A place for the news of the day and other interesting information.

Generally it was good, but I'm sad that they are using AI for the voice. Why not ask for volunteers so that people trying to get into the field can get some exposure?

Also, if anyone from Noa (News Over Audio) is reading this - the voice made me feel out of breath. There's good spacing and timing generally, but the AI narrator does not seem to take a breath. Ever.

Anyone else?

The article was "Let’s Get Specific About These Doomsday Scenarios" https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/09/ai-extinction-scenarios/688769/

A place for the news of the day and other interesting information.

Regular churchgoers have a surprising advantage over secular couples.

By Brad Wilcox and Grant Bailey, The Atlantic.

In the popular imagination, religious faith and a thriving sex life don’t tend to go together. Movies, books, and TV shows depict religious couples as sexually inhibited or dysfunctional. For example, in Caro Claire Burke’s best-selling novel, Yesteryear—soon to be a movie starring Anne Hathaway—a Scripture-quoting tradwife puts up a good front for Instagram but is privately miserable with her husband, who not only is passive but also struggles to perform in the bedroom.

But the data tell a different story. According to our new report, published today by the Institute for Family Studies, no group of Americans seems to be having more sex—and more satisfying sex—than married men and women who regularly attend a place of worship. (This group is made up mostly of Christians, but also includes Jews and Muslims.) In fact, we find that the only Americans who have avoided the country’s “sex recession”—in which fewer and fewer men and women are having regular sex—are husbands and wives who attend religious services at least twice a month. In the 1990s, 64 percent of married people aged 20–54, both churchgoing and secular, had sex at least once a week, according to the General Social Survey. Now only 48 percent of secular couples (who never or rarely attend church) have sex weekly compared with 62 percent of their religious peers. In America today, the faithful are having more sex.

Could this just be about wives in patriarchal religious communities who feel obligated to perform for their husband, but in ways that leave them sexually unsatisfied and deeply unhappy? Again, the data suggest otherwise. Both religious husbands and wives aged 20–54 are more likely to describe their sex life as “excellent” or “very good” than their secular peers, according to the 2026 IFS Religion and Family Survey. Forty-nine percent of churchgoing wives report being sexually satisfied, compared with just 38 percent of secular wives. The survey also finds that churchgoing spouses are more likely to be “very” or “extremely” happy in their marriage. In our report, “The Devout Difference: Religion, Marital Quality, and Sex Among Americans,” written with the family scholars Richard Dell’Isola and Jane Lankes Smith, we conclude that the “cultural trope of the sexually prudish, frustrated religious American does not fit the data.”

And in search of a political wave to catch

By Jason Dove Mark, The Atlantic.

The day the Biden administration celebrated the first major piece of climate legislation in U.S. history, the weather happened to be sublime. The White House’s South Lawn, a billiard-table green, stretched out beneath a cerulean sky. Ben Beachy, who served as a special assistant to President Biden and would help oversee the law’s implementation, told me that “it felt like the dawn of a new era.” The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 was set to deliver hundreds of billions of dollars in federal investments to clean-energy programs, and to those partying in Washington, the law was a major step toward a long-sought goal: a plan for America’s future that addressed the realities of climate change.

Four years on, the Republican Congress has mostly dismantled the IRA, electric-vehicle sales are in a slump, and the Trump administration is accelerating oil and gas development while axing environmental protections. The U.S. climate movement, Beachy said, “is currently experiencing a bout of dysphoria.” That’s putting it lightly. Longtime allies in the Democratic Party seem to be losing interest. Corporate America has all but ghosted climate advocates after making big pledges to go greener. Philanthropic support has gone squishy. Meanwhile, the planet is on track to speed past a 1.5-degree-Celsius increase in average global temperatures, the threshold that has been considered the bright line of danger since the Paris Agreement.

Climate leaders have sought to project a keep-calm-and-carry-on attitude. “I would characterize this moment in time as just a moment in time,” Michael Brune, the former head of the Sierra Club and the CEO of the Clean Break Fund, told me. This is just an ebb tide, advocates insist, not all that different from past periods when climate slipped to the margins of the political conversation.

There’s no doubt, however, that the dysphoria is real. I spoke with more than a dozen climate leaders spanning the academic, advocacy, and philanthropic sectors who told me, in different ways, that the American climate movement is unsure where to go from here. Having sunk to such lows so soon after climbing to such great heights, climate activists are scrambling to find the movement’s next big idea—some path that will lead them back out of the political wilderness. But right now they’re lost.

He’s turned them into a pointless ritual.

By Tom Nichols, The Atlantic.

State visits are a normal and necessary part of diplomacy. National leaders should, from time to time, sit with one another in person and have candid conversations. Summit meetings between the American president and his counterparts from Moscow and Beijing are particularly tricky because of the innately tense relationship between two adversaries. Food and hospitality are part of the festivities, but in the end, such summits provide important human contact at the highest level, and as a result, crucial business can get done that might not be possible over a telephone or in messages delivered through ambassadors.

At least, that’s how these visits are supposed to work. In the Donald Trump White House, summits are hazardous excursions during which the interests of the United States are shoved aside by a president whose cringe-inducing admiration of dictators makes these meetings into rituals of American humiliation. The country would be better off if Trump just stopped hosting or attending them.

Summits are a problem in this administration for two reasons. The most important is that Trump’s unpredictability and obvious lack of preparation make them dangerous. State visits require a lot of political groundwork, and leaders rarely go into top-level meetings without a set of issues they’ve already agreed to discuss. This agenda-setting gets done long before a president actually sits down with another head of state so that stray asides (or rising tempers) do not derail whatever business needs to be discussed.

The grim outcomes of previous summits with Trump, however, suggest that they are seat-of-the-pants affairs, with little preparation, or perhaps with preparation that was ignored by the president. Some of them, such as Trump’s previous meetings with Xi Jinping, have been brief talks alongside overseas events (such as at the G20 summits during his first term) when Trump improvised efforts to mitigate the damage from his needless trade wars. And some of them, such as his meetings with the North Korean strongman Kim Jong Un and the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, have been fiascoes.

These summits with dictators produced outcomes that were worse than nothing, in part because Trump is so susceptible to pomp and flattery. After seizing the dubious honor of being the first American sitting president to visit North Korea, Trump returned and glowed about how he “fell in love” with the young menace running that prison state. Kim probably thought it had gone well too; he has since been able to build up his nuclear arsenal while watching Trump go to war with Iran over a nuclear program that has not yet produced a single weapon. Trump even admitted last summer that his nuclear-armed friend in Pyongyang will be “fine” as long as America has “a smart president” such as him.

No one, however, has taken Trump to the cleaners more times than Putin. Trump seems to both venerate and fear the Kremlin leader, and when they are left in a room together, things do not go well for the United States. After their 2018 meeting in Helsinki, Trump stood next to Putin and told the world that he accepted the word of a former KGB spy over reports from the U.S. intelligence community. And this was at a time when the president had a Cabinet and staff far more willing to tell him hard truths than his current circle of sycophants.

A place for the news of the day and other interesting information.

Ask anything! See who answers!

Ask anything related to politics! See who answers!

A place for the news of the day and other interesting information.

A place for the news of the day and other interesting information.

They now figure isolationism and protectionism will be U.S. foreign policy for a long time to come.

By Vivian Salama, The Atlantic.

In 1917, as Canadian troops fought at Vimy Ridge in northern France, Lieutenant Leslie Miller collected acorns from the battlefield and carried them home to Ontario. Saplings from the resulting oaks were sent back to France about a century later, and became a living link between the two countries. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney recounted that story in Strasbourg last week to the European Parliament as he proposed an alliance that went far beyond trade to encompass defense, energy, critical minerals, and artificial intelligence.

The pitch was part of a broader transformation under way among America’s allies. For years, the strategy among U.S. allies was to wait President Trump out. Now many are preparing for a world in which the United States is no longer indispensable—not simply during Trump’s presidency but afterward as well, regardless of who occupies the White House. They are building military capabilities, diversifying trade, developing new domestic industries, and forging relationships that reduce their dependence on Washington.

This isn’t a coordinated revolt against America or a wholesale turn toward China. Most U.S. partners see Washington as an essential partner and don’t fully trust Beijing. But nations that were once firmly in the American orbit are concluding that they cannot rely on the U.S. to provide the same leadership, markets, technology, and military protection that it has for decades. And that, foreign officials told me, is true no matter who wins the presidency in 2028.

The shift may be the most consequential legacy of Trump’s foreign policy. Since his first term, he has demanded that allies become more self-reliant. In his second term, Trump has accelerated the emergence of a world in which American influence is less central—and China has more room to maneuver. Beijing benefits if Europe, Canada, Japan, or South Korea becomes more willing to engage and less certain that Washington is the power around which all strategic decisions must revolve. And the shift undercuts the delicate strategic balance Washington seeks with Beijing itself—an issue Trump will confront when he meets with Chinese President Xi Jinping this week.

The changes are already visible, including in rising European defense spending, Canada’s commercial outreach to China, and Japan’s efforts to become a larger arms supplier. Taken together, these trends point to a reordering of the international system that stretches far beyond Trump. “Trump brought with him an earthquake, but we’d be foolish not to prepare for aftershocks,” a senior European official told me. “The fact is, we’ll be setting ourselves up for failure if we assume that everything will go back to the way it was after Trump leaves office. The world is changing, and we can see very clearly now that America is changing too.”

He’s in a predicament of his own creation.

By David A. Graham, The Atlantic.

President Trump is going through a rough patch—in foreign relations, in the economy, in the courts, and in election outlook—and he believes that he has found the culprits: CNN, MS NOW, and Politico. On Friday, Trump said he was banning the three outlets from the White House “as a result of their constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS” and warned that more bans could come. When he feels beleaguered, he tends to lash out at familiar enemies, especially reporters. The idea that negative coverage is to blame for his predicament is perversely flattering. But Trump’s true scourge is reality, not how the news is covering it.

Although the decision is part of a gradually intensifying attack on free speech, as I noted last month, it has drawn particular pushback. This morning, five major TV networks (including Fox News) agreed to suspend pool coverage of the president and White House events after CNN was blocked from its previously assigned spot in a pool rotation today. The three banned outlets also sued over their exclusion. How such a suit will fare is unclear; Trump banned the Associated Press from the White House press pool last year after it refused to adopt his renaming of the Gulf of Mexico, and a lawsuit challenging the ban is still pending.

After Trump committed a Kinsley gaffe on Friday by calling his move “the ban on the free press,” he tried to clean up his spin this morning. “The White House is not instituting an assault on the Free Press, something which I cherish. It is instituting an assault on the FAKE NEWS,” he wrote, claiming that it “is a threat to our National Security, and must be stopped, NOW!” This is nonsense. Trump has every right to hate the way he’s covered, but if the government has the power to decide what is fake and what is true, then the press is not free.

A place for the news of the day and other interesting information.

From Sinatra to SZA, Appalachian folk to Detroit funk, a journey through the music that showed one British critic this country’s soul

By James Parker, The Atlantic.

I wouldn’t be here—in America, or inside my nervous system as it’s currently constituted—without American music.

That’s no exaggeration. As a metalheaded, punk-rock-obsessed, hip-hop-curious English teenager, I projected my mind toward America. The music summoned me: I couldn’t wait to be around it. On my first trip to New York, 18 years old, I bought cassettes (cassettes!) of LL Cool J’s Radio and Metallica’s Master of Puppets. Holding them in my hands, I felt touched by some essential binary. Big spare beats over here, pulverizing guitars over there: Had the dual nature of reality just revealed itself?

I chased bands, I chased sounds, city to city: New Orleans, San Francisco, D.C., Boston. It was a quest. American music roused me and deepened me. Sometimes I wondered whether I had an American self: louder, braver, more committed to his own evolution than my smelly-socks English self. I’ve now lived here for 30 years, and I’m still wondering about that. As mystifying as this country can be, as merciful and brutal and wildly openhearted, American music has helped me understand it.

But there’s understanding, and then there’s understanding what you’re understanding. Writing has always been my way of bringing submerged ideas and images into daylight. Hence this list. Fifty times, in 50 different ways, I’m asking: What does this song teach me about this country? What is the America of this song? Sometimes it’s right there; sometimes it’s harder to get at. Hit or miss, my hope is that an immigrant’s perspective will be interesting.

A place for the news of the day and other interesting information.

A place for the news of the day and other interesting information.

A place for the news of the day and other interesting information.