Make Me Smart

Keyed to President Donald Trump’s tariff announcement today, Kimberly and Sabri unpack some of the messaging about the impact tariffs had during the president’s first term and explain why many of thos...

The idea that the government should be run more like a business isn’t new. But with two businessmen, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, now taking a proverbial chainsaw to the federal bureaucracy all in the ...

President Donald Trump has promised that a fresh wave of tariffs on April 2 will usher in an era of growth in American manufacturing. But does history bear that out? We’ll explain how steel tariffs un...

The artificial intelligence cloud computing provider CoreWeave sold shares to the public today with so-so results. Because it’s the first major IPO of the current generative AI era, some argue that Co...

On today’s episode, Kai and Reema discuss the disturbing arrest of a Turkish national with a valid student visa at Tufts University and the effects these immigration detentions are having on political...

In all the talk about senior White House officials discussing military attack plans over the messaging app Signal (and accidentally invited a journalist to the chat), one detail is being overlooked: t...

The United States and Ukraine are weighing a deal that would give the U.S. a cut of revenues from Ukraine’s rare earth minerals. But Gracelin Baskaran, mining economist at the Center for Strategic and...

Most of us can only wonder what goes on in U.S. national security leaders’ group chats, but The Atlantic’s Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg doesn’t have to. Last week, Goldberg was accidentally includ...

It’s almost peak bloom in Washington, D.C., which means it’s time for our annual cherry blossom celebration! But first, some federal funding news: Columbia University will give in to far-reaching dema...

Not totally sure how tariffs work, who pays for them and how they’re collected? Look no further. In today’s episode, Kai and Nova answer these questions and more. We’ll explain how tariffs are applied...