2026-08-01 22:10:48
Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings, watch full episodes here, or listen to the weekly podcast here.
Anthony Fauci returned to Capitol Hill this week, where he faced attacks from Republican lawmakers during a Senate hearing. On Washington Week With The Atlantic, panelists joined to discuss his response, and more.
“The hearing was such a perfect encapsulation of Washington at this moment, with a lot of raised voices and a lot of yelling and virtually no new information,” Stephen Hayes, the editor of The Dispatch, said last night. “With a more serious government we would have gotten closer to answers through that hearing.”
Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at The New York Times; Susan Glasser, a staff writer at The New Yorker; Hayes; Nancy A. Youssef, a staff writer at The Atlantic.
Watch the full episode here.
2026-08-01 20:00:00
© Estate of David Hockney. Edition of 75. Photograph by Richard Schmidt.
David Hockney, Contrejour in the French Style, 1974. Etching, soft-ground etching, aquatint.
David Hockney, who died at 88 in June, became famous as a young artist for imbuing 20th-century life with the formality and stasis of early Renaissance painting. His sharp-edged figures stand by the pool or sit by a coffee table in spaces as orderly as those in a Fra Angelico annunciation. The real world does not look so tidy, symmetrical, and enchanting. Except, very occasionally, when it does.
Contrejour in the French Style depicts a window at the Louvre that Hockney encountered shortly after moving to Paris in 1973. With its shade partly drawn, shutting out unwanted sunlight while giving a glimpse of garden, it was, he thought, “a picture in itself.”
Working from a drawing and some photographs, he rebuilt the found scene—tugging here, flattening there. His pathways and parterres are a streamlined echo of the nearby Tuileries, just as his balustrade is a compass-and-protractor enactment of the elegant original. The way the two receding diagonals intersect the wall, window, and walkway to converge at the tree line is an almost perfect diagram of single-point perspective. Hockney used visibly different etching techniques in different territories of the image—soft mats of color for the window blind, meticulous linear hatching for the floor, and splotchy, translucent color for the surrounding wall.
The formal garden, the parquet, the deep window setback, and the dappled wall (a nod to the pointillism of Georges Seurat) all wave the flag of “French Style,” with its distinct history of rules developed in the pursuit of beauty. Soon after Contrejour, Hockney’s own style shifted toward fragmented space, expressive brushwork, and episodic motion. This print, however, still exerts its wistful invitation to bask in quiet emotional weather, and notice the pictorial machinery he was about to dismantle.
This article appears in the September 2026 print edition with the headline “Contrejour in the French Style.”
2026-08-01 20:00:00
Truth is under threat today from two opposing impulses. The first is subjectivism, or relativism: the denial of the existence of objective truth or the possibility of ever attaining it. This proposition may seem abstract, but it has direct consequences for our civic life. Contrary to what one hears at cocktail parties or in freshman philosophy classes, relativism is the predicate not of tolerance but of repression.
The other impulse poses no less a threat to liberty: the refusal to reckon with our fallibility. All of us, at every conscious moment of our lives, hold in our head some false beliefs. Even when we do our best to be attentive, informed, judicious, and honest, we can still be wrong about profoundly important questions—questions of human nature, the human good, human dignity, and human destiny. We can, for example, be confident that we are on the side of justice, yet profoundly mistaken about what justice demands of us.
Fallibility is a feature of the human condition. Although we can’t eradicate it, we can make progress toward replacing many of our false beliefs with true ones. But to do that, we need to cultivate the virtue of intellectual humility, open ourselves to challenges to our convictions, and rebuild our capacity for civil discourse. Genuine civil discourse recognizes not only that objective truth exists but that it’s often best pursued by engaging with people who are convinced we’ve got it wrong.
[Robert P. George: Universities shouldn’t be ideological churches]
Civil discourse is not mere politesse. It does not consist of listening patiently while someone articulates a view contrary to one’s own. Rather, each party considers the opposing argument in its most favorable light, sincerely entertaining the possibility that their own view is incorrect and should be abandoned. Their goal—a shared goal—is not winning a victory for their tribe; it is getting to the truth.
Achieving civil discourse is hard for us frail human creatures, particularly in our era of ideological partisanship, polarization, identity politics, and conspiracism on both the left and the right. It requires resisting the nearly universal human tendencies to embrace ideological tribalism and fall in love with our opinions. We often regard some of our beliefs—especially moral, political, and religious ones—as so integral to our identity that we experience even good-faith challenges as attacks on our very selves. In other words, we tend to wrap our emotions tightly around our convictions.
In a certain respect, this is helpful, even necessary. We have to be emotionally invested in our convictions if we want to accomplish anything, especially things that require strenuous effort, courage, and sacrifice. It’s important for even mundane matters too. A parent can have a bare belief in the usefulness of getting the kids up, washed, dressed, fed, and sent off to school in the morning. But the belief by itself—as any parent will attest—is not enough. Without some emotional investment, the kids aren’t getting to school on time.
We should aspire to be people of conviction—people who are prepared to act, take risks, and bear burdens for what we believe is good and true. And yet, we need to put some distance between ourselves and our convictions. If we wrap our emotions too tightly around our convictions, we lose the ability to contemplate the possibility that a critic of our view might be right. We then find ourselves descending into dogmatism, if not fanaticism.
Dogmatists and fanatics purport to uphold the truth, but in reality they jeopardize it. They undermine freedom of speech and other basic civil liberties—the prerequisites of truth seeking—because they see no reason to entertain challenges to their beliefs. They know the truth more or less completely, or so they suppose, and therefore have nothing to learn from those with whom they disagree. They regard their critics as enemies of the truth and thus forces to be defeated, even destroyed.
[Arthur C. Brooks: A gentler, better way to change minds]
Relativism may seem like the antidote to this kind of thinking, but it leads to the same result. Relativists claim that there is no truth to be attained, and therefore none to be sought; that there is merely “your truth” and “my truth,” but no such thing as the truth, at least about questions outside the domain of empirical inquiry. In this worldview, people have no good basis for respecting one another’s freedom of speech, thought, inquiry, conscience, or religion. Why should we try to reason with one another about our competing desires or perspectives when there is no truth to reason about or toward? When there is nothing to reason about, there is no rational warrant for civil liberty. There is only power. “Truth” becomes the rule of the strong.
People of goodwill—intellectually and morally serious people of many shades of belief—share a desire to know the truth and live by it, even if that means giving up comforting or cherished convictions that fail to withstand critical scrutiny. To honor this fact is to reject relativism and absolutism. It is to regard reasonable people of goodwill with whom we disagree as friends who can help rescue us from false beliefs and better understand the truth.
This near collapse of civic friendship is a catastrophic threat to public life. Restoring it depends on our capacity to practice civil discourse, which in turn requires us to acknowledge our fallibility—deeply, existentially, and not merely formally. Without such an acknowledgment, it is impossible for people to cultivate the virtue of intellectual humility on which our civil liberty depends.
2026-08-01 20:00:00
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.
We often associate wonder with the faraway and the exceptional. But some of the planet’s most extraordinary spectacles unfold every day, largely unnoticed.
For a recent Atlantic story, the senior editor Vann R. Newkirk II traveled to Mexico to witness one such phenomenon: the annual arrival of millions of monarch butterflies after a migration spanning thousands of miles. The journey still puzzles scientists, but perhaps the most remarkable part is that it continues at all. After decades of decline, monarch populations are showing signs of recovery, thanks in part to years of patient conservation work across North America. It’s a reminder of how much the natural world still has left to teach us about not only what it can do, but what it can survive as well.
Today’s newsletter explores the many ways that nature continues to surprise and inspire us to look a little closer.
On Our Living Planet
The Return of the Monarch
By Vann R. Newkirk II
After years of decline, butterfly populations are rising—for now.
Paradise Revisited
By Helen Lewis
What Darwin saw in the Galápagos
How First Contact With Whale Civilization Could Unfold
By Ross Andersen
If we can learn to speak their language, what should we say? (From 2024)
Still Curious?
Other Diversions
PS
My colleague Isabel Fattal recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. “I was hesitant to go to Antarctica because I thought it would be uncomfortably cold. Heaven forbid! It turns out, I was so entranced by the landscape, the wildlife, the sounds that I was willing to stand on the open deck for hours,” Jessica D. from Phoenix, Arizona, shared.
We’ll continue to feature your responses in the coming weeks.
— Rafaela
2026-08-01 20:00:00
In one of my favorite videos of the singer-songwriter Glen Hansard, who died this week at the age of 56, he is standing in a small backyard in Cologne. It’s 2015, and he’s playing “Say It to Me Now,” which he performs in the opening scene of the breakout 2007 indie film Once; it’s a raw, wrenching plea of a song that explodes in its second half. In his guitar is a gaping hole: Hansard’s trusty cedar-topped Takamine—nicknamed “the Horse,” for its endurance—had been with him through many years of busking in Hansard’s hometown of Dublin, where he’d strummed it with sufficient force to cut through the din of the street.
Like its owner, the guitar had little varnish—hence the gash, which exposed its interior. Just as the performance begins to take off—mid–raspy belt, mid–resolute strum—the Horse’s G string snaps, and knocks some of its neighbors out of tune. Hansard coolly flings the limp string to the side, adjusts the tuning pegs with a grin, and sings on.
The sum of the video’s parts—the unassuming backyard, the battered Horse, the mishap taken in stride—tells you everything you need to know about Hansard. Many people might know him only as “the guy from Once,” which won him and Markéta Irglová, his co-star and musical collaborator, the Oscar for Best Original Song. But in this stripped-down performance, we witness the mastery and lack of artifice that defined his music and his life.
The simple scene also harkens to his origins as a street musician. Hansard said time and again that this vulnerable and often trying vocation, which he left school at 13 to pursue, turned him into the artist he was. Busking made him egoless, unflappable—the people’s troubadour.
[Read: A quieter, gentler music festival]
The tributes to Hansard from every corner of the music industry show the profound mark he left over his four-decade career. Songwriters cited his influence on them; collaborators recounted his generosity; his fellow Irishman Bono hailed him as the “voice of the streets.” Other artists recalled how he’d made time for everyone: He’d befriended legends, paid tribute to peers who had passed, mentored those coming up behind him. He gathered his fellow musicians, and they gathered around him.
It’s no coincidence that Hansard shot to fame in the United States with Once: He starred as an Irish busker who falls for a Czech pianist, played by Irglová. The film begins with an unbroken shot of Hansard on a dark, nearly deserted street, guitar case propped open at his feet, singing “Say It to Me Now.” It’s a vocal tour de force, by turns tender and volcanic, that immediately establishes him as a rugged bard roiling with emotion. When he was invited, with Irglová, to perform their poignant, Oscar-winning ballad, “Falling Slowly,” at the following year’s Academy Awards, he put on a nice suit—but still played his beat-up old Horse.
Hansard’s brush with Hollywood was relatively brief. He had many other pursuits: He was the front man of the Frames, one of Ireland’s most successful rock bands, and one-half of the heart-on-its-sleeve folk duo the Swell Season, with Irglová; he also put out a number of solo records. He was recording new music up until the end of his life, and had been busking for decades. His final, two-volume album, a career-spanning retrospective, was called Don’t Settle. He never did. He had just finished work on another record, which he’d hoped to release next spring. Knowing the amount of music he still had in him—that he was nowhere near done—makes his sudden death all the more devastating.
Even as his profile grew, he remained a street musician at heart. He toured with Eddie Vedder, performed with Bruce Springsteen, and earned four Grammy nods, but he appeared to have no interest in hoarding the spotlight; after all, in the parks and streets he had long frequented, there was no spotlight. Music, he believed, was a communal experience, something to be shared and reveled in. “The thing with busking,” he once said, “is, it has to be inclusive—it has to be an open act.”
[Read: How to make music popular again]
His life’s work, it seems, was to bridge the distance between performer and spectator. He often played surprise or impromptu sets in bars, clubs, or the street. At concerts, he could make a large venue feel as intimate as a pub; the amps, lights, and stage were all accoutrements. He invited friends to join him onstage, often doing a number with the opening act or local artists. The audience became his drinking buddies as he regaled them with stories and entrusted them with what felt like secrets. He often encouraged them to join him, and one another, in song; many of his shows included an a cappella sing-along of the Irish folk ballad “The Auld Triangle.”
Everyone who knew Hansard—and most of his fans did feel that they knew him—has their own story that captures his big-tent ethos. I have many. This is one of them: In August 2023, Hansard and Irglová took the stage at Manhattan’s Radio City Music Hall, a stop on a reunion tour celebrating the 15th anniversary of Once. Toward the end of the night, Glen appeared onstage solo and said that the night before, he had met a young musician named Gabriel busking on the streets of Boston, and had invited him to tonight’s show. “Come up and sing with me!” he shouted into the orchestra.
Gabriel emerged from the darkness; Hansard threw a reassuring arm around him and handed him a guitar. They stepped away from the microphones, their instruments unplugged; the two men were buskers again. They played “Say It to Me Now.” Strumming in unison, they traded beaming smiles, assuring glances. It was clear that Hansard believed that they both had an equal right to be on that hallowed stage—professional, amateur, old, young, educated, uneducated, it made no difference. It was the music that bound them to each other, and Hansard to those who loved him.
2026-08-01 19:00:00
Wisconsin has been the nation’s most closely divided state for a quarter century. Since 2000, only one presidential candidate—Barack Obama, twice—has carried the state by more than a single percentage point. But despite its status as a battleground, America’s Dairyland has never been a bastion of milquetoast moderation. Wisconsin has produced both a father of progressivism, Robert La Follette, and the red-baiting conservative Joseph McCarthy. More recently, its voters have backed the liberal stalwarts Russ Feingold and Tammy Baldwin as well as the right-wing Republicans Scott Walker and Ron Johnson.
Francesca Hong is keenly aware of this history. Indeed, she’s relying on it as she tries to persuade Democratic voters to trust her with the party’s nomination for governor later this month. “We’ve been a laboratory for democracy and a petri dish for conservatism,” Hong told me during an interview last weekend at a brewery in Appleton, a small city near Green Bay where she had drawn more than 200 people for a rally.
A state legislator and former restaurateur, the 37-year-old Hong wants to make Wisconsin the country’s biggest lab for democratic socialism. She’s running on an expansive platform that includes creating a public bank and public grocery stores; providing universal child care and free school lunches; paid leave and a $20 minimum wage; and many more favored policies of the progressive left. Hong has filmed campaign videos in restaurant kitchens and on soccer fields, and she’s often wearing a red bandana that evokes Rosie the Riveter and labor solidarity. Her rallies are punctuated by profanity—a fellow state legislator who introduced her on Sunday wore a T-shirt that said Fight the Fuckery—earthy musical acts, and hearty endorsements by like-minded local progressives.
With innovative ads and a grassroots network of more than 7,000 volunteers knocking on doors across the state, Hong’s campaign has shot out far ahead of more experienced and well-known Democratic rivals. (Wisconsin’s current lieutenant governor, Sara Rodriguez, dropped her bid for the top job amid a campaign-finance scandal; its previous lieutenant governor, Mandela Barnes, suspended his candidacy on Thursday and effectively conceded to Hong.) The most recent survey from Marquette Law School—the state’s most reputable pollster—found Hong with 38 percent of the vote in a five-way race, with more than twice the support of her nearest competitor.
Naturally, Democratic grandees are nervous. Republicans, eager to run against a far-left candidate in the fall, have pumped more than $2.5 million into ads aimed at boosting Hong’s profile across the state. David Axelrod, an architect of Obama’s two victories, likened the Democratic primary on August 11 to “a slow-rolling car headed for a cliff.” Whoever captures the Democratic nomination will face Representative Tom Tiffany, a Trump loyalist elected in 2020 from the northern part of the state.
The primary race has alternated between unusual sleepiness and extreme volatility. David Crowley, the Milwaukee County executive, suspended his campaign early in July for lack of support, but then jumped back in after Rodriguez dropped out a few weeks later. Wisconsin’s outgoing Democratic governor, Tony Evers (who, if not quite milquetoast, is far more moderate than Hong), stayed on the sidelines for months. Then, with Rodriguez out, he passed over both Hong and his former second in command, Barnes, to back Crowley, who was far behind in the polls. “There’s been a lot,” Kendra Koeppen Mulwana, the director of the statewide group Badger Youth Action, told me with a laugh. “It feels like there’s something new that’s happened everyday.” A few hours after we spoke, Barnes’s withdrawal jolted the race again.
With so much uncertainty, many Wisconsin Democrats have yet to make up their mind even after months of campaigning—a dynamic that, with Barnes out, could give Crowley an opportunity to make a late run at Hong. During a televised debate on Tuesday, none of Hong’s rivals went after her very aggressively. “It’s hard to understand,” Barry Burden, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me. “There was not really a sense of urgency from the other candidates that you would expect.”
[Read: The Democratic base is angry]
In a phone interview the day before, Crowley also declined to criticize either Hong’s record or her electability, telling me he was focused on “reintroducing” himself to voters. Yet that has also proved difficult with so little time left in the primary. On the day we spoke, Crowley had been scheduled to greet voters at the same Appleton venue where Hong appeared a day earlier, but he canceled the event after a tornado tore through the city. Christine Sinicki, a state representative and former chair of the Milwaukee County Democrats who is backing Crowley, told me that for Crowley to win, Evers would need to campaign across the state with him—something that has yet to happen.
The stakes of this election year are high for Democrats across the country, but particularly so in Wisconsin. The party has a chance to end years of Republican dominance in the state legislature and, if they also hold the governorship, secure a trifecta for the first time since 2008. Such an outcome could have ripple effects in Washington, because Democrats would then have the power to redraw Wisconsin’s congressional map and reverse a GOP gerrymander that has given Republicans all but two of the state’s eight House seats. That is one reason Sinicki is worried about nominating Hong for governor. “This is not the time to take a risk,” she told me. “2026 should be a Democratic year.”
When you ask Hong and her supporters how a socialist from Madison can appeal to independent and conservative voters across a state that Trump carried in 2024, they have a ready reply: AI data centers. Hong has proposed a one-year moratorium on their construction, going further than any of her rivals to crack down on development that, according to polls and interviews, is unpopular with voters of all political ideologies.
“I’m willing to stand up to bullies on both sides because I’m fighting for you” is how Hong summarized the pitch she’d make to Wisconsinites who voted for Trump. She told me, “I think that folks want someone to take a firm stance on another massive entity that’s trying to take control of people’s lives right now when people already are so uneasy about rising costs and feeling that it’s not enough.”
Data centers came up repeatedly as I spoke with Hong supporters at the Appleton event. Treston Kaepernick, an 18-year-old who’ll be enrolling at UW in the fall, told me he’s seen Hong signs pop up in his conservative hometown of New London and that he’s encountered Republicans who cite her opposition to data centers as a reason for their support. A Hong canvasser, Matthew Hennes, told me he brings up Hong’s proposed moratorium early in many of his conversations with voters. “That usually gets them very interested,” Hennes said. “From my personal experience knocking on doors and talking to the community, nobody wants data centers constructed in their backyard.”
[From the April 2026 issue: Inside the dirty, dystopian world of AI data centers]
The question for Hong, should she win the primary, is whether her crossover appeal on the issue of data centers can overcome what will surely be millions of dollars worth of ads from Republicans highlighting other positions of hers that might not go over as well with middle-of-the-road voters, such as her past calls to defund the police and abolish prisons. During last week’s debate, she said she did not support “the full platform” of the national Democratic Socialists of America and that although she is a DSA member, she is not running with its endorsement.
Hong is not quite as outspoken in interviews as she is on the stump. When I asked her how she differentiated herself as a democratic socialist from a progressive Democrat, she replied with a fairly anodyne answer that might have fit most Democratic officeholders. “Democratic socialist means that I want there to be more power for working-class people and the workers,” Hong said. “That the mega corporations and the billionaires pay their fair share. That we're unapologetic in taking on corporate interests and the status quo.” As for defunding the police? “I can’t defund or abolish the police as governor, and I won’t,” Hong told me.
Hong addresses what she calls “the E-word”—electability—head-on at her rallies. She cites her sprawling volunteer network and the people who tell her that their “Republican uncle” is supporting her, and the fact that she has more donors and more individual donations than Tiffany. “We’re already beating him!” she exclaimed at one point. “I truly think that in this moment, the more that folks doubt our power, the more power we can actually reclaim,” Hong said later in her speech. “When I hear from folks that there’s only a certain group that’s supporting our campaign, or that it’s fringe or left, one word comes to mind: bullshit.” The crowd roared.
But Democratic voters in Wisconsin are clearly thinking about the E-word too. As I followed Hennes on his canvassing route through Appleton, several people told him they liked Hong’s policies or were leaning toward her. But they also expressed some pause. “I like what she has to say,” Bob Molitor, a 75-year-old retiree, said, “but we’ve got to get a winner.”
Wisconsin’s history suggests the concerns about Hong’s statewide appeal could be overstated. Michael Wagner, a University of Wisconsin political scientist, pointed me to research showing that voters do not punish more extreme candidates. Her chances might be better still in a midterm election when turnout is expected to be lower than a presidential year, he said. “An ideological extremist can absolutely win a statewide election in Wisconsin,” Wagner said.
Democrats such as Sinicki, the former Milwaukee party chair, remain nervous about Hong because so much is at stake for the party. But for others, the favorable political environment for Democrats is reason enough to take the chance. “There’s not a better year to go all out than this one,” Kaepernick told me. With just slightly more than a week to go before the primary, most Wisconsin Democrats seem to agree.
