The Atlantic

“I’ve been disabled for 14 years,” Jessica Slice writes, “but have never lived somewhere safe where I can use all (or even most) of the rooms.” She reports on the indignities of seeking housing when exclusion is built into the architecture. https://lnkd.in/ecByr5YM According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, 6 percent of U.S. households include someone who has difficulty using their own home because of accessibility problems. “Most houses lack elevators and ramps, and for years, builders had little motivation to include them, because most disabled people were sent away to institutions rather than integrated into family life,” Slice continues. For renters, the thicket of housing laws is complicated and varies based on where they live. In some cases, tenants may be expected to foot the bill for modifications; in other circumstances, landlords may be required to pay—but the requirements can include loopholes for changes that create an “undue financial and administrative burden.” Slice, for instance, spent months failing to persuade a property-management company to install buttons that would enable her to open the exterior doors of her apartment building. Even when landlords are open to making modifications or when disabled people can cobble together the funds to do so themselves, some updates can be difficult to implement, depending on local preservation requirements. Slice had to abandon her dream of building what would have been her first fully accessible home, after a neighbor started a months-long campaign against the construction, arguing that the house wouldn’t fit in. That neighbor hosted a meeting (upstairs, in a building without an elevator) where about 50 community members and a city councilor discussed how to stop the project. “Looking back, I’m struck by the fact that those meeting attendees were inadvertently paving the way for their own eventual exclusion. Bodies and needs change over time, and accessible housing makes it easier for people to remain in their home as they age,” Slice continues. “Yet the inevitability of aging does little to make the housing system friendlier to the disabled or the elderly.” 🎨: Matteo Giuseppe Pani / The Atlantic

The GOP has “mostly stopped singing the praises of American health-care innovation,” Jonathan Chait argues. “Indeed, they are taking a meat axe to it, slashing medical-research funding while elevating quacks and charlatans to positions of real power”:

When it comes to matching Republican gerrymandering, Democrats’ hands are largely tied—and the party itself provided the rope, Russell Berman writes. https://lnkd.in/ewbW7Bgc Republicans, at the behest of President Donald Trump, are moving quickly to redraw district lines in Texas and elsewhere in a bid to lock in their tenuous House majority, Berman explains. Some Democrats now want to match them seat for seat in the states that they control—but, having spent more than a decade trying to be the party of good government on redistricting, they may find themselves constrained by their own rules. “To boost the GOP’s chances of winning an additional five House seats in Texas next year, all Governor Greg Abbott had to do was call the state’s deeply conservative legislature back to Austin for an emergency session to enact new congressional maps,” Berman continues: “By comparison, Democrats face a much longer and more arduous process to do the same in California and New York.” In California, Democrats are hoping to put the question of redistricting to voters during a special election in November; if it passes, the new districts could be implemented for the 2026 election. The process in New York requires the legislature to act in two separate sessions, so a new map couldn’t take effect until 2028 at the earliest. “By then,” Berman writes, “some Democrats fear it may be too late.” Democrats never forswore the practice of gerrymandering entirely. “Indeed, their ability to respond to Republicans now is constrained in part by the fact that district lines in blue states such as Illinois and Maryland are already skewed heavily in their favor,” Berman continues. “It is fair to say that Democrats in New York and around the country vastly underestimated the willingness of the Republican Party to cross every line, break every norm, and do so with enormous speed,” Micah Lasher, a New York State assembly member, tells Berman. “We’re in a period of adjustment. We better adjust really damn quickly.” 🎨: Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Sources: zhengshun tang / Getty; CSA Archives / Getty.

“Upon closer inspection, Trump’s trade deals aren’t nearly as impressive as they sound,” Rogé Karma argues. “In fact, they aren’t really trade deals in the traditional sense, and they might not benefit the U.S. at all”:

“Virtually everyone agrees that people are becoming ruder,” Arthur C. Brooks writes. But though you may not be able to fix the broader trends in society, you can—and should—be polite for your own sake.

After more than two years of anticipation, OpenAI has released GPT-5. The model reveals everything about the company's new strategy, Matteo Wong writes:

When the greatest rock musicians of the 1970s needed an instrument—or a friend—Fred Walecki was there. Nancy Walecki writes about her father’s work: https://lnkd.in/eGWe45h2

The makers of the Instant Pot filed for bankruptcy even though their most famous product was still beloved by many users. Those two things weren't unrelated, Amanda Mull wrote in 2023. The Instant Pot's popularity helped seal its fate. https://lnkd.in/e3YbwC9p

“The most fragile sectors of our health-care system will be in danger of collapsing" once Medicaid cuts go into effect, Annie Lowrey argues. “And pediatric care might be first on that list.”

“The end of the liberal world order” is a phrase that gets thrown around a lot in conference rooms and lecture halls, Anne Applebaum writes. But in Sudan, it’s a reality. Applebaum traveled to the country twice this year, visiting each side of Sudan’s brutal civil war. There, she spoke with those who are already living in a post-American world. https://lnkd.in/ecZUpzCa Not that long ago, Applebaum writes, Sudan inspired American compassion: George W. Bush had deep links to the faith-based charities that worked in Sudan, and arrived in office determined to help; the Obama administration believed in America’s “responsibility to protect.” Both administrations invested real diplomatic and political effort in Sudan, largely because Americans wanted them to. But in 2011, attention began to dwindle—slowly at first and then very fast. After years of conflict, a sense of pointlessness—of meaninglessness—permeates Sudan alongside the physical destruction that has been left behind. “I felt this most strongly in the al-Ahamdda displaced-persons camp just outside of Khartoum—although the word ‘camp’ is misleading, giving a fast impression of something organized,” Applebaum writes. “Some 2,000 people were sleeping on the ground beneath makeshift shelters, or inside plain concrete rooms, using whatever blankets they had brought from wherever they used to call home.” No international charities or agencies were anywhere in evidence; only a few local volunteers with Emergency Response Rooms, Sudan’s mutual-aid movement, were there to organize a daily meal. “There was no school at the camp, and no work,” Applebaum writes. “The artillery fire, the burned television station, the melted refinery, the rapes and the murders, the children in the hospital—all of that had led to nothing, built nothing, only this vacuum.” In The Atlantic’s September cover story, Applebaum reports on how the forces behind Sudan’s war have destroyed the country. And what’s left, she writes, is anarchy and greed. Read the full story: https://lnkd.in/ecZUpzCa 📸: Lynsey Addario