MoveOn Supporter Brutally Attacked by Rand Paul Supporter

My President Was Black

Ta-Nehisi Coates

A history of the first African American White House—and of what came next

In the waning days of President Barack Obama’s administration, he and his wife, Michelle, hosted a farewell party, the full import of which no one could then grasp. It was late October, Friday the 21st, and the president had spent many of the previous weeks, as he would spend the two subsequent weeks, campaigning for the Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton. Things were looking up. Polls in the crucial states of Virginia and Pennsylvania showed Clinton with solid advantages. The formidable GOP strongholds of Georgia and Texas were said to be under threat. The moment seemed to buoy Obama. He had been light on his feet in these last few weeks, cracking jokes at the expense of Republican opponents and laughing off hecklers. At a rally in Orlando on October 28, he greeted a student who would be introducing him by dancing toward her and then noting that the song playing over the loudspeakers—the Gap Band’s “Outstanding”—was older than she was.

Zak Bickel / Katie Martin / Paul Spella / The Atlantic

The 50 Best Podcasts of 2016

Laura Jane Standley and Eric McQuade

From politics shows to horror series, highlights from a year of listening

Gone are the days of explaining what a podcast is: The arrival of money to the form and a continued increase in listeners has led to another banner year and the premiere of hundreds of shows to suit any listener’s audio preferences. Whether it’s entrepreneurial advice, video game breakdowns, or candid looks at celebrities, if you know what you want, there’s likely a show that offers exactly that. Finding them, though, can be a trial-by-fire enterprise that requires serious listening hours. The following shows don’t require you to love a certain movie or have a particular sense of humor. They don’t force you to become best friends with the host or listen to five episodes before you pick up on the “in” jokes. We’ve chosen the 50 best podcasts of 2016 based on their innovation this year, consistent high quality, excellence within their genre, and of course, entertainment value.

Remember the 'Thucydides Trap'? The Chinese Do; Trump Clearly Does Not

James Fallows

None

In my cover story in the December issue of the magazine, on how the United States should prepare for the possibility of a more truculent and repressive China, I mention the concept of the “Thucydides Trap.” The article describes the implications:

This concept was popularized by the Harvard political scientist [and my one-time professor as an undergraduate] Graham Allison. Its premise is that through the 2,500 years since the Peloponnesian warfare that Thucydides chronicled, rising powers (like Athens then, or China now) and incumbent powers (like Sparta, or the United States) have usually ended up in a fight to the death, mainly because each cannot help playing on the worst fears of the other. “When a rising power is threatening to displace a ruling power, standard crises that would otherwise be contained, like the assassination of an archduke in 1914, can initiate a cascade of reactions that, in turn, produce outcomes none of the parties would otherwise have chosen,” Allison wrote in an essay for TheAtlantic.com last year.

The American Leader in the Islamic State

Graeme Wood

John Georgelas was a military brat, a drug enthusiast, a precocious underachiever born in Texas. Now he is a prominent figure within the Islamic State. Here’s the never-before-reported story of his long and troubling journey.

At dawn on a warm September morning in 2013, a minivan pulled up to a shattered villa in the town of Azaz, Syria. A long-bearded 29-year-old white man emerged from the building, along with his pregnant British wife and their three children, ages 8, 4, and almost 2. They had been in Syria for only about a month this time. The kids were sick and malnourished. The border they’d crossed from Turkey into Syria was minutes away, but the passage back was no longer safe. They clambered into the minivan, sitting on sheepskins draped on the floor—there were no seats—and the driver took them two hours east through a ravaged landscape, eventually stopping at a place where the family might slip into Turkey undetected.

This Is What the Resistance Sounds Like

James Fallows

None

Governor Jerry Brown of California got Twitter-verse attention for saying two days ago that if Donald Trump shuts down satellite collection of climate data, “California will launch its own damn satellites.”

I’ve now seen the short speech from which that line was taken, thanks to a tip from reader CS. It’s remarkable enough to be worth your time. It’s a genuine fighting speech, with a tone that is resolute but positive, rather than resentful or doomed. It’s a rousing call-to-battle against the environmental backwardness and larger disdain for fact of the coming era, from a person who as he nears age 80 has struck a distinctive Happy Warrior tone of resistance. Happy, in its confidence. Warrior, in its resoluteness.

The Problem With Using Fascist as a Political Insult

Dominic Green

Fascism is in the running to be Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year. But it’s not the right word for the current moment.

The votes are in, the people have spoken, and the result is ugly. Merriam-Webster has warned that fascism could become 2016’s most-searched term on its online dictionary—presumably with even more searches than bigly.

'Fascism' is still our #1 lookup.

# of lookups = how we choose our Word of the Year.

There's still time to look something else up.
— Merriam-Webster (@MerriamWebster) November 29, 2016

This is a significant result. The chaps at the Oxford Dictionary may issue their Word of the Year by decree—this year it’s post-truth, or so they say—but Merriam-Webster is a democratic dictionary. Its Word of the Year, part of an annual list of the top 10 search terms, reflects what is on people’s minds—if only they knew what it meant.

Illustration by Mark Weaver; Photos by Bernard Hoffman / Life Picture Collection; Jack Garofalo / Paris Match; Sherman Oaks Antique Mall / Getty

The Four-Letter Code to Selling Just About Anything

Derek Thompson

What makes things cool?

Several decades before he became the father of industrial design, Raymond Loewy boarded the SS France in 1919 to sail across the Atlantic from his devastated continent to the United States. The influenza pandemic had taken his mother and father, and his service in the French army was over. At the age of 25, Loewy was looking to start fresh in New York, perhaps, he thought, as an electrical engineer. When he reached Manhattan, his older brother Maximilian picked him up in a taxi. They drove straight to 120 Broadway, one of New York City’s largest neoclassical skyscrapers, with two connected towers that ascended from a shared base like a giant tuning fork. Loewy rode the elevator to the observatory platform, 40 stories up, and looked out across the island.

Despair and Hope in Trump’s America

James Fallows

Americans are optimistic about the communities they live in—but not their nation. Why?

I have been alive for a long time. I remember the assassination of John F. Kennedy, when I was a 10th-grader, and then watching with my family through the grim following days as newscasters said that something had changed forever. The next dozen years were nearly nonstop trauma for the country. More assassinations. Riots in most major cities. All the pain and waste and tragedy of the Vietnam War, and then the public sense of heading into the utterly unknown as, for the first time ever, a president was forced to resign. Americans of my children’s generation can remember the modern wave of shocks and dislocations that started but did not end with the 9/11 attacks.

Through all this time, I have been personally and professionally, and increasingly, an American optimist. The long years I have spent living and working outside the United States have not simply made me more aware of my own strong identity as an American. They have also sharpened my appreciation for the practical ramifications of the American idea. For me this is the belief that through its cycle of struggle and renewal, the United States is in a continual process of becoming a better version of itself. What I have seen directly over the past decade, roughly half in China and much of the rest in reporting trips around the United States, has reinforced my sense that our current era has been another one of painful but remarkable reinvention, in which the United States is doing more than most other societies to position itself, despite technological and economic challenges, for a new era of prosperity, opportunity, and hope.

How Uncertainty Fuels Anxiety

Julie Beck

An inability to live with life's unknowns can lead to worry and distress.

After nine years writing Slate’s “Dear Prudence” advice column, Emily Yoffe has noticed some recurring themes: “Mothers in law, husbands addicted to porn, impossible officemates, crazy brides.”

Sometimes, Yoffe says, letter-writers say they’re prepared to abide by her advice, whatever it is. “I have people writing to me, saying ‘I thought we wanted three children, but I realized I’m happy with two. My spouse wants another. What do you think?’ What do I think? You know this is not an issue for me to decide, right?”

But decide she does, and people keep asking her to weigh in on their anxiety-inducing decisions, big and small, from planning for the end of life, to when to let a daughter shave her legs.

The OA Is a Bizarre, Totally Absorbing Puzzle

Sophie Gilbert

The surprise Netflix series is a strange but compelling mystery about a woman who returns after being missing for seven years.

The OA, which had a Beyoncé-like surprise release on Netflix on Friday, is a puzzle to be solved: a strange mashup of genres and story threads and dimensions that unfurls slowly. In the first episode, a woman in her twenties (Brit Marling) is spotted jumping off a bridge; she survives, but footage of her makes the news, and is seen by her parents, who rush to the hospital to claim her. They identify her as Prairie, who went missing seven years ago, and who used to be blind, but can somehow now see—a miracle she can’t or won’t explain.

To say too much about the plot is to spoil the intrigue of the show, which is more complex and layered than the premise might suggest. Prairie is a strange woman, childlike in affect but often unexpectedly insightful. She begins to attract a group of misfit friends and followers, to whom she tells her history, and the circumstances in which she disappeared. Cutting between scenes of her stories and scenes showing what happened to her, The OA expands in unexpected, sometimes baffling directions, defying many of the conventions of dramatic storytelling while keeping tight control on the narrative. If some of the more outlandish twists occasionally give episodes a vertiginous feeling, the central mystery of the show is intriguing enough that it carries viewers through.