Latest News from The Atlantic
Atlantic
5 hours ago
- Politics
- Atlantic
Profit and Power
Donald Trump's willingness to mix public office with personal benefit is facing scrutiny, as are his latest pardons. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined last night to discuss how the president may be using his power to profit, and more. Meanwhile, Trump's battle with Harvard continued this week. Panelists considered how that fight is being received by voters and Republican lawmakers—and whether the president's continued crackdown on higher education could have political consequences. For Republicans, Trump's action against Harvard is 'not something that they want to break with the president on,' Leigh Ann Caldwell said last night. 'This is not an issue that they're willing to stand in front of him on, like most issues.' Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times; Leigh Ann Caldwell, the chief Washington correspondent at Puck; and Stephen Hayes, the editor of The Dispatch. Watch the full episode here.
Atlantic
5 hours ago
- Health
- Atlantic
HIV's Most Promising Breakthrough Has Taken a Hit
Solving HIV vaccination—a puzzle that scientists have been tackling for decades without success—could be like cracking the code to a safe. The key, they now think, may be delivering a series of different shots in a specific sequence, iteratively training the body to produce a strong, broad immune response that will endure against the fast-mutating virus, ideally for a lifetime. Figuring out which ingredients to include in those shots, and in which order, is one of the trickiest immunological conundrums that researchers have ever faced. But mRNA, the fast, flexible technology that delivered two of the world's first COVID-19 vaccines in record time, is ideal for that kind of brute-force tinkering, and may be the most important tool for getting an effective HIV vaccine, Julie McElrath, the head of the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Division at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, in Seattle, told me. Multiple mRNA-based HIV vaccines are now in clinical trials, and early data suggest that they're prompting the type of immune responses that researchers think are essential to keeping HIV at bay—and that other vaccine candidates have struggled to elicit at all. But recently, several promising mRNA HIV-vaccine candidates have slammed up against a technical roadblock. In two small clinical trials, 7 to 18 percent of participants developed rashes and other skin reactions after getting the shots—including multiple cases of chronic hives that troubled volunteers for months after they were immunized. All of the vaccines were manufactured by Moderna. The rashes aren't life threatening; they're also readily treatable. Still, they can be debilitating and distressing. 'I've had patients who literally can't go to work,' Kimberly Blumenthal, an allergist and immunologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, who has treated people with chronic hives, told me. The rate at which they're occurring in the trials is also out of the norm, and no one has an explanation yet for the root cause. To prioritize patient safety, mRNA HIV-vaccine research in people has slowed as researchers try to suss out the cause of the hives, William Schief, the Scripps Research Institute biophysicist who helped design one of the vaccines, told me. (Schief also holds titles at Moderna and at IAVI, the nonprofit that sponsored some of the HIV-vaccine work.) At any time, a side effect this uncomfortable and prolonged would give researchers pause. But in 2025, a setback for a high-profile mRNA vaccine trial—focused on HIV, no less—could more fundamentally upend potentially lifesaving research. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime and prominent anti-vaccine activist, has repeatedly questioned the safety of mRNA COVID vaccines. He and agency leaders are already recommending that fewer Americans take vaccines and creating new hurdles to vaccine approval. Since January, the National Institutes of Health, under HHS's direction, has also terminated funding for hundreds of research projects related to HIV and vaccines. This week, the department canceled Moderna's nearly $600 million contract to develop mRNA-based flu vaccines. The HIV-vaccine studies that detected the skin reactions were also supported by NIH funding, and the researchers involved collaborated directly with NIH scientists. But those partnerships have since been terminated, and the NIH is now telling several agency-supported researchers working on HIV vaccines that the government is not planning to continue funding their work, according to several researchers I talked to. When reached for comment, Emily Hilliard, HHS's press secretary, wrote in an email, 'The reality is that mRNA technology remains under-tested, and we are not going to spend taxpayer dollars repeating the mistakes of the last administration, which concealed legitimate safety concerns from the public'—referencing the mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines, which were rigorously tested in clinical trials, and billions of doses of which have been safely administered people around the world. Under normal circumstances, detecting rashes in a small vaccine safety study would represent a routine scientific setback, and prove that the trials served their intended purpose. But the administration's anti-vaccine stances have created a culture of fear among scientists: Several of the researchers I contacted for this story declined to comment, for fear of publicly tying their name or institution to reporting on mRNA vaccines and losing funding for their research. Science requires resources and open discussion—in torpedoing both, the Trump administration is rapidly undoing decades of progress toward ending the HIV pandemic. Researchers running the mRNA HIV-vaccine trials first took note of the rashes in 2022, shortly after studies began. After Science magazine reported about the side effect connected with the IAVI-sponsored vaccine, many scientists in the field weren't sure what to make of the finding. The trial in which it had been reported had enrolled only 60 people, and wasn't set up to rigorously look at a mysterious side effect. 'The sort of feeling was, Yeah, that's a bit weird, god knows what happened,' John Moore, an HIV researcher and vaccinologist at Cornell, told me. This April and May, though, researchers independently published two papers describing the rashes, for four separate vaccines, in two separate trials: one for the IAVI-backed vaccine and another run by the HIV Vaccine Trials Network. Now, the side effect is 'real, confirmed, generalizable,' Moore said. 'And we don't know why it's happening.' The vaccines in question target slightly different parts of the virus. But all of them rely on a Moderna-manufactured mRNA backbone, and all of them triggered, in up to about 10 percent of participants, chronic hives that emerged a few days or weeks after vaccination and in many cases lasted for months. That's a long time to be battling itching and discomfort—and it threatens to be a major deterrent to completing the series of vaccines, or potentially starting at all, Genevieve Fouda, an immunologist and HIV researcher at Cornell, told me. Delayed, chronic hives have long been known as a rare side effect of vaccines, including mRNA-based COVID vaccines. But the rates are generally very low —usually well under 1 percent, and often detectable only in massive studies of thousands of people. To see these rashes crop up in two small safety studies—one of 60 people, the other of 108—is a significant departure from precedent, scientists told me. And working out why they're appearing at such high rates will take time. Although researchers understand that the reactions are a kind of autoimmunity—in which the body inadvertently learns to attack itself—they don't know exactly why rashes occur after certain immunizations or infections, Blumenthal told me. In this case, the data so far do point to the specific combination of mRNA and HIV as a root cause. Other mRNA vaccines, including Moderna's, haven't had this issue, to anywhere near this degree; neither have other HIV vaccines that have made it into people. And several researchers pointed out to me that, so far, the only trials that they're aware of in which these hives have turned up at this frequency have involved a Moderna-manufactured product. None of the other vaccines being tested by the HIV Vaccine Trials Network, for instance, has seen rashes at that rate—including other, non-Moderna mRNA HIV vaccines, Jim Kublin, the director of HVTN, told me. (Barton Haynes, the Duke immunologist leading work on one of the non-Moderna vaccines, told me he and his colleagues have not encountered the same skin-reaction problem.) Hives also appear to have been a more common side effect of the Moderna COVID vaccines than of the Pfizer ones, though still overall rare. 'This is truly an outlier in terms of what we've seen,' Robert Paris, a vice president at Moderna, told me. A persistent mRNA problem would be a major blow to HIV-vaccine development. When the technology emerged, it sped progress like nothing else: 'Things that originally took us about three years, we could do them in maybe three and a half months or so,' Mark Feinberg, the head of IAVI, told me. The early results for these vaccines have also been very promising, and before the hives were detected, researchers were well on their way to testing even more iterations of mRNA-based HIV vaccines, to crack the final immunization code. But for the moment, 'there's no appetite to say, 'Let's try all these different immunogens and see what happens,'' Schief, the Scripps researcher who helped design one of the vaccines, told me. Still, most of the researchers I spoke with insisted that they'll find a solution soon. mRNA vaccines for HIV 'are not at all dead in the water,' Kublin told me. If needed, scientists could tweak the vaccine recipe, or combine the mRNA approach with another technology. The fix may be as simple as lowering the vaccine dose, a strategy that Schief and Feinberg are working to test a new trial based in South Africa. (Moderna's COVID vaccine also contained more than three times as much mRNA as Pfizer's—and one study found that lowering the Moderna dose seemed to reduce the rate of certain skin reactions.) Successful HIV vaccination may require a balancing act—minimizing hives, while still delivering enough mRNA to rile up the immune system. But researchers may not be able to drive the rates of skin reactions down to zero: HIV is especially adept at cloaking itself from the immune system, and there may be few ways to force the body to attack the virus without producing collateral damage. And Schief and others couldn't say what rate of hives would be acceptably low. The virus is so infectious and deadly that some minor side effects may be worth the risk, if the vaccine is effective at generating the right immune response. But even a perfect, immunity-inducing shot won't do the world any good if people are afraid to take it. Still, if a rash can dissuade someone from vaccination, so, too, can misinformation, or an official's decision to stop recommending a shot. No vaccine progress will be made if the federal government doesn't want it to happen: Paris, of Moderna, told me that earlier this spring, the NIH terminated its partnership with the researchers developing these mRNA HIV vaccines, forcing the scientists to seek alternate sources of support. And yesterday, Schief and Haynes were told that their groups at Scripps and Duke would not have the opportunity to renew funding for the two HIV-vaccine-focused research consortia that their institutions lead—millions of dollars that the researchers had been told to expect they would receive, and that have been powering the development of their mRNA shots. The rationale, Haynes told me, as it was described to him, was 'due to the desire to go with currently available approaches to eliminate HIV.' Currently available approaches include community education and preventive drugs, but notably, no vaccine. (HHS did not respond to questions about these funding shifts.) 'Unless we can find a substitute source of support, this work won't go forward,' Haynes told me. If the project of HIV vaccination looks less promising right now than it has in years, that's not about science or technology, or about any single side effect: It's about politics.
Atlantic
5 hours ago
- General
- Atlantic
When College Graduates Face Reality
This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning. 'History found you.' In 2020, Caitlin Flanagan told recent college graduates that their dreams were interrupted in much the same way her father's dreams had once been interrupted. In 1941, he was a new student at Amherst College, 'and he thought it was paradise,' Caitlin wrote. Then the Pearl Harbor bombing happened, and he and his college peers enlisted in the Army the very next day. History found both of these generations and left them with a whole lot of plans deferred, but perhaps also something great—'As very young people you know something powerful: that you have been tested, and you did not falter,' Caitlin wrote. 'You kept going.' Caitlin's essay is one of a series of commencement speeches The Atlantic commissioned in 2020 for students who would not be able to attend their graduation. In them, writers spoke to young people growing up in the shadow of loss, who were watching as humanity as a whole was tested. While 2025 isn't the same topsy-turvy reality as 2020, students still face a core uncertainty about what comes next. Below is a collection of honest, not-always-rosy, but often hopeful advice for the graduate in your life. On Graduating You Thought You Were Free, but History Found You By Caitlin Flanagan The 2020 commencement speech you'll never hear Read the article. I Didn't Get to Graduate Either By Bridget Phetasy In May 1998, I should have been finishing my first year at an Ivy League college. Instead, I was in a state-funded halfway house in Minneapolis trying to recover from a heroin addiction. Read the article. A Commencement Address Too Honest to Deliver in Person By David Brooks I couldn't say these things during a traditional ceremony, but these aren't traditional times. Still Curious? 'I didn't have any graduation wisdom. So I asked 19 smart people instead.' Joe Pinsker relayed what a novelist, a therapist, a Buddhist teacher, and others had to say to the class of 2020. The long goodbye to college: Any recent graduate will tell you that their head felt heaviest after the cap came off, Amogh Dimri writes. Other Diversions P.S. I recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. 'Sunrise symmetry: a reminder of the order that exists in this chaotic world,' Courtney C., 74 , from Bermuda Run, North Carolina, writes. I'll continue to feature your responses in the coming weeks.
Atlantic
6 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
When Mission: Impossible Had No Mission
Every major movie franchise has boxes to check. In Jurassic Park, dinosaurs must run amok; in Planet of the Apes, apes have to meditate on intelligence; in The Fast and the Furious, Vin Diesel absolutely has to evangelize the benefits of family, Corona beers, and tricked-out cars. But Mission: Impossible took four films to fully establish its franchise must-have: the ever more blurred lines between its death-defying, stunt-loving star, Tom Cruise, and the superspy he plays. For more than a decade, the series was defined instead by its lack of definition—at least, beyond having Cruise in the lead role as Ethan Hunt, and Ving Rhames recur as Hunt's ally. Each installment felt made by a director with a specific take on the material, and Cruise was their versatile instrument. But the four Mission: Impossible films that followed—culminating in the eighth and purportedly final installment, now in theaters—have taken a different approach. Instead of relying on a select few characters and story beats to link the films together, the movies have abided by a stricter canon. Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning, which earned a record-setting $63 million at the box office over its opening weekend, represents the most aggressive pivot away from the saga's more freewheeling origins: It self-seriously inserts supercuts of footage from its predecessors, reveals the purpose of a long-forgotten plot device, and turns a bit player from 1996's Mission: Impossible into a crucial character. In the process, it streamlines those earlier, delightfully unpredictable stories to the point of overlooking their true appeal. That tactic may be familiar to today's audiences, who are used to cinematic universes and intersecting story threads, but the Mission: Impossible franchise initially distinguished itself by eschewing continuity. New cast members came and went. Hunt lacked signature skills and catchphrases. The movies were messy, and didn't seem interested in building toward an overarching plan. Yet in their inconsistency, they prove the value of ignoring the brand-building pressures that have become the norm for big-budget features today. Like the 1960s television show on which they're loosely based, the early Mission: Impossible s were stand-alone stories. The first two movies in particular stuck out for their bold authorial styles. First came Brian De Palma's film, which he drenched in noir-ish flair while also deploying vivid color and Dutch angles. It arrived at a time when blockbusters such as Independence Day and Twister leveled cities and prioritized world-ending spectacle. Without a formula in place, De Palma got to challenge genre conventions—for instance, by mining tension out of mere silence during the central set piece, which saw Hunt's team staging a tricky heist. The second film, 2000's Mission: Impossible II, went maximalist under the direction of John Woo, who punctuated almost every sequence with slow-motion visuals and dizzying snap zooms. The filmmaker also asserted that Hunt himself was malleable: Whereas in the first film, he fights off his enemies without ever firing a gun, in Woo's version, he's a cocksure Casanova mowing down his targets in hails of bullets. Woo also indulged in the action pageantry that De Palma had avoided— Mission: Impossible II seemed to contain twice the amount of explosions necessary for a popcorn film—but the climactic stunt is perhaps the smallest Cruise has ever had to pull off: When the villain stabs at Hunt with a knife, the point stops just before reaching his eye. The two films that followed conveyed a similar sense of unpredictability. For 2006's Mission: Impossible III and 2011's Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol, Cruise, who also served as a producer, picked unconventional choices to direct: J. J. Abrams, then best known for creating twisty TV dramas such as Alias and Lost, took on the third entry, while Brad Bird, who'd cut his teeth in animation, handled Ghost Protocol. Like their more accomplished predecessors, both filmmakers were entrusted by Cruise and company to treat Mission: Impossible as a playground where they could demonstrate their own creative strengths. Where De Palma and Woo focused on visual panache, Abrams and Bird stretched the limits of tone—and in doing so, revealed the adaptability of the franchise. Mission: Impossible III is unnervingly sobering amid its shootouts and double crosses; the film features a memorably chilling Philip Seymour Hoffman as the villain, a character's disturbing death, and a subplot about Hunt getting married. Ghost Protocol, meanwhile, is essentially a screwball comedy: Simon Pegg's character, Benji, provides a humorous button to many of the film's biggest scenes, and Bird treats Hunt like a marble caught in a Rube Goldberg machine packed with goofy gadgets, whether he's pinballing through a prison or being launched out of a car in the middle of a sandstorm. (Hunt even declares 'Mission accomplished,' only for the film to play the line for laughs.) In the years since Ghost Protocol, much of big-budget filmmaking has come to feel made by committee. Studios offer fans remakes, legacy sequels, and spin-offs that connect disparate story threads, bending over backwards to ensure that viewers understand they're being shown something related to preexisting media. (Just look at the title of the upcoming John Wick spin-off.) The new Mission: Impossible suffers by making similar moves. It struggles to make sense of Hunt's story as one long saga, yielding an awkwardly paced, lethargic-in-stretches film. The Final Reckoning insists that every assignment Hunt has ever taken, every ally he's ever made, and every enemy he's ever foiled have been connected, forming a neat line of stepping stones that paved the way for him to save the world one more time. Taken together, the first four Mission: Impossible s were compellingly disorganized, a stark contrast with Hollywood's ever more rigid notion of how to construct a franchise. They didn't build consistent lore. Each new installment didn't try to top the previous one—a popular move that's had diminishing returns. Although some observers critique their varying quality, the lack of consensus emphasizes the singularity of each of these efforts. They remind me of the instances of an individual filmmaker's vision found amid major cinematic properties these days, such as Taika Waititi putting his witty stamp on a Thor sequel, Fede Alvarez turning Alien: Romulus into a soundscape of jump scares, and on television, Tony Gilroy ensuring that the Star Wars prequel Andor never included a single Skywalker. If the older Mission: Impossible movies now feel dated and incongruous—whether within the franchise itself or as part of the cinematic landscape writ large—that's to their benefit. They let creative sensibilities, not commercial ones, take the lead.
Atlantic
8 hours ago
- Politics
- Atlantic
The Unconstitutional Conservatives
Not too long ago, many Republicans proudly referred to themselves as 'constitutional conservatives.' They believed in the rule of law; in limiting the power of government, especially the federal government; in protecting individual liberty; and in checks and balances and the separation of powers. They opposed central planning and warned about emotions stirred up by the mob and the moment, believing, as the Founders did, that the role of government was to mediate rather than mirror popular passions. They recognized the importance of self-restraint and the need to cultivate public and private virtues. And they had reverence for the Constitution, less as a philosophical document than a procedural one, which articulated the rules of the road for American democracy. When it came to judicial philosophy, 'constitutional conservatism' meant textualism, which prioritizes the plain meaning of the text in statutes and the Constitution. Justice Antonin Scalia excoriated outcome-based jurisprudence; judges should never prioritize their own desired outcomes, he warned, but should instead apply the text of the Constitution fairly. 'The main danger in judicial interpretation of the Constitution—or, for that matter, in judicial interpretation of any law,' he said in 1988, 'is that the judges will mistake their own predilections for the law.' One of the reasons Roe v. Wade was viewed as a travesty by conservatives is that they believed the 1973 Supreme Court decision twisted the Constitution to invent a 'right to privacy' in order to legalize abortion. The decision, they felt, was driven by a desired outcome rather than a rigorous analysis of legal precedent or constitutional text. WHICH IS WHY it's hard to think of a more anti-conservative figure than President Donald Trump or a more anti-conservative movement than MAGA. Trump and his supporters evince a disdain for laws, procedures, and the Constitution. They want to empower the federal government in order to turn it into an instrument of brute force that can be used to reward allies and destroy opponents. Trump and his administration have abolished agencies and imposed sweeping tariffs even when they don't have the legal authority to do so. They are deporting people without due process. Top aides are floating the idea of suspending the writ of habeas corpus, one of the most important constitutional protections against unlawful detention. Judges, who are the target of threats from the president, fear for their safety. So do the very few Republicans who are willing to assert their independence from Trump. In one of his first official acts, Trump granted clemency to more than 1,500 people charged in connection with the violent attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, including those convicted of seditious conspiracy. The president and his family are engaging in a level of corruption that was previously unfathomable. And he and his administration have shown no qualms about using the federal government to target private companies, law firms, and universities; suing news organizations for baseless reasons; and ordering criminal probes into former administration officials who criticized Trump. The Trump administration is a thugocracy, and the Republican Party he controls supports him each step of the way. Almost every principle to which Republicans once professed fealty has been jettisoned. The party is now devoted to the abuse of power and to vengeance. POLITICAL THEORISTS recognize that the governing approach of Trump and the GOP embodies the philosophy of Nietzsche and Machiavelli. It's all about the world of 'Anything goes' and 'Might makes right.' Laws and the Constitution are as malleable as hot wax; they can be reshaped as needed. Limited government has been traded for the Leviathan, and there are no constraints. The state has become a blunt-force instrument. The significance of this shift can hardly be overstated. A party that formerly proclaimed allegiance to the Constitution and the rule of law, warned about the concentration and abuse of power, and championed virtue, restraint, and moral formation has been transmogrified. The Republican Party now stands for everything it once loathed. Peter Wehner: America's Mad King If this rot was confined to the GOP, it would be tragic but manageable. But Trump and the Republican Party control the levers of federal power. As a result, less than five months into Trump's second term, America is heading toward a form of authoritarianism. We are still mid-story. The outcome is not ordained, and the courts are turning out to be, for the most part, a vital bulwark against Trumpism. The clashes will surely intensify as Trump rages against the storm. But as he does so, the resistance to him will grow and intensify too, and it will find expression in many different ways. The flame of liberty hasn't been extinguished quite yet. Love of country is, as the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb said, an ennobling sentiment, worthy of our affections. And love of country demands that those who love America and her ideals stand up against a man and a party intent on destroying them.
