“There are no shortcuts in life, and definitely no shortcuts in cooking,”—Kaiser Lashkari, who owns a restaurant in Houston.
“It's just too stupid for us to spend the equivalent of $50 billion filing our individual income taxes,”—Joseph Bankman, a tax-law professor.
“I think we sometimes have a tendency to overthink the dinosaur extinction, myself included,”—Stephen Brusatte, a paleontologist.
(Previous quotes from our sources here)
“Oh my god, this is everything I ever wanted in a fat character,” —Kiva Bay, who writes about feminist issues, on a new comic-book superhero, pictured above.
“It’s quite true that we don’t know what the heck that dark matter is, and you need to be open-minded about it,” —James Bullock, an astrophysicist, on the invisible substance that comprises most of the universe’s mass.
“We’re all on board with creating trust in community government, but we’re not going to wait around for them. We’re gonna build this shit ourselves,” —Brandon Anderson, who created an app to track reports of police brutality.
(Previous quotes from our sources here)
“Forests might be more socialist than we thought.” —Franciska De Vries, who studies ecosystems, on how trees share carbon.
“I’ve not had a good sleep since I started this job,” —Amit Reddy, a first-year science teacher.
“Work isn’t the answer to everything, but it is the answer to most problems that people have,” —David Riemer, who created a program that provides jobs.
(Previous quotes from our sources here.)
“My hope is that this is the beginning, and not just a flash-in-the pan presidential campaign around one very adorable 74-year-old socialist,” —Erik Forman, who supports Bernie Sanders.
“There is no delete button in the nervous system,” —Steven Hayes, a psychologist, on why it’s hard to stop worrying.
“It doesn’t feel lonely, it just feels right,” —Jeff Merkley, the only U.S. senator so far to endorse Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.
(Previous quotes from our sources here.)
“Quiet catastrophe,” —what Ken Kolosh, who studies accidents, thinks of driving.
“Holy **#$@#!, we know virtually nothing right now about the biology of most of the tree of life,” —Jonathan Eisen, a microbiologist.
“Look, food culture is emotionally very fraught. People have very strong feelings and they don’t want to be told by anybody how to eat,” —Michael Pollan, who studies food.
(Previous quotes from our sources here.)
“Possible benefit of being in the office: less chance of being puked on,” —Tara, who started working from home 20 days after giving birth.
“If you ever want to break a community, just start by breaking down the school system and eventually you’re just going to have deserts and graveyards,” —Arlyssa Heard, who leads a parent-advocacy organization in Detroit.
“If you want to find a way of preventing disease, you shouldn’t be looking at people with the disease. You should look at people who should have been sick but aren’t,” —Stephen Friend, who studies genetics.
(Previous quotes from our sources here)
“I don’t like him. He’s an old buzzard as far as I’m concerned,” —David Osterkamp, who supports Donald Trump, on Ted Cruz.
“Just because I could buy a backhoe for cheap doesn't mean that a backhoe is useful … for my little garden in the backyard,” —Jeffrey Winters, a political science professor, on who uses shell corporations.
“We want to be a neighborhood school again. … We can’t let the anchors of our communities die,” —Randall Josserand, a public-school administrator in Chicago.
(Previous quotes from our sources here.)
“Within the Cuban population, if you have the option you don’t live in Little Havana. The Hispanic culture is about pride. Moving up and on is the goal,” —Frank Rodriguez Melo, a real-estate broker in Miami.
“For the most part, whatever white men do is viewed to be normal, legitimate, and expected. So if I as a white man advance diversity, people look at me weird, but they pretty much let me keep on doing it,” —David Hekman, who studies diversity and bias in the workplace.
“It’s like when a friend gives you a great recipe at a dinner party, and when you try to follow it, you say: Wait, there’s a lot that’s vague here,” —David Broockman, a business professor, on uncovering a fraudulent study.
(Previous quotes from our sources here)
“If it turns out that what you really have to do is go to college and make sure your roommate is the next Mark Zuckerberg in order to get ahead … that doesn’t work,” —Kevin Leicht, a sociologist.
“It’s a groundbreaking work, but Freudenthal’s book is the most boring I have ever read. Logarithm tables are cool compared to it,” —Yvan Dutil, an astrophysicist, on a 1960 book about communicating with extraterrestrials.
“If you want to incorporate, fine. You pay the fee. Nevada doesn’t investigate, so why should I?” —Robert Harris, a Nevadan who helps people avoid taxes.
(Previous quotes from our sources here)
“Something that in the history of religion is kind of interesting is to see how Christian monks, like, really bum out about wet dreams,” —Kelly Bulkeley, who studies dreams.
“Complaining in Texas is not for sissies,” —Annie Laurie Gaylor, who runs an organization that promotes separation of church and state.
“Imagining today minus the Net is as content-free an exercise as imagining London in the 1840s with no steam power, New York in the 1930s with no elevators, or L.A. in the 1970s with no cars. After a while, the trellis so shapes the vine that you can’t separate the two,” —Clay Shirky, who studies the Internet.
(Previous quotes from our sources here)
“To think, if we look at mainstream porn, that we’re being wild or really sexy … it’s the sex equivalent of eating all our meals at McDonald’s,” —Shira Tarrant, who writes about the pornography industry.
“In real life, that’s not a recipe for great teaching. That’s a recipe for a teacher whose emotional rubber band is almost always stretched to its breaking point,” —Roxanna Elden, a high-school teacher, on heroic teachers in popular culture.
“Living in denial is not a good coping method, but if you’re still in it, and you don’t have the resources to really open the wound and treat it, it could be the best way,” —Tanya Feldman, who provides short-term therapy for refugees with PTSD symptoms.
(Previous quotes from our sources here)
“He seems like the old man in his kitchen who will bang his hand on the table and really talk about these issues,” —Tracy Moore, who supports Bernie Sanders (pictured above).
“The program is designed to keep you in a rut. It’s not built to empower anybody,” —Raquel Williams, who receives welfare assistance.
“There are many ways that poor people are used as revenue streams for businesses. This looks like it has the potential to become another one,” —Michele Gilman, a law professor, on selling personal data.
(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.
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.
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.
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.
Kash Patel has alarmed colleagues with episodes of excessive drinking and unexplained absences.
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On Friday, April 10, as FBI Director Kash Patel was preparing to leave work for the weekend, he struggled to log on to an internal computer system. He quickly became convinced that he had been locked out, and he panicked, frantically calling aides and allies to announce that he had been fired by the White House, according to nine people familiar with his outreach. Two of these people described his behavior as a “freak-out.”
Patel oversees an agency that employs roughly 38,000 people, including many who are trained to investigate and verify information that can be presented under oath in a court of law. News of his emotional outburst ricocheted through the bureau, prompting chatter among officials and, in some corners of the building, expressions of relief. The White House fielded calls from the bureau and from members of Congress asking who was now in charge of the FBI.
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.”
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.
TV is finally considering the relentless, creative work of making a living online.
On-screen, the actor Elle Fanning has the cherubic, moon-eyed guilelessness of a storybook princess or an animated woodland creature, the kind that belies a character much more tenacious than she first appears. In the new Apple TV series Margo’s Got Money Troubles, based on the 2024 novel by Rufi Thorpe, Fanning plays an imaginative and naive college student named Margo, and it doesn’t take long for a predator to come sniffing around. In this case, it’s a sad-sack, married literature professor named Mark (played by Michael Angarano), who locks in on Margo and—correctly—identifies her writing potential. “I’m meeting him for coffee,” Margo tells her best friend over FaceTime. “He thinks my writing is brilliant.” (If your eyes roll at this point, they’re supposed to.)
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?
