could Unite Iran’s Opposition
NEWS | 10 August 2025
One figure stands out for bridging that divide, making him one of Iran’s most promising political prospects. Mostafa Tajzadeh, a former deputy interior minister, is one of Iran’s best-known and most broadly popular political prisoners. That Tajzadeh’s appeal bridges Iran’s fractious opposition was evident in the reaction to his most recent sentencing. Mousavi was Iran’s prime minister in the 1980s, when he was a favorite of the regime’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Outside Iran, the opposition can seem bitterly divided, with some parts of the diaspora embracing Pahlavi’s leadership and others in disarray.

Current Events:
The Storm Before the Calm
NEWS | 10 August 2025
It was what followed the Second World War, which in turn follows the First World War, which in turn follows the Napoleonic Wars. When I look at the United States, there is something unique about the United States. One that the United States is the military force that must be there first and best to combat the Russians. So what I see for the future is we are going through the storm before the calm. But it’s the storm before the calm.

Sponsored:
Remote Monitoring App
SPONSORED | 10 August 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