Hoda Kotb through the years on the ‘Today’ show

President-elect Donald Trump said he is working on setting up a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin for after his Jan. 20 inauguration and is in "communication" with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Nineteen passengers on Royal Caribbean's Symphony of the Seas are suing the cruise line after an employee was sentenced for placing hidden cameras in their guest rooms.

An automotive maker in China has developed a flying car that is setting the stage for a new era in how we think about commuting and connectivity in cities.

Social media users blasted Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., after she blamed the Los Angeles-area wildfires on corporations which allegedly contribute to climate change.

In an ember storm, every opening in a house is a portal to hell. A vent without a screen, a crack in the siding, a missing roof tile—each is an opportunity for a spark to smolder. A gutter full of dry leaves is a cradle for an inferno. Think of a rosebush against a bedroom window: fire food. The roses burn first, melting the vinyl seal around the window. The glass pane falls. A shoal of embers enter the house like a school of glowing fish. Then the house is lost.As the Palisades Fire, just 8 percent contained this morning, and the Eaton Fire, still uncontained, devour Los Angeles neighborhoods, one thing is clear: Urban fire in the U.S. is coming back. For generations, American cities would burn in era-defining conflagrations: the Great Chicago Fire in 1871, the San Francisco fires of 1906. Then came fire-prevention building codes, which made large city burns a memory of a more naive time. Generations of western firefighters turned, instead, toward wildland burns, the big forest devastations. An urban conflagration was the worst-case scenario, the one they hoped they’d never see. And for a long time, they mostly didn’t.Now more people live at the flammable edges of wildlands, making places that are primed to burn into de facto suburbs. That, combined with the water whiplash that climate change has visited on parts of California—extraordinarily wet years followed by extraordinarily dry ones—means the region is at risk for urban fire once again. And our ability to fight the most extreme fire conditions has reached its limit. The Palisades Fire alone has already destroyed more than 5,300 structures and the Eaton Fire more than 4,000, making both among the most destructive fires in California’s history. When the worst factors align, the fires are beyond what firefighting can meaningfully battle. With climate change, this type of fire will only grow more frequent.The start of the Palisades and Eaton Fires was a case of terrible timing: A drought had turned abundant vegetation into crisp fire fuel, and the winter rains were absent. A strong bout of Santa Ana winds made what was already probable fire weather into all but a guarantee. Something—it remains to be seen what—ignited these blazes, and once they started, there was nothing anyone could do to stop them. The winds, speeding up to 100 miles an hour at times, sent showers of embers far across the landscape to ignite spot fires. The high winds meant that traditional firefighting was, at least in the beginning, all but impossible, David Acuna, a battalion chief for Cal Fire, told me: He saw videos of firefighters pointing their hoses toward flames, and the wind blowing the water in the other direction. And for a while, fire planes couldn’t fly. Even if they had, it wouldn’t have mattered, Acuna said. The fire retardant or water they would have dropped would have blown away, like the hose water. “It’s just physics,” he said.California, and Southern California in particular, has some of the most well-equipped firefighting forces in the world, which have had to think more about fire than perhaps any other in the United States. On his YouTube livestream discussing the fires, the climate scientist Daniel Swain compared the combined fleet of vehicles, aircraft, and personnel to the army of a small nation. If these firefighters couldn’t quickly get this fire contained, likely no one could. This week’s series of fires is testing the upper limits of the profession’s capacity to fight wind-driven fires under dry conditions, Swain said, and rather than call these firefighters incompetent, it’s better to wonder how “all of this has unfolded despite that.” The reality is that in conditions like these, once a few houses caught fire in the Pacific Palisades, even the best firefighting could likely do little to keep the blaze from spreading, Michael Wara, a former member of California’s wildfire commission who now directs a climate-and-energy-policy program at Stanford, told me. “Firefighting is not going to be effective in the context we saw a few days ago,” when winds were highest, he said. “You could put a fire truck in every driveway and it would not matter.” He recounted that he was once offered a job at UCLA, but when the university took him to look at potential places to live in the Pacific Palisades, he immediately saw hazards. “It had terrible evacuation routes, but also the street layout was aligned with the Santa Ana winds so that the houses would burn down like dominoes,” he said. “The houses themselves were built very, very close together, so that the radiant heat from one house would ignite the house next door.”In California, the shift toward ungovernable fires in populated places has been under way for several years. For the former Cal Fire chief deputy director Christopher Anthony, who retired in 2023, the turning point was 2017, when wildfires in populated places in Northern California’s wine country killed 44 people and burned nearly a quarter million acres. The firefighting profession, he told me, started to recognize then that fortifying communities before these more ferocious blazes start would be the only meaningful way to change their outcome. The Camp Fire, which decimated the town of Paradise in 2018, “was the moment that we realized that this wasn’t, you know, an anomaly,” he said. The new fire regime was here. This new kind of fire, once begun, would “very quickly overwhelm the operational capabilities of all of the fire agencies to be able to effectively respond,” he said.As Wara put it, in fires like these, houses survive, or don’t, on their own. Sealed against ember incursion with screened vents, built using fire-resistant materials, separated from anything flammable—fencing, firewood, but especially vegetation—by at least five feet, a house has a chance. In 2020, California passed a law (yet to be enforced) requiring such borders around houses where fire hazard is highest. It’s a hard sell, having five feet of stone and concrete lining the perimeter of one’s house, instead of California’s many floral delights. Making that the norm would require a serious social shift. But it could meaningfully cut losses, Kate Dargan, a former California state fire marshal, told me.Still, eliminating the risk of this type of wind-driven fire is now impossible. Dargan started out in wildland firefighting in the 1970s, but now she and other firefighters see the work they did, of putting out all possible blazes, as “somewhat misguided.” Fire is a natural and necessary part of California’s ecosystem, and suppressing it entirely only stokes bigger blazes later. She wants to see the state further embrace preventative fires, to restore it to its natural cycles. But the fires in Southern California this week are a different story, unlikely to have been prevented by prescribed burns alone. When the humidity drops low and the land is in the middle of a drought and the winds are blowing at 100 miles an hour, “we’re not going to prevent losses completely,” Dargan said. “And with climate change, those conditions are likely to occur more frequently.” Avoiding all loss would mean leaving L.A. altogether.Rebuilding means choosing a different kind of future. Dargan hopes that the Pacific Palisades rebuilds with fire safety in mind; if it does, it will have a better chance of not going through this kind of experience again. Some may still want to grow a rosebush outside their window. After this is over, the bargaining with nature will begin. “Every community gets to pick how safe they want to be,” Dargan said.

House Republicans who President-elect Donald Trump summoned to Mar-a-Lago this weekend are hoping to reconcile their own agenda with his.

Trump assassination attempt victims James Copenhaver and David Dutch, who were injured in the July shooting in Pennsylvania, will be attending the 47th president's inauguration.

President-elect Trump was sentenced for falsifying records just 10 days before he is set to take office.

Golden State Warriors head coach Steve Kerr said Thursday that his childhood home in California has been destroyed in the wildfires tearing through the Los Angeles area.

The Supreme Court will decide the fate of TikTok in the U.S. as a federal ban on foreign-adversary owned apps is set to take effect Jan. 19.

President-elect Donald Trump was sentenced Friday after being found guilty on charges of falsifying business records stemming from Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s yearslong investigation.

Graham Harding and his wife, Helen Harding, have long enjoyed the game of Scrabble both separately and now together as a married couple — and are still playing in tournaments together.

Emergency and useful phone numbers to have if you are a Los Angeles-area resident, as well as additional information on how to help those impacted by the wildfires.

Alec Baldwin is suing Santa Fe, New Mexico, officials after a judge dismissed the involuntary manslaughter case against him for the 2021 fatal shooting of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins.

A desperate Los Angeles mother confronted California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday about the city's raging wildfires, demanding answers about why fire hydrants ran empty and what he was going to do to fix communities that have been reduced to ash.

A snow-and-ice festival in northern China, destructive wildfires in Los Angeles, Ethiopian Orthodox Christmas celebrations in Addis Ababa, the Dakar Rally in Saudi Arabia, a Christmas-tree snack at a Berlin zoo, an oil spill off the cost of Crimea, and much moreTo receive an email notification every time new photo stories are published, sign up here.

It’s a peculiar symptom of where we’re at—caught between phases of consciousness, between the ruins of one world and the unknown shape of the next—to be seeing two things at the same time. Or to be seeing the same thing in two ways simultaneously. Stuck in the transition, we’re condemned to a species of double vision: cross-eyed, as it were, in the cross-fade. And sometimes, sometimes, this can be quite useful. When you meet a guy, for example, like Francis of Assisi.Genius or crackpot? Both. Sensuous embracer of life or self-mortifying freak? Both. Exhibitionist or recluse? Anarchist or company man? Runaway rich kid or true voice of the rejected? Both, both, and both. And when God spoke to him in 1206, his voice issuing from a crucifix and saying, “Francis, do you not see that my house is falling into ruin? Go, therefore, and repair the house,” did God mean the dilapidated, bat-flitted, holes-in-the-roof church in which Francis, at that moment, happened to be kneeling? Or did he mean the whole of medieval Christendom? He meant, of course—are you getting the idea?—both.Volker Leppin’s Francis of Assisi, newly translated from the German by Rhys S. Bezzant, is subtitled The Life of a Restless Saint, and the restlessness of the subject is shared by the author. His book, Leppin writes, “does not present itself as a biography in the classic sense.” Which is not to suggest that Leppin, a professor of historical theology at Yale, has written some kind of jazzy meta-book. But Francis of Assisi does have double vision, maneuvering constantly between hagiography and history, legend and fact, heaven and Earth, miracles and—what’s the opposite of miracles? Leppin comes not to debunk but rather to discover in what fashion those early, physics-defying accounts of Francis, the tales told within the blast radius of his actual presence, might be understood as true.Francis was born around 1181, in Assisi in central Italy, the son of a well-to-do merchant named Pietro di Bernardone. After that, the story gets hazy. Some versions would have him quite a nicely behaved youth; in others, the more fun ones, he’s a profligate, a sybarite, a tearaway. Seeking honors on the battlefield, he signs up for one of the endless local town-on-town skirmishes, only to be swiftly captured and imprisoned. When he gets out, a year or so later, the changes begin: conversion.[From the August 2000 issue: Being St. Francis]Francis tears off his fancy clothes; he kisses lepers; he starts begging. It’s all a bit unbalanced. He turns his back on privilege and plunges madly downward. (Perhaps this is the point in the story at which Francis—were he trying something similar today, here in America—would find himself scooped up by psychiatry and institutionalized, or at the very least heavily medicated, at the behest of his family maybe, or he’d go rattling unattended into the tunnels of the justice system.)Desperate to impoverish himself, he tries to donate a large amount of his father’s money to a local church; the priest, afraid of Bernardone Sr., refuses it, whereupon Francis—the anti-alchemist, King Midas in reverse, turning gold back to base metal—casts the money scornfully aside, “valuing it,” as Saint Bonaventure wrote in his 13th-century Life of Saint Francis, “no more than dust that is trodden under foot.”But gradually, via great humiliations, a stint in a cave, and a complete rupture with his father, these lungings and impetuosities resolve themselves into the properly achieved Franciscan humor, a kind of continual outrageous sanctity. Francis becomes Francis, and he begins to attract followers. What he’s doing is pretty straightforward. He’s living—actually living—by the words of Jesus: Love your neighbor, give it all away, praise God, and don’t worry about tomorrow.[From the June 2022 issue: How politics poisoned the evangelical Church]Pretty straightforward, and a head-on challenge to the world. It is no longer enough, for example, to give alms to the lepers and walk off feeling pious: Now, like Francis and his brothers, you have to accompany the lepers. You have to stand with them in what Leppin calls “the world of the excluded,” of the lowest in society, which in the cosmic reversal effected by the Gospels turns out to be the highest place on Earth.To get in touch with the miraculous Francis, the folkloric Francis, read the Fioretti, or The Little Flowers of St. Francis, a 14th-century collection of tales about the saint and his friars. It’s a beautiful book. Here we find Francis “raising his face to heaven” like a solar panel, taming wolves and preaching to the birds and subsisting for weeks on half a loaf of bread to “cast the venom of vainglory from him.” We see him healing a leper, and then, when that leper dies (“of another infirmity”) a couple of weeks later, encountering the man’s heaven-bound soul whooshing past him in a wood.We see him—in a typically self-condemning mood, regarding himself as the vilest of sinners and the basest of men—earnestly instruct Brother Leo to tell him, “Truly thou dost merit the deepest hell.” And Leo tries to say it—he tries his best—but when he opens his mouth, what comes bulbing out instead, Jim Carrey–style, is, “God will perform so many good works through thee that thou shalt go to paradise.” Francis, peeved, renews the effort, enjoining Leo this time to tell him, “Verily thou art worthy of being numbered among the accursed.” Again Leo assents, but the words that come through him, rebelliously, are, “O Friar Francis, God will do in such wise that among the blessed thou shalt be singularly blessed.” And repeat. It has the rhythm of an SNL sketch. We also meet the amazing, more-Francis-than-Francis Brother Juniper, a figure of such affronting innocence that Francis himself, when he’s wrangling a particularly tenacious demon, simply has to mention Juniper’s name to make the demon flee.G. K. Chesterton wrote very beautifully about Francis. For him, the saint’s jangling polarities resolve themselves quite naturally if we imagine him as a lover: Francis was in love with God, so he did all the crazy zigzag things that lovers do. The feats, the ecstasies, the prostrations and abnegations. And he loved the Church too. “Francis,” Leppin notes, “certainly did not engage in any polemic against the clergy.” It never occurred to him to question directly the institutions and practices of Catholicism: The polemic, so to speak, was himself. The story goes that when he went to Rome to get Pope Innocent III’s blessing, and Innocent said something waspish about him looking like a swineherd, Francis left the papal court, found a couple of pigs in the street, rolled around companionably in their pig-mess, and then came back.Did that really happen? Does it matter? A story like that, we need it to be true. And right now we need Saint Francis. Now that kindness is countercultural, we need his extremes of wild charity to pull us back toward it. And we need his asceticism: His self-denial, his merry disdain of health and comfort and security, is a rebuke to our self-care. There are no safe spaces, and no guarantees—the only stability is the bottomlessness of divine love. The trapdoor held open by grace. So we take the hand of Francis, and down we go.This article appears in the February 2025 print edition with the headline “The Wild Charity of Saint Francis.”

President-elect Trump is appearing virtually in a New York courtroom to be sentenced for his hush money felony conviction, days before inauguration.

Donald Trump has had a remarkably vocal pre-presidency, particularly on foreign policy. Against the background of a no less astonishing silence from President Joe Biden, Trump has threatened to unleash hell on Hamas unless it cuts a deal with Israel before he is sworn in, mused about seizing the Panama Canal and Greenland, and advocated the annexation of Canada—not to mention that he has promised to end the war in Ukraine and inflict tariffs on friend and foe alike.That Trump observes none of the foreign-policy decorum that presidents, let alone presidents-elect, are supposed to maintain should come as no surprise. We have long known that he has no filters; that he makes outlandish, boorish, menacing, ridiculous promises and threats.It does not help, however, when the foreign-policy commentariat responds by shrieking in justifiable but futile outrage. It only gratifies Trump and that portion of his followers, who—like J. K. Rowling’s Crabbe and Goyle, the followers of the malicious Draco Malfoy—derive an oafish satisfaction when their bullying leader upsets the good kids. Why give them the pleasure of getting visibly riled?[Jonathan Chait: The political logic of Trump’s international threats]But it does make sense to figure out where these statements come from, and, more important, what consequences they may have. They are, on their face, absurd. There is nothing more that the United States can do to Hamas that the Israelis are not already doing—American troops would not help, and plenty of American bombs have been supplied to people who know the targets much better than the U.S. Air Force. Does Trump really plan to expose American soldiers to Latin American guerrillas, and the Panama Canal to almost certain sabotage, in an occupation? Would he really give Europe an opening to align against the United States in defense of what is, after all, a part of Denmark? As for Canada, we have been there before. In 1775, the rebellious colonies launched an invasion, declaring that the inhabitants would be “conquered into liberty,” an infelicitous phrase if ever there was one, and during the War of 1812, we had another go. We got thoroughly whipped twice. Canadians are not as wimpy as we think, nor as peace-loving as they believe.As Trump’s former national security adviser H. R. McMaster has pointed out, during his first term, he hesitated to use force. So why does he say these belligerent things? For the pleasure of trolling the eminently trollable elites that he despises, no doubt, but there is more to it than that.Part of Trump’s modus operandi is throwing those around him off balance. He plays his own people off each other, he keeps friends and allies guessing to the end whether he will support them or not, and he wants possible opponents not to know what he will do next. The tactic is not uncommon, nor is it ineffective. It is also a way (in his mind) of setting up negotiations. In his business life as in his political life, Trump has never negotiated in good faith, does not believe in sticking to a deal (as his creditors know), and has always believed that the only defense is an unremitting offense.That is a bad way to transact the nation’s affairs internationally, because diplomacy relies more than many people realize on good faith and predictability—but then again, Trump does not understand that. He also does not care about the details of the deals he cuts, so long as they look big and beautiful.Each of Trump’s foreign-policy eruptions also contains a very small kernel of something real, which his whisperers may have shared with him. The United States has not, until now, loudly insisted that Hamas release the hostages, take safe passage for some of their leaders, and surrender. The rest of the world most certainly has not. Although the Biden administration periodically mentions the fact that some of those hostages are Americans, it has not made a big deal of it: Trump intends to.It is a commonplace that our view of the world tends to form in our 20s. That, for Trump, would have been in the late 1960s, a time closer to the construction of the Panama Canal than to the present. Even during the ’70s, the decision to hand the canal over to Panama met fierce opposition. And although Trump may be interested in getting deals for American shippers, it is reasonable to be anxious about the nature of Chinese infrastructure investments in the Canal Zone, given that the line between Chinese business and the Chinese government is blurry.As for Greenland, a vast and important territory because of its strategic position and potential mineral wealth, its inhabitants have periodically made noises about independence from Denmark. There are only 57,000 Greenlanders, and the Chinese have been clever and aggressive in penetrating and corrupting the governments of islands with much larger populations than that. The United States tried to buy Greenland in 1867 and again in 1946 and considered it on other occasions as well. It is not a completely insane idea.And Americans have periodically indulged in dreams of absorbing Canada. In addition to the two botched invasions, the United States and Great Britain came close to blows over American support for Canadian armed rebellions in 1837 and 1838, and the Fenian raids by Americans (including veterans of the Union army) in 1866 and 1870. William Seward, Lincoln’s secretary of state, wanted Canada, and so have many others. The charming fortifications that tourists can enjoy on the Canadian side of the border in Ontario and Quebec were, let us remember, built to defend them from us, and they were still being built five years after the Civil War.In short, these are all ridiculous proposals, but not 100 percent unhinged from reality. (Although, if today’s Republican Party loathes wokery in all of its forms, why does it believe the United States would benefit from making adherents of the more toxic Canadian variant of wokeness into citizens?)[Robinson Meyer: Trump is thinking of buying a giant socialist island]There are, however, two real dangers in Trump’s foreign-policy blither. The first is that sooner or later, he will need to be taken seriously, particularly because the world is a far more unstable and dangerous place than it was in his first term. It is already clear that Russian President Vladimir Putin does not take anything he says seriously—and indeed, Putin has had his television channels stick in the knife by showing nude pictures of the once and future first lady. Trump’s lack of credibility could be dangerous.The other may follow from what a German civil servant in 1934 referred to as “working towards the Führer”—doing not what the leader has ordered, so much as what you believe he would like done. It has become a cliché that Trump’s opponents take him literally but not seriously, and his supporters take him seriously but not literally. There will be those among the compromised individuals he will recruit into government, or MAGA-inspired officials and soldiers already there, who do both. And they may be inclined to do dangerous things.The way to deal with the foreign-policy bombast is not so much through outrage as by turning it against a leader who is inconstant and leads a movement that is actually deeply divided. The Republican Party now has a more or less isolationist wing now, and it would not hurt to call this promiscuous lack of restraint to its attention. Which is why, one hopes, Senator Rand Paul, among many others, will have to field persistent questions about just how much he supports the program of violent Trumpian foreign-policy twaddle.

A federal appeals court denies a bid to block release of special counsel Jack Smith’s report on Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss.

The busty bot, named Melody, was one of several humanoid robots on display at the 2025 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Jan. 7.

The Supreme Court hears TikTok's case to toss out a ban just nine days before it will take effect. The Biden administration defends the measure on national security grounds.

The Supreme Court hears TikTok's case to toss out a ban just nine days before it will take effect. The Biden administration defends the measure on national security grounds.

The U.S. economy created a burst of new jobs in December, capping a solid year of employment growth marked by big gains in healthcare and government payrolls, according to new figures released Friday.

The current state of social media has made the online experience of the L.A. wildfires even more stressful than previous disasters.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are lending a helping hand to their pals as deadly infernos continue to rip through the surrounding areas.

“I hope you are all doing OK !!! I had to evacuate my home and I’m driving 4 hours to a hotel !!!" Britney Spears posted on her Instagram.

Forecasting for disaster didn’t help us avoid it.

Kohl's has faced significant challenges in recent months during which it has seen leadership changes amid dismal earnings reports and economic headwinds.

"In an ever-changing marketplace, we determined that it was best to meet the evolving demands of sports fans by focusing on existing products and distribution channels," the companies added.

Almost everyone knows what it’s like to face insurmountable odds—to feel ineffective, unable to see a way out, doubtful that the struggle to prevail is even worth the fight. Sometimes a challenge is genuinely life-and-death, or involves dire consequences; other times, the obstacles in your path may be lower stakes, but still feel frustratingly immovable. As diverse as these experiences can be, they tend to share a common quality: They can become powerful stories.As a result, literature is full of reminders that long odds can sometimes be surmounted—that David can defeat Goliath, that perseverance can pay off, and that action can lead to change. The seven books below follow people who faced extraordinary predicaments and, instead of caving in, found ways to push back. Some protagonists overcome their obstacles; others confront them on their own terms or weaken the systems they’re up against. Many of their stories are infuriating, but the unlikely achievements within are all elementally hopeful, because they might galvanize readers to fight another day.All In: An Autobiography, by Billie Jean King with Johnette Howard and Maryanne VollersWhen King came up in tennis in the 1960s, female players were an afterthought at best. The money they received for winning tournaments was a fraction of what men received, and the sexism was constant: King was once told she’d be No. 1 someday because she was ugly. In her autobiography, King frankly recounts the opposition she faced on and off the court, and also recognizes the challenges faced by other barrier-breaking players such as Althea Gibson, Arthur Ashe, and Renée Richards. “There was this gap between what I thought I was capable of and the world as it was,” she writes. “I saw that gulf clearly. I was less sure how to breach it.” King found a way across: In addition to winning 39 Grand Slam titles, she helped create a women-only invitational that proved female players could sell tickets. In 1973, she also defeated Bobby Riggs in the Battle of the Sexes, a watershed cultural moment watched by 90 million people. All In reads like one of King’s tennis matches: An intense volley of obstacles fly at her, and she returns them all with power and headlong determination.The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, by Shannon ChakrabortyIn many works of fiction, pirates—even the most plundering, pillaging types—are portrayed sympathetically, as people who don’t fit into society and turn to a life on the high seas in order to be their authentic selves. The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi is one of those stories. The novel takes place in a fantastical version of the medieval Islamic world, specifically on the Indian Ocean, where the titular captain, Amina, once helmed her own ship and crew. Ten years after leaving the pirate life, she’s older, and a mother; she has the aches and pains to prove it. Unsurprisingly, given how these stories usually go, circumstances draw her back to her ship and the sea: She needs to rescue the daughter of a dead crewmate, and her journey gets her embroiled with magical forces that are literally leviathan in nature. Her specific challenges are, obviously, not of our world, but her desire to control her own life, and her refusal to be whipped around by powerful, indifferent forces, is deeply relatable. And although the themes of the story are serious, the tone is relatively light—hope and humor lash its pages, making for a swashbuckling read.[Read: How to succeed at failure]The Radium Girls, by Kate MooreIn the late 1910s, corporations used radium, a radioactive material found in uranium ore, to make the numbers and dials on watches glow in the dark. They hired young women to paint the substance on, and employees were encouraged to twirl the brushes between their lips to get them to a fine point. The radium accumulated in their bones, killing many of them—they glowed at night as it destroyed their bodies from the inside. Ultimately, groups of these women took two separate companies—the United States Radium Corporation and the Radium Dial Company—to court, and after years of efforts, their former employers were finally held accountable. Although financial compensation was important to cover medical bills and support their families, the women mainly wanted the truth exposed; at least 50 of them died before the trials concluded. Moore demonstrates that USRC and Radium Dial knowingly sentenced the painters to death for the sake of profit, denying that there was any risk to their health even when their own medical examinations proved otherwise. More important, she puts these workers front and center, as women who had full lives before, and after, they picked up a paintbrush.Whalefall, by Daniel KrausOn the surface, Whalefall spins a wild premise into a gripping tale: A young diver, Jay, is fighting to escape a sperm whale that inadvertently swallows him while hunting a giant squid. As you get deeper into the novel, however, the plot becomes more complex. Yes, it’s a thrilling story of survival—Jay’s body is shattered, beaten and ruptured in various places, and the oxygen in his tank is rapidly dwindling. But it’s also about his grief for his estranged father: Kraus flits between Jay’s Herculean efforts to stay alive inside the whale’s stomach and memories of his dad, who—ravaged by terminal cancer—ultimately chose to die in these same waters. Whalefall interweaves past and present via short, immediate prose as “Jay lived and died and lived again in the deep.”[Read: How kids learn resilience]Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde, by Jeff GuinnIn the early 20th century, the media and Hollywood turned Bonnie and Clyde into infamous bank robbers, inflating their often-fumbling exploits to super-gangster status. As Guinn explains in Go Down Together—a book that aims to move past the myth and paint a more accurate picture of the two—many Americans eagerly bought into the image the press created. Reality didn’t matter: The story of the couple became a touchstone for people’s frustrations. “In 1933 bankers and law enforcement officials, widely perceived to have no sympathy for decent people impoverished through no fault of their own, were considered the enemy by many Americans,” Guinn writes. “For them, Clyde and Bonnie’s criminal acts offered a vicarious sense of revenge.” In reality, Clyde—who had been serially raped by another inmate in prison—“was more interested in getting even than in getting ahead,” and Bonnie wanted a life filled with fame and adventures, and “was willing to risk arrest to have them.” What their legend truly shows is just how badly the American public wanted to crown a hero who stood up to the establishment on its behalf—an impulse that persists, dangerously, to this day.The Half Life of Valery K, by Natasha PulleyFrom its first pages, The Half Life of Valery K gets to the core of what humans facing a seemingly hopeless situation must do to carry on. “The way to not sink into self-pity and despair—the way not to die—was to look forward to things,” Valery thinks. “Anything; the tinier the better, because then you were more likely to get it.” Incarcerated in a Siberian prison, he must stave off “the terrible docility that came before you gave up.” Valery is a Soviet biochemist specializing in radiation who gets transferred to City 40, ostensibly to study the effect of a nuclear accident the government has spun as a planned “experiment” on an ecosystem. Pulley’s novel is inspired by real events: In September 1957, an explosion in the Soviet Union spread radioactive material, causing mass evacuations and contamination. The book itself has sharp edges. Pulley’s characters are not only physically wounded; they are forever scarred by their trauma. But Valery, despite his lack of power in a despotic system, is able to help others, and finds a way to not just survive his pain but also live with its lasting effects.[Read: Schopenhauer’s advice on how to achieve great things]A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit, by Noliwe RooksRooks’s history of the educator, philanthropist, and civil-rights leader Mary McLeod Bethune is more of a meditation on the effect she had on those in the Black community, including the author, than a formal biography. “I think Bethune—her image, her statues, her name—may be a kind of talisman, or maybe a light, guiding, promising, showing a path,” Rooks writes early on. Over about 200 pages, Rooks unpacks Bethune’s legacy in fighting racism, exploring her efforts to found a school and secure investors to buy land near the ocean and create Bethune Beach, the only beach in Florida’s Volusia County where Black Americans could congregate without restrictions during Jim Crow. In 2022, a statue of Bethune replaced that of a Confederate general in the U.S. Capitol’s National Statuary Hall, where she represents the state of Florida. As Rooks puts it, the activist “taught me that there is strength in numbers, always a reason to hope, and that if someone disrespects you and yours, it is in your best interest to find a way to use the metaphorical flag that professes your citizenship, rights, and humanity as a weapon, and ‘get it done.’”

Three years ago, when it was trickling into the United States, the bird-flu virus that recently killed a man in Louisiana was, to most Americans, an obscure and distant threat. Now it has spread through all 50 states, affecting more than 100 million birds, most of them domestic poultry; nearly 1,000 herds of dairy cattle have been confirmed to be harboring the virus too. At least 66 Americans, most of them working in close contact with cows, have fallen sick. A full-blown H5N1 pandemic is not guaranteed—the CDC judges the risk of one developing to be “moderate.” But this virus is fundamentally more difficult to manage than even a few months ago and is now poised to become a persistent danger to people.That didn’t have to be the reality for the United States. “The experiment of whether H5 can ever be successful in human populations is happening before our eyes,” Seema Lakdawala, a flu virologist at Emory University, told me. “And we are doing nothing to stop it.” The story of bird flu in this country could have been shorter. It could have involved far fewer cows. The U.S. has just chosen not to write it that way.[Read: America’s infectious-disease barometer is off]The USDA and the CDC have doggedly defended their response to H5N1, arguing that their interventions have been appropriately aggressive and timely. And governments, of course, don’t have complete control over outbreaks. But compared at least with the infectious threat most prominent in very recent memory, H5N1 should have been a manageable foe, experts outside of federal agencies told me. When SARS-CoV-2, the virus that sparked the coronavirus pandemic, first spilled into humans, almost nothing stood in its way. It was a brand-new pathogen, entering a population with no preexisting immunity, public awareness, tests, antivirals, or vaccines to fight it.H5N1, meanwhile, is a flu virus that scientists have been studying since the 1990s, when it was first detected in Chinese fowl. It has spent decades triggering sporadic outbreaks in people. Researchers have tracked its movements in the wild and studied it in the lab; governments have stockpiled vaccines against it and have effective antivirals ready. And although this virus has proved itself capable of infiltrating us, and has continued to evolve, “this virus is still very much a bird virus,” Richard Webby, the director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Studies on the Ecology of Influenza in Animals and Birds, told me. It does not yet seem capable of moving efficiently between people, and may never develop the ability to. Most human cases in the United States have been linked to a clear animal source, and have not turned severe.The U.S., in other words, might have routed the virus early on. Instead, agencies tasked with responding to outbreaks and upholding animal and human health held back on mitigation tactics—testing, surveillance, protective equipment, quarantines of potentially infected animals—from the very start. “We are underutilizing the tools available to us,” Carol Cardona, an avian-influenza expert at the University of Minnesota, told me. As the virus ripped through wild-animal populations, devastated the nation’s poultry, spilled into livestock, started infecting farmworkers, and accumulated mutations that signaled better adaptation to mammals, the country largely sat back and watched.When I asked experts if the outbreak had a clear inflection point—a moment at which it was crucial for U.S. leaders to more concertedly intervene—nearly all of them pointed to the late winter or early spring of last year, when farmers and researchers first confirmed that H5N1 had breached the country’s cattle, in the Texas panhandle. This marked a tipping point. The jump into cattle, most likely from wild birds, is thought to have happened only once. It may have been impossible to prevent. But once a pathogen is in domestic animals, Lakdawala told me, “we as humans have a lot of control.” Officials could have immediately halted cow transport, and organized a careful and concerted cull of infected herds. Perhaps the virus “would never have spread past Texas” and neighboring regions, Lakdawala told me. Dozens of humans might not have been infected.[Read: America’s bird-flu luck has officially run out]Those sorts of interventions would have at least bought more of the nation time to provision farmworkers with information and protection, and perhaps develop a plan to strategically deploy vaccines. Government officials could also have purchased animals from the private sector to study how the virus was spreading, Cardona told me. “We could have figured it out,” she said. “By April, by May, we would have known how to control it.” This sliver of opportunity was narrow but clear, Sam Scarpino, an infectious-disease modeler and flu researcher at Northeastern University, whose team has been closely tracking a timeline of the American outbreak, told me. In hindsight, “realistically, that was probably our window,” he said. “We were just too slow.”The virus, by contrast, picked up speed. By April, a human case had been identified in Texas; by the end of June, H5N1 had infected herds in at least a dozen states and more than 100 dairy farms. Now, less than 10 months after the USDA first announced the dairy outbreak, the number of herds affected is verging on 1,000—and those are just the ones that officials know about.The USDA has repeatedly disputed that its response has been inadequate, pointing out to The Atlantic and other publications that it quickly initiated studies this past spring to monitor the virus’s movements through dairy herds. “It is patently false, and a significant discredit to the many scientists involved in this work, to say that USDA was slow to respond,” Eric Deeble, the USDA’s deputy undersecretary for marketing and regulatory programs, wrote in an email.And the agency’s task was not an easy one: Cows had never been a known source of H5N1, and dairy farmers had never had to manage a disease like this. The best mitigation tactics were also commercially formidable. The most efficient ways to milk cows invariably send a plume of milk droplets into the air—and sanitizing equipment is cumbersome. Plus, “the dairy industry has been built around movement” of herds, a surefire way to move infections around too, Cardona told me. The dairy-worker population also includes many undocumented workers who have little incentive to disclose their infections, especially to government officials, or heed their advice. At the start of the outbreak, especially, “there was a dearth of trust,” Nirav Shah, the principal deputy director of the CDC, told me. “You don’t cure that overnight.” Even as, from the CDC’s perspective, that situation has improved, such attitudes have continued to impede efforts to deploy protective equipment on farms and catch infections, Shah acknowledged.Last month, the USDA did announce a new plan to combat H5N1, which requires farms nationwide to comply with requests for milk testing. But Lakdawala and others still criticized the strategy as too little, too late. Although the USDA has called for farms with infected herds to enhance biosecurity, implementation is left up to the states. And even now, testing of individual cows is largely left up to the discretion of farmers. That leaves too few animals tested, Lakdawala said, and cloaks the virus’s true reach.The USDA’s plan also aims to eliminate the virus from the nation’s dairy herds—a tall order, when no one knows exactly how many cattle have been affected or even how, exactly, the virus is moving among its hosts. “How do you get rid of something like this that’s now so widespread?” Webby told me. Eliminating the virus from cattle may no longer actually be an option. The virus also shows no signs of exiting bird populations—which have historically been responsible for the more severe cases of avian flu that have been detected among humans, including the lethal Louisiana case. With birds and cows both harboring the pathogen, “we’re really fighting a two-fronted battle,” Cardona told me.Most of the experts I spoke with also expressed frustration that the CDC is still not offering farmworkers bird-flu-specific vaccines. When I asked Shah about this policy, he defended his agency’s focus on protective gear and antivirals, noting that worker safety remains “top of mind.” In the absence of consistently severe disease and evidence of person-to-person transmission, he told me, “it’s far from clear that vaccines are the right tool for the job.”[Read: How much worse would a bird-flu pandemic be?]With flu season well under way, getting farmworkers any flu vaccine is one of the most essential measures the country has to limit H5N1’s threat. The spread of seasonal flu will only complicate health officials’ ability to detect new H5N1 infections. And each time bird flu infects a person who’s already harboring a seasonal flu, the viruses will have the opportunity to swap genetic material, potentially speeding H5N1’s adaptation to us. Aubree Gordon, a flu epidemiologist at the University of Michigan, told me that’s her biggest worry now. Already, Lakdawala worries that some human-to-human transmission may be happening; the United States just hasn’t implemented the infrastructure to know. If and when testing finally confirms it, she told me, “I’m not going to be surprised.”

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