Putin’s War Comes Home to Moscow
This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. Four years ago, President Vladimir Putin offered Moscow and its business elite a de facto deal: Support my war in Ukraine, and in exchange you won’t have to think about it. In the past week, that deal was broken. Not that Moscow was ever fully immune: As long ago as May 3, 2023, the first two Ukrainian drones to reach Moscow exploded over the Kremlin, doing no damage but revealing that the capital’s air defenses weren’t as stellar as advertised—and that the war wasn’t as far away as Muscovites assumed. Eventually, the Ukrainians shifted their efforts toward Moscow’s airports, using drones dozens of times to buzz the runways or circle the airports, deliberately creating travel chaos and expense. Last week, the whining noise of unmanned flying objects could be heard in the city of Moscow once again. On the morning of May 7, the mayor of Moscow announced that the Russian air force had shot down hundreds of Ukrainian drones aimed at the city. Two days later, Moscow was due to host Russia’s annual May 9 military parade, a celebration linked very intimately with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, who had revived this Soviet-era celebration of Stalin’s victory over Nazi Germany and his conquest of Europe.
Trump Isn’t Setting Vance or Rubio Up for the Future
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Donald Trump loves to pit his advisers and staffers against one another—many aspects of Trump’s persona on The Apprentice may have been manufactured, but not this one. Lately, The New York Times noted this weekend, this has played out as Trump informally polling friends and advisers on who would be a better Republican presidential nominee in the next election: J. D. Vance or Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Making predictions about how voters will feel by the 2028 election is futile, but for a long time, the front-runner seemed to have been decided within the administration. “If J. D. Vance runs for president, he’s going to be our nominee, and I’ll be one of the first people to support him,” Rubio told Vanity Fair last year. Prominent outside activists such as Erika Kirk have also thrown their lot in with Vance. Now Rubio appears to be gaining some momentum. The secretary of state (who is also Trump’s national security adviser) is suddenly everywhere, whether ringside with Trump at UFC fights, deskside in the pope’s Vatican office, or perched behind the lectern in the White House briefing room. As my colleague Matt Viser wrote last week, Rubio—who often seemed glum early in the administration—now looks to be having the time of his life. Pollster Sarah Longwell also reported in The Atlantic last month that MAGA voters in the focus groups she runs are expressing new interest in Rubio.
The DOGE-ing of the Humanities Is Being Reversed
Winning a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities can take months of preparation and can require multiple attempts. So last year, when DOGE officials with no humanities experience yanked the funds of hundreds of grantees using little more than a chatbot and a haphazard search for terms such as BIPOC and gay, it stung. “The NEH, NEA, Guggenheim, and maybe one or two other grants are considered just the gold standard for your prestige in the academy,” Elizabeth Kadetsky, an English professor at Penn State, told us. Her grant to research stolen Indian antiquities for a nonfiction-writing project was canceled last year. “Can you imagine if you win the Pulitzer Prize or the Nobel and they’re like, Oh, I’m sorry, never mind, you don’t have it?” A federal court on Thursday ruled that the grant cancellations were unconstitutional, potentially reversing, for now, one of the many moves made by the Trump administration to influence how experts uncover—and then tell—the country’s story. Despite Trump officials’ efforts to impose their values and version of American history on knowledge-making institutions, doing so may not be as simple as they thought, particularly given their slapdash methods that have now been called out by a federal judge.