“Hopefully they are vegetarians and have gotten beyond the point of eating each other,” —Philip Lubin, a physics professor, on the extraterrestrials he hopes will find Earth.
“We should not be using imperfect skills as reason to disqualify kids from membership in the group,” —Amanda Moreno, an education professor.
“It wasn’t so long ago that West Virginia was probably the most solid Democratic state in the country,” —James Green, a historian.
(Previous quotes from our sources here)
“You get to know everyone by the way their butt looks,” —a member of the California Lichen Society, on searching the ground for specimens.
“If the elephant kills [me], the owner will not pay my family. It’s the same for me as for a chicken or a dog,” —Kyaw, who handles elephants for a tour company in Thailand.
“As a police officer who has been walking the streets of Detroit for 16 years, I can tell you that citizens used to come up to us and shake their heads at us. Now they come up to us and shake our hands,” —Michael Woody, a police sergeant.
(Previous quotes from our sources here)
“Burying people face-down means they will only dig themselves deeper if they reanimate,” —Andrew Reynolds, an archaeologist, on medieval burial practices.
“I was in the same university as my daughters,” —Alfredo Garcia, who is now a professor, on going back to college at the age of 47.
“Of course, you address violent crime appropriately, and no one’s saying that you shouldn’t. But … there isn’t a broad stroke that you use for every type of crime or every type of person,” —Meg Reiss, a former prosecutor in the U.S.
(Previous quotes from our sources here)
“I would say that Donald Trump’s views on women’s ideal roles are not shared by most people,” —Alice Eagly, a psychology professor in Illinois.
“Being a jazz musician you have to be a Jedi,” —J.D. Allen, a saxophonist, on the intellectualism of jazz.
“There will always be enough white kids. Most of them will never experience what it’s like being the only one,” —Rashaun Martin, who is black, on going to an elite, mostly white Boston high school.
(Previous quotes from our sources here)
“You saw your neighbor consume something, you saw that he didn’t die, so you decided that would be a pretty good thing to eat too. Then as society became more complex, you start to have prestige models of, well, not only did he like that food, he's the most important person in the village, so of course I should really check it out,” —Tom Vanderbilt, who studies taste.
“Sometimes women abort for reasons we wouldn’t like—‘we’ being whoever the woman isn’t,” —Carol Sanger, a law professor.
“In this day and age, we can’t cloister ’em like 1802 in West Point. And that didn’t work out that well anyway. I’m a military commander, but it’s college,” —Michelle Johnson, superintendent of the U.S. Air Force Academy, on why the school now allows students to date.
(Previous quotes from our sources here)
“I’m hoping, frankly, that this is the year that the Republican Party implodes,” —Peter Gemma, a Constitution Party leader.
“We are hanging by a thread,” —Juan Nazario, a doctor in Puerto Rico, on his hospital’s struggle for funding.
“It’s like me going into the cereal aisle in the grocery store. There’s an entire aisle of cereal. You can’t possibly pick a cereal. It takes more energy to do that,” —Debra Zellner, a psychology professor, on the challenge of too many choices.
(Previous quotes from our sources here)
“There are very few sites where these birds go, and hardly any of our birds turned up at the other places. We really think they died,”—Jan van Gils, a Dutch researcher, on the diminishing populations of shorebirds known as red knots.
“We’re making a thing that will probably never be looked at. We could print a whole bunch of nothing and nobody would know,”—Craig Mod, on building a massive digital archive.
“When your sex drive comes back, it’s like being in high school. I don’t know how it’s going to work. I don’t know what’s going to happen,”—Timothy Brown, a former staff sergeant in the U.S. Marine Corps who received reconstructive surgery on his injured groin.
(Previous quotes from our sources here)
“The boys’ penguins were fatter and wearing sunglasses, and the girls’ penguins were skinnier with eyelashes, rosy cheeks, and lips. I was like, ‘Man, those are penguins! This is messed up!’” —Courtney Hartman, who designs kids’ clothes, on shopping for penguin pajamas.
“When results of huge studies like this one appear, some people head straight for Tigger’s camp and others for Eeyore’s. I find myself somewhere in between,” —Kathryn Ashbury, who studies education and genetics.
“Can we multitask? The research, more and more, shows that we all suck at it,” —Randolph Bias, who studies reading comprehension.
(Previous quotes from our sources here)
“If we don’t take care of the adults who are caring for children, their children will be negatively affected later—if not immediately,” —Allison Scobie-Carroll, a social worker.
“These people just want more control,” —Mark Harrison, a lawyer, on the plan to add more justices to Arizona’s Supreme Court.
“Here I was this advocate for education, and I couldn’t find a place for my son. I was crying in the principal’s office and I said, ‘I don’t know what to do.’ The principal said, ‘I don’t either,’” —Arlyssa Heard, a parent in Detroit.
(Previous quotes from our sources here)
“We know how to put people in prison. But we don’t know what to do with them afterwards,” —Louis Caprioli, a former counterterror chief in France.
“If my credit score were based solely on my Reddit post history, my score would be over 800,” —Tavares Allen, who borrows money from his fellow Reddit users.
“Squishy,” —how Austin Petersen, a Libertarian running for president, describes his party’s delegates.
(Previous quotes from our sources here)
“I just point at things,” —David Attenborough, a naturalist, on hosting wildlife documentaries.
“Basically, you have no idea how to write for college,” —what a history professor told Melissa Scholes Young when she was a first-year college student.
“When we have self-compassion, when we fail, it's not ‘poor me,’ it's ‘well, everyone fails.’ Everyone struggles. This is what it means to be human,”—Kristin Neff, a psychology professor.
(Previous quotes from our sources here)
“In the abstract we see things very differently from when we’re actually faced with a decision. We think we’re going to eat healthy and then we see a piece of a cake,” —Kim Nalder, who studies voting behavior.
“The tablet itself looks the same whatever the child is doing, which is actually incredibly liberating. No one can point and laugh at you when they can’t see what you’re doing,” —Jess Day, who advocates for gender-neutral toys.
“The whole thing is designed Persian. It’s sexy Persian. You’ll love it. … It looks like people who have got the fire in their belly. It looks like love,” —Ali Ghambari, who is Iranian, on the decor in his Seattle coffee shop.
(Previous quotes from our sources here)
An interview with the Atlantic staff writer Sarah Fitzpatrick about her reporting
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In a recent story, the Atlantic staff writer Sarah Fitzpatrick writes about how FBI Director Kash Patel’s colleagues are alarmed by what they describe as erratic behavior and excessive drinking. Sources told Fitzpatrick that, on multiple occasions, members of his security detail had trouble waking Patel because he was seemingly intoxicated. Last year, Fitzpatrick reports, a request was made for “breaching equipment,” normally used by SWAT teams to break into buildings, because Patel had been unreachable behind locked doors.
Patel called the story a “lie” and earlier this week sued The Atlantic for defamation. When asked about it at a press conference Tuesday, he said, “I can say unequivocally that I never listen to the fake-news mafia. And when they get louder, it just means I’m doing my job.”
For the richest men on Earth, everything is free and nothing matters.
At the end of Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 movie, There Will Be Blood, Daniel Day-Lewis’s oil-baron character, old now and richer than Croesus, beats Paul Dano’s preacher to death with a bowling pin. Dano’s Eli Sunday, a nemesis of Day-Lewis’s Daniel Plainview during his seminal, wealth-building years, has come to sell Plainview the oil-rich land that he once coveted. But Plainview doesn’t need the land anymore, because—as he explains in one of the most famous monologues in modern cinema—he has sucked out all the oil hidden beneath it from an adjoining property, like a milkshake.
Desperate for money, Eli begs for a loan. Instead, Plainview chases him around a bowling alley and murders him with great enthusiasm. Once it’s over, a butler comes to see what all the noise was about. “I’m finished,” Plainview yells.
Media figures who have turned against Trump only in recent weeks have forfeited the right to be taken seriously in the future.
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Pity poor Tucker Carlson. Watching Donald Trump’s war in Iran—which Carlson has branded “the single biggest mistake” by a U.S. president in his lifetime—he is ruing his strong support for Trump in the 2024 election.
“It’s a moment to wrestle with our own consciences,” Carlson, long the most prominent media personality in the MAGA movement, said this week on his podcast. “We’ll be tormented by it for a long time. I will be. And I want to say I’m sorry for misleading people.”
Or, even better, don’t pity Carlson. He is one of several media figures who are having second thoughts about Trump—and in some cases, receiving praise for it. But these pundits deserve no amnesty. Their second thoughts are wise, but to have erred so badly, when so many other commentators and journalists saw the truth, disqualifies them from being taken seriously on politics again.
A kidnapping in Iraq
I remember screaming, though I don’t know what words I screamed. And I remember resisting, though there was little I could do in heels against two military-trained men intent on shoving me into the back seat of their vehicle.
Video surveillance captured the moment I was taken. In it, you can see two burly men walk past, watching nonchalantly as I struggle. Inside the vehicle, the men zip-tied my wrists and ankles, and blindfolded me. I kept asking them: Why?
I had been working in Iraq as a journalist for more than a decade. I had documented Iraq’s fight against the Islamic State from the front lines as a freelancer—at my own expense and at great risk. I had covered social, political, economic, and environmental issues, and had been welcomed into the homes of many Iraqi families whose stories I tried to tell with sensitivity and fairness. Why, I asked these men in Arabic, had they taken me? Why were they hurting me? What purpose did this serve?
The economist Adam Posen on the effect of the war in Iran on the world’s economy and the darkening economic outlook for the United States. Plus: A shifting partisan balance of power and Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed, by Maureen Callahan.
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In this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with a discussion of the likelihood that the partisan balance of power will shift from Republicans to Democrats at state-government level.
Then, David is joined by the president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, Adam Posen, for a conversation about the state of the world’s economy. Frum and Posen discuss the economic effect of the war in Iran, the United States’ reputational hit caused by Trump’s tariffs, and the chance of global recession.
Finally, David ends the episode with a discussion of Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed, by Maureen Callahan, and reflects on why reactions to the abuse of women by men in power seem to have become a partisan issue.
Trump’s Iran messaging seems desperate.
On Monday morning, CNN reported that the United States and Iran had been on the verge of striking a deal to end the war when Donald Trump made a series of comments to reporters and on social media that undermined the talks. “The Iranians didn’t appreciate POTUS negotiating through social media and making it appear as if they had signed off on issues they hadn’t yet agreed to, and ones that aren’t popular with their people back home,” complained one source, who apparently pleaded with his boss to stop.
This was Trump’s signal to begin binge-posting about the Iran negotiations. The Iranians may not have appreciated Trump’s stream-of-consciousness messaging, and apparently their American counterparts did not either. But one very important person did.
In some left-wing corners of the commentariat, moral rectitude is out. Flagrant disregard of the social contract is in.
In 1785, Immanuel Kant introduced his famous “categorical imperative.” Put simply: Act the way you want others to behave. This dictate, a version of the Golden Rule, has been a bedrock of moral philosophy for centuries. But for the New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino, Kant’s “categorical-imperative-type thing” no longer applies. Moral rectitude, in some left-wing corners of the commentariat, is out; flagrant disregard of the social contract is in.
Yesterday, The New York Times posted a video of a conversation featuring Tolentino, the pro-communist streamer Hasan Piker, and the Times opinion editor Nadja Spiegelman, under the headline: “The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules. So Why Should I?” It began with Tolentino, a highly successful author, admitting to shoplifting lemons from Whole Foods. “I think that stealing from a big box store—I’ll just state my platform—it’s neither very significant as a moral wrong, nor is it significant in any way as protest or direct action.”
The tech billionaire wants to shape humanity’s future. Not everyone has a place there.
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Updated at 2:28 p.m. ET on June 24, 2025
In April, Ezibon Khamis was dispatched to Akobo, South Sudan, to document the horrors as humanitarian services collapsed in the middle of a cholera outbreak. As a representative of the NGO Save the Children, Khamis would be able to show the consequences of massive cuts to U.S. foreign assistance made by the Department of Government Efficiency and the State Department. Seven of the health facilities that Save the Children had supported in the region have fully closed, and 20 more have partly ceased operations.
Khamis told us about passing men and women who carried the sick on their shoulders like pallbearers. Children and adults were laid on makeshift gurneys; many vomited uncontrollably. These human caravans walked for hours in up to 104-degree heat in an attempt to reach medical treatment, because their local clinics had either closed completely or run out of ways to treat cholera. Previously, the U.S. government had provided tablets that purified the water in the region, which is home to a quarter-million people, many of whom are fleeing violent conflicts nearby. Not anymore, Khamis says; now many have resorted to drinking untreated river water. He told us that at least eight people—five of them children—had died on their journey that day. As he entered a health facility in Akobo, he was confronted by a woman. “She just said, ‘You abandoned us,’” Khamis told us.
Modi styled himself a global leader but can’t seem to get ahead of events in the Middle East.
Pakistan is having a diplomatic moment, and India’s political elites are not enjoying it.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has spent the past decade promoting the notion that India is the leader of the global South and, as such, is indispensable to world affairs. Now a conflict in the Middle East has thrown the global economy, and, with it, India’s, into crisis. On top of that, Islamabad, not New Delhi, has hosted at least one round of talks between the United States and Iran and is preparing to mediate others, leaving the Indian government to ponder its irrelevance.
Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar first dismissed Pakistan’s role in the U.S.-Iran talks, using a pejorative Hindi word for a kind of unsavory middleman. But in Indian political circles, particularly after the April 8 cease-fire was announced, criticism has been trained on the Modi government. Jairam Ramesh, a spokesperson for the opposition Congress Party, wrote on X that Pakistan’s role was “a severe setback to both the substance and style of Mr. Modi’s highly personalised diplomacy.” Ramesh mocked the Indian prime minister for calling himself vishwaguru, meaning “teacher of the world.” Asaduddin Owaisi, the country’s most prominent Muslim politician, lamented that India would have been the natural venue for the U.S.-Iran talks, if not for the Modi government’s missteps.
And J. D. Vance less and less
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President Trump reportedly likes to go around asking aides about who his successor should be: J. D. Vance or Marco Rubio. If Trump were to ask his own voters the same question, he would, at least based on my recent experience, come away with a pretty clear answer.
I run weekly focus groups, and the moderators regularly ask Trump voters whom they would like to see inherit the party in 2028 and beyond. More and more, what we’re hearing in response is a strange new respect for Rubio. Although Vance might seem like a more natural MAGA heir, many Trump voters see Rubio as a stabilizing force who comes off a lot better than many of his peers inside the administration, including the vice president.
