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Route 66 turns 100 on Wednesday. The road, which was decommissioned in 1985, remains a nostalgic destination for road-trippers with its neon-clad motels and diners, trading posts and vintage cars.
This summer, photographer Matt McClain traveled the road’s full 2,448 miles across Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California. He shares his five must-see spots along the route.
Historic brick road in Auburn, Illinois: This might be an unconventional start to a must-see Route 66 list, but the 1.4-mile stretch of brick running through Auburn is unlike anything I’ve ever seen on a road trip. Winding through Illinois farmland, the brick road is incredibly striking.
Twistee Treat Diner at the Pink Elephant in Livingston, Illinois: The classic 1950s-style diner is super visual. It’s part of a menagerie of statues and other roadside oddities that seem ever-changing and evolving.
Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona: So much of what I find beautiful about Route 66 is the changing landscape. No place represents this better than the pastel colors of Petrified Forest National Park. Also, don’t miss the incredible Painted Desert Inn: an early-20th-century building that fits perfectly into its surroundings.
Oatman, Arizona: The historic mining town is truly a window to the past. The highlight of the experience is seeing the roaming pack of burros, descendants of the town’s original working animals that assisted miners. One cautionary note: The path leading into Oatman is a harrowing, switchback mountain road.
Santa Monica Pier in California: Symbolically, the pier represents the conclusion of Route 66. It fully embodies the kitsch that permeates many stretches of the historic route.
President Donald Trump praised Joe Biden as a president he believed “will be true to yourself and the American people” in a letter he left Biden upon leaving the White House in January 2021.
The two-page letter, which has been kept private for almost six years, will be published in Biden’s upcoming memoir “Promise Me, America.”
“Many presidents have come and gone who simply governed as Republicans or Democrats,” Trump wrote, according to a copy seen by the Associated Press.
“Largely, they did not change history, they were just swept along in its relentless tide. This will not happen to you because I know how much you love the American people.”
The warm tone marks a sharp contrast to Trump’s public comments in the months prior, in which he attacked Biden and falsely claimed the 2020 election was stolen from him.
The letter, addressed “To ‘46,’” referencing Biden as the 46th president, was handwritten in black Sharpie on White House stationery. At the time, Biden described it as “very generous,” but declined to reveal its contents.
The letter continued a tradition started by President Ronald Reagan in 1989. Biden returned the gesture and left Trump a letter before leaving office in 2025.
A Reuters-Ipsos poll sheds some light on President Donald Trump’s influence within the Republican Party after Democrats’ sweeping midterm victories last week.
Fifty-two percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents want the party’s next presidential nominee to “take a different approach to governing as Trump,” while 46 percent prefer “a similar approach” to Trump.
While this specific poll question was not asked before, the results suggest a shift from similar questions before the midterms. A Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll last month found that 61 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents wanted GOP leaders to “follow Trump’s leadership,” while 37 percent wanted “a different direction.”
The new poll also found Democrats divided over whether former vice president Kamala Harris would be a good choice to lead the party’s ticket in 2028. Some 45 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents said Harris would be an “excellent” or “good” choice for the party’s nomination, while 49 percent said she would be “only fair” or a “poor” candidate.
The Reuters-Ipsos poll was conducted online Nov. 6-9 among 1,705 U.S. adults via the KnowledgePanel, an online survey panel recruited through random sampling methods. The margin of error for party subgroups is roughly four to five percentage points.
As climate-friendly, energy-efficient appliances such as heat pumps, EV chargers and induction stoves become more popular in U.S. homes, many homeowners have replaced their electrical panels — the box of circuits where the electrical wire from the street comes into the home — with a larger one to handle the increased electric load.
New research shows that almost all of those upgrades might be unnecessary. Existing panels, it seems, could usually handle the increased demand.
If you are thinking of upgrading your panel, ask these questions first:
How much energy am I currently using?
Homeowners are often using far less power than they think they are. See whether your utility will give you the data on your home’s usage, or look for a local company that can help you estimate your “energy load profile.”
Is it worth choosing a power-efficient appliance?
Some newer versions of some appliances, including EV chargers and induction ranges, are built with technology meant to keep power demand low, especially when there are other demands on the panel at the same time. These versions can be more expensive. But if they save you thousands of dollars by avoiding a panel upgrade, they might be worth it. They would be kinder to the overall power grid, too.
Can I find a qualified electrician?
Practically speaking, you can only skip the panel upgrade if you can find an electrician who says it’s safe to add devices to your existing panel. Consult qualified professionals.
Read more here about how outdated assumptions and many states’ years-old electrical codes are leading people to spend thousands on unnecessary upgrades.
A new study has found that two oceanic atolls in the Marshall Islands are some of the most intact ecosystems left in the world — teeming with life and a range of species at a time when climate change, overfishing and pollution threaten many other natural areas around the globe.
According to the study, published Wednesday in the journal Frontiers, the coral atolls of Bikar and Bokak in the northeast of the Marshall Islands have some of the most rich and dense ecological communities on the planet, with 15 seabird colonies, 266 groups of reef fish, 15 groups of open-water predators, and more.
“This is at the very top of the most intact ecosystems I’ve seen,” said Alan Friedlander, a researcher at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology at the University of Hawaii and one of the authors of the study.
The researchers surveyed seabirds, sea turtles, reefs and deepwater communities of fish — at times finding themselves surrounded by hundreds of sharks or dozens of blocky, half-meter-long parrotfish.
The atolls are now a protected area, ensuring that they will be preserved. “It’s a natural baseline,” Friedlander said. “These are windows to the past — what reefs everywhere used to look like.”
Good morning. It’s Wednesday, Nov. 11, and Veterans Day. The Post spent time with some vets with PTSD that resisted treatment, so they tried ayahuasca instead.
Yesterday, House Republicans blocked the impeachment effort against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. That story leads today’s edition of The 7 briefing. The 211-204 vote was a show of Republican unity after last week’s midterm losses and has eased pressure on Hegseth, at least temporarily.
Today, Trump will travel to Arlington National Cemetery to mark Veterans Day. He is likely to pass by the site where he hopes to build his arch, but opposition to the project is growing. This morning, The Post published an account of the fight to build or block the arch.
Elsewhere in the briefing, we cover Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s trips to watch Florida football games. We reveal which areas could be in for heavy snow this winter. And finally, could putting an air purifier in your bedroom benefit your health? A new study suggests so.
Read today’s edition of The 7 briefing here.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) is approaching the final days of his more than two decades in the Senate. But he’s still got some juice in him.
“I’m looking for a job, if you have any ideas,” Cornyn said Tuesday when asked by TMZ about his next steps. “People who retire die.”
Cornyn met with his successor, Democratic Sen.-elect James Talarico, this week to help with transitioning his office. Talarico will be sworn in in January. Cornyn, 74, said Talarico expressed interest in continuing with the Republican’s case work staff. Several Democrats who won in Texas’s historic blue wave have retained or added Republican staffers to ensure continuity in a state where they have not governed in more than 30 years.
Cornyn said he would cheer for Talarico’s success, as long as his priorities are in line with Texans’ interests. Still, Cornyn remained confident he could have kept the Senate seat red had he been on the ballot. Cornyn lost in a bitter primary runoff to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who lost to Talarico by 12 percentage points.
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