Table of contents for February 27-March 6, 2026 in Newsweek

1962 “Just a few years ago, any public suggestion that a vast segment of American technology and brain power was soon to be engaged in the task of sending men to the moon sounded like sheer lunacy,” Newsweek wrote during the early days of the Apollo program, NASA’s first mission to land humans on the Moon. Today, NASA’s lunar ambitions are broader and more complex. Artemis II, the first crewed mission of the Artemis program, is now targeting a March launch after being pushed back from early February, and will send four astronauts on a 10-day, roughly 683,500-mile journey around the Moon. The mission is designed to test life-support, navigation and communications systems beyond Earth’s orbit, paving the way for future landings near the Moon’s south pole and a sustained…

LOOKING UP ABOVE UKRAINE’S SNAKING FRONT LINES, HIGH ALTITUDE drones zip toward far-away targets while others hover lower—some buzzing right above the heads of soldiers on the contact line, searching for the next target. “In general, there is constant activity in the air almost everywhere,” says one Ukrainian soldier currently fighting on the front line. He declined to provide his name or any details about where is deployed in the battle against Russian troops, as he was not authorized to speak. Real-life Star Wars, he remarks, is “unfolding right now.” Drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles, have arguably become the best-known characteristic of the now four-year-long Russia-Ukraine war. UAVs are responsible for 80 percent of Ukrainian strikes on Russian targets, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said earlier this year. Most of these…

OVER SUPER BOWL WEEKEND, DEMO-crats recorded another impressive special election victory. In a race to represent Louisiana state House District 60, Democratic candidate Chasity Verret Martinez won by 24 points after President Donald Trump had carried the district by 13 points in 2024. The 37-point swing wasn’t an anomaly. In Texas, Democrat Taylor Rehmet flipped Senate District 9 in a January special election, winning by 14 points, a 31-point swing from Trump’s victory in 2024. Since Trump took office, similar patterns have emerged in special elections across Georgia, Mississippi, Pennsylvania and Iowa: prior to Martinez’s win, Democrats flipped eight Republican seats with an average swing of 19 points. Looking toward the 2026 midterms, polling of the generic ballot shows 48 percent of voters would back a “Democratic candidate” compared with…

Best Picture We don’t mean to kill the suspense, but the top race appears to be all but locked up. Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another was almost immediately canonized upon release and is heavily tipped as the favorite this awards season. Timely themes (like the sacrifices and shortcomings inherent to resistance politics) lend the film an urgency that critics and awards voters can’t resist; it also doesn’t hurt to have a high-wattage cast and a potent mix of nervy comedy and chase-movie suspense. —K.M. Best Director After decades spent as a critics’ darling, and helming a string of masterpieces— Boogie Nights (1997), There Will Be Blood (2007) and Phantom Thread (2017) among them—Anderson is positioned to win his first-ever Oscar. Well, make that his first three: If One…

■ Elon Musk has made orbital computing—operating data centers in space—central to the future of artificial intelligence, arguing that the next phase of AI will move large amounts of computing infrastructure off Earth. That logic underpinned the merger of SpaceX and xAI in a $1.25 trillion deal, aligning rocket launch capacity with the future needs of AI computing. A SpaceX blog post read, “Global electricity demand for AI simply cannot be met with terrestrial solutions.... To harness even a millionth of our Sun’s energy would require over a million times more energy than our civilization currently uses!” Space-based data centers’ appeal lies in power generation and thermal management. In orbit, solar panels can produce electricity almost continuously, avoiding the night cycles and weather constraints faced on Earth and simplifying long-term…

MOSCOW’S FULL-SCALE INVASION OF UKRAINE TURNED RUSSIA INTO a pariah state almost overnight, and it soon became clear that President Vladimir Putin’s assumption he could topple the Ukrainian government within days was misplaced. Russia’s 40-mile armored column stalled on the road to Kyiv, and Moscow instead found itself preparing for a protracted conflict against an unexpectedly resilient opponent backed by billions of dollars in U.S. and European support. Meanwhile, the Russian economy was hit with a withering U.S.-led sanctions regime, severance from the SWIFT international payment system and an exodus of international companies. The early years of the war marked an unprecedented period of isolation for Putin, before he later regained some legitimacy from parts of the international community. It was in this moment that China stepped into the void,…

WHEN YOU MEET SEAN PENN at his Malibu home, you get the man in his element. Barefoot, with black paint speckled across his hands from an afternoon spent in his carpentry woodshop, the actor settled into his living area with a pack of American Spirit cigarettes and his German shepherd standing guard nearby. There is a raw, grounded quality to the setting, and his decision to go without shoes mirrors his conversational style: stripped of padding and entirely unbuffered. It is a setting that reflects his current philosophy: “I seek to build the frame of the house and have the house really surprise me...if a script is great, you know, that’s a house with music playing.” Speaking with Newsweek Editor-in-Chief Jennifer H. Cunningham at his home, the two-time Oscar-winner is…

COMEDIAN JACK WHITEHALL IS TRADING PUNCHLINES FOR THE “GOOD TYPE OF NERVES” in the new series ’The Burbs. In this latest role, the British comedian navigates the “uncomfortable territories” of neighborhood life, a setting he finds surprisingly familiar. “I grew up in the suburbs of London—a very suburban street with a creepy Victorian house and a ghostly figure, who was usually just my father.” In this remake of the 1989 film, Whitehall and Keke Palmer play a couple who move back to his small suburban town, only to find it’s not exactly what they were bargaining for. “I felt very familiar with that world, even if it’s now transposed to an American setting.” Speaking of his father, Michael, Whitehall is so glad their reality series Travels With My Father continues…

MICHIGAN BRIDGE TOO FAR? Following President Donald Trump’s threat to block the opening of the Gordie Howe International Bridge, which links the U.S. and Canada, Republicans could face political fallout in Michigan, where the project is widely viewed as an economic boost. Local leaders have backed the crossing for its role in jobs, trade and supply chains, raising the risk that any delay could alienate voters in a battleground state the party needs to hold. WASHINGTON, D.C. PAYING THE PRICE Estimated profit hits of more than $34 billion globally have been linked to President Donald Trump’s tariffs, according to a Reuters analysis of corporate disclosures. Ford expects about $2 billion in tariff-related costs in 2026, while Barbie-maker Mattel saw its shares fall 31 percent mid-February, blaming tariffs and weak sales…

PEOPLE DON’T BUCKLE UP IN CARS IN KRAMATORSK. Iryna Nikolaichuk’s husband, Volodymyr, lunged for his wife’s hand when she went to clip in her seatbelt in a taxi weaving from the main train station of the Donetsk city toward the center. “No, we don’t do that here,” Iryna recalls him saying after she arrived to visit on a bright, sunny fall day back in September 2025. A seat belt in Kramatorsk is less likely to save a life than cost one—it would stop a passenger or driver from being able to escape the vehicle quickly if it got caught in the crosshairs of a small but deadly Russian first-person-view drone. “The rules here,” Iryna remembers thinking, “are something else.” Volodymyr enlisted in the Ukrainian armed forces in May 2025, leaving…

FOR DECADES, HORROR FANS HAVE WATCHED AWARDS SHOWS COME and go with rarely a mention of a genre that, in 2025 alone, grossed over $1.3 billion at the box office thanks to hits like Sinners and Weapons. While these films are traditionally relegated to the technical “basement” of the Oscars, this year, no one saw the jump scare coming. When the dust settled after nominations were announced for the 98th Academy Awards, the narrative hadn’t just changed—it had been rewritten in blood. At the center of it all is Ryan Coogler’s Sinners. This Jim Crow-era vampire epic didn’t just land a few nods; it became the most nominated film in the history of the Academy with a staggering 16 mentions, shattering the 14-nomination record previously shared by All About Eve…