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For over 75 years, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has bolstered American power and shaped the world order as we know it. But under President Donald Trump, its future is uncertain.The United States has spent the better part of a year telling its allies they’re on their own. Trump has threatened to annex Greenland – the sovereign territory of NATO ally, Denmark. He skipped the Munich Security Conference. And he launched the war in Iran without consulting NATO allies.Now, the president is asking for help securing the Strait of Hormuz. And European countries are saying no.How is the war in Iran testing the alliance? And how would a U.S. withdrawal from NATO reshape global power dynamics?Find more of our programs online. Listen to 1A sponsor-free by signing up for 1A+ at plus.npr.org/the1a.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Imagine you’re in a bookstore and you wander over to the fiction section. There, you find two shelves: one for human-written novels… and one for novels written by AI.That future may not be as far off as you think. Roughly 4 million books were published in the U.S. in 2025. That’s a more than a 32 percent increase from 2024, according to the trade magazine Publisher’s Weekly.It’s unclear how many of those books were written by AI, in part because software used to detect it can be ineffective. And the literary waters were made even murkier by the fact that at least 3 million of those 4 million books were self-published. That makes it even more difficult to know if they were written by human hands (er, minds).That’s not to say the self-published portion of the industry is the only part where this tech is showing up. Hachette, one the largest publishers in the U.S., canceled one of its novels, “SHY GIRL,” after allegations that its author used AI to write it.All this is marking a turning point for the publishing industry. How can authors ethically use this technology? And do readers really need new AI-authored books in a market already saturated with options?Find more of our programs online. Listen to 1A sponsor-free by signing up for 1A+ at plus.npr.org/the1a.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

It’s that time of the year again. Have you finished filing your return?Doing taxes this season has been particularly fraught – for both taxpayers and the Internal Revenue Service. It’s been a year since DOGE slashed federal funding and cut droves of federal employees. Those departures hit the IRS hard. Its leadership has largely turned over.Also, Republicans in Congress took back billions of dollars the agency had received to improve its systems. Then, they gave the IRS even more tax code changes to enforce.Can the IRS handle it all? And what do taxes – and a functional tax agency – have to do with the strength of U.S. democracy? We sit down with a panel of experts to find out.Find more of our programs online. Listen to 1A sponsor-free by signing up for 1A+ at plus.npr.org/the1a.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy