Reporter's Notebook

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.

In the last months, weeks, and days of his life, “I will not go to the emergency room” became my husband’s mantra. Andrej had esophageal cancer that had spread throughout his body (but not to his ever-willful brain), and, having trained as a doctor, I had jury-rigged a hospital at home, aided by specialists who got me pills to boost blood pressure; to dampen the effects of liver failure; to stem his cough; to help him swallow, wake up, fall asleep.

“I will not go to the emergency room”—emphasis on not—were his first words after passing out, having a seizure, or regurgitating the protein smoothies I made to pass his narrowed esophagus. He said it again and again, even as fluid built up in his lungs, rendering him short of breath and prone to agonizing coughing spells. He had been a big, athletic guy, but now, in the ugly process of dying, he was looking gaunt. Ours was a precarious existence, but I understood his adamant rejection of the emergency department. Most prior visits had morphed into extended trips into a terrifying medical underworld—to a purgatory known as emergency-department boarding.

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.)

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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.

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.

“Marco Rubio, I think, is an amazing dude,” said Ken, a Biden 2020/Trump 2024 voter from Georgia. “If anybody is left that we can see on the TV or C-SPAN that’s just genuine,” he said, “it’s Marco Rubio.” Ken called Rubio “a family man and still a stand-up politician,” and said, “He also is about putting America first, which I agree with.” (To protect participants’ privacy, we disclose only their first name.)

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When President Trump last summer implored Republicans to launch a nationwide gerrymandering blitz to pad their narrow House majority, the fight he started did not seem fair. GOP lawmakers had both the will and the power to draw their party new seats, while Democrats were hamstrung by limits of their own making. The question was not whether Republicans could expand their edge in Congress, but by how much.

This morning the landscape looks a lot different, after Virginia voters yesterday approved a lopsided new House map that could hand Democrats an additional four seats that Republicans currently hold. The Democratic redistricting victory is the party’s second in a statewide referendum. When combined with new lines that California voters endorsed in November, Democrats have now succeeded in drawing districts that will likely yield them nine more seats this fall, at least matching what Republicans have been able to achieve in states that they control. By some measures, Democrats have jumped into the redistricting lead, bolstering their chances of winning back the House majority in the midterm elections.

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?

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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.

The Iran war’s effect on fuel prices is easy to see, not least in the climbing numbers on gas-station signs. Less visible is the disruption cascading through another part of the fossil fuel–based economy: plastic production. Before long, prices not just for the gasoline that goes into cars but for the parts that make them—along with the cost of toys, furniture, clothing, and more—could start climbing too.

The plastics that proliferate through modern life are almost all made from oil and gas derivatives or by-products. Until the conflict began, many of the chemical ingredients that go into plastics, the ingredients for those ingredients, and raw plastics themselves originated in the Middle East. The Strait of Hormuz closure has already created shortages of key ingredients, which could mount into shortfalls of some plastics and plastic products. Even if tensions ease and the strait reopens soon, untangling supply lines would take months, likely until the end of the year, experts say.

Stewart Brand changed my life. At my local library as a teenager, leafing through the massive 1980 edition of the Whole Earth Catalog—the countercultural guide to ideas and tools that Brand originally launched in the late ’60s—I felt as if I’d stumbled across the best book in the world. It introduced me to the architect Buckminster Fuller, who would become a lifelong obsession, and to works that shaped my thinking forever. An encouraging blurb from Brand was enough to send me in search of A Pattern Language, Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics, and many other revelatory reads. Just browsing through the Catalog made me feel like a generalist, and I identified with its charismatic editor, who signed his comments with the initials “SB.”