Despite Donald Trump's promises, America has not been Made Affordable Again. This has created an immense political opportunity for his opponents. But Democratic lawmakers are failing just as badly to articulate an alternative vision. Instead, some of them seem to be trying to out-Trump the president with their own brand of 'slopulism''half-baked policy proposals that sound good only if you don't think too hard about them, and that would, if enacted, hurt the people they're supposed to help. Others are simply reheating the leftovers of Joe Biden's agenda. Few are reckoning with the fundamental problem that led to the party's defeat in 2024: an inability to prioritize the most important parts of its agenda and make the case that they're worth paying for. These shortcomings might not prevent Democrats from riding an anti-Trump backlash to success in the midterms, but they could doom the chances of any future Democratic administration governing successfully. Senators Cory Booker and Chris Van Hollen recently unveiled bills that would exempt most middle-class households from paying any federal income taxes. Booker's plan would more than double the standard deduction, to $75,000 per couple, and increase the child tax credit to be even more generous than it was under Biden's COVID-era expansion. Van Hollen's would essentially create a parallel income-tax system under which a couple's first $92,000 of income is exempt. His bill in particular appears to have broad support within the party, rolling out with 18 Senate co-sponsors and a slew of endorsements from major labor unions and activist groups....

A few years ago, I wrote in The Atlantic about my complete failure to run a book club. This group should have been a slam dunk: I'd recruited my best friends; we were all stuck inside because of COVID, yearning for distraction and connection; we were all women who love to read and talk about books. And yet we managed to get through only two selections, both of which I hated, before giving up entirely. Why was reading with my friends so hard' The librarians, professors, and booksellers I talked with gave me some clues: We hadn't agreed on a theme, and we probably met too infrequently. But the most memorable insight to come out of my reporting was the concept of 'reader's advisory,' which means a knack for intuiting which volumes specific people would enjoy. The phrase comes from library science, but it describes the kinds of interactions that happen in bookstores and on the internet, too. Another version shows up in The Atlantic's book-recommendation lists, including Rhian Sasseen's recent collection of books that demand to be discussed with friends....

Living organisms are surprisingly creative when it comes to finding their way into hostile environments. Microbes, after all, thrive everywhere from hyperarid deserts and hydrothermal vents to the stratosphere. Of all hostile environments, one might think the most unbreachable to be the laboratory, where populations of bacteria are stored inside tubes sealed with tight screw-caps and stacked in freezers at -80'C. Of course, normal evolutionary processes don't magically stop at the doors of the lab: organisms still mutate, fragile microbial species can still be out-competed by faster-growing contaminants, and parasites can still spread. However, vigilant scientists devote considerable effort to making sure containers hold what is written on their labels and, when in doubt, can sequence any part of a sample's DNA, discarding or incinerating undesired specimens. Still, interlopers persist. One organism that has been particularly successful at infiltrating microbiology research facilities is called '80. It is a bacteriophage, or virus that infects bacteria. Slowly but surely, '80 has been spreading. Researchers carry out experiments, make reproducible observations, and publish ' usually without ever realizing that their samples have quietly been contaminated with this phage....

Over the past few months, AI-based tools have emerged that enable scientists to design original antibodies on the computer for the first time. A year ago, none could reliably do this computationally. But now companies like Nabla Bio, Chai Discovery, Latent Labs, Manifold Bio and, most recently, DeepMind-spinoff Isomorphic Labs have allowed high success rates. There are even open source tools, such as BoltzGen and Germinal, that deliver similar performance. The rapid progress in antibody design matters because these molecules are among the most versatile tools in biology. Many medicines ' including Humira and Adalimumab ' are antibodies, and cheap diagnostics, including $1 COVID tests, rely on them as well. These Y-shaped proteins make excellent binders, as the two arms can latch onto proteins or other molecules and block their activity. Before these AI tools existed, scientists searching for a useful antibody would first need to screen billions of candidates in laboratory assays to identify just a handful with high affinity for a target. BindCraft, released in 2024, changed this. For many targets, a suitable binder can now be found after just tens of attempts rather than billions. BindCraft uses the AlphaFold 2 model, but inverts it: the model creates a protein structure expected to fit onto a chosen target, then converts that 'shape' back into an amino acid sequence that can be synthesized and tested in the laboratory....