Study: Tai Chi Increases Brain Size, Boosts Memory, May Delay Dementia

When Your Child Is a Psychopath

Barbara Bradley Hagerty

The condition has long been considered untreatable. Experts can spot it in a child as young as 3 or 4. But a new clinical approach offers hope.

This is a good day, Samantha tells me: 10 on a scale of 10. We’re sitting in a conference room at the San Marcos Treatment Center, just south of Austin, Texas, a space that has witnessed countless difficult conversations between troubled children, their worried parents, and clinical therapists. But today promises unalloyed joy. Samantha’s mother is visiting from Idaho, as she does every six weeks, which means lunch off campus and an excursion to Target. The girl needs supplies: new jeans, yoga pants, nail polish.

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At 11, Samantha is just over 5 feet tall and has wavy black hair and a steady gaze. She flashes a smile when I ask about her favorite subject (history), and grimaces when I ask about her least favorite (math). She seems poised and cheerful, a normal preteen. But when we steer into uncomfortable territory—the events that led her to this juvenile-treatment facility nearly 2,000 miles from her family—Samantha hesitates and looks down at her hands. “I wanted the whole world to myself,” she says. “So I made a whole entire book about how to hurt people.”

All photos courtesy of Alex Tizon and his family

My Family’s Slave

Alex Tizon

She lived with us for 56 years. She raised me and my siblings without pay. I was 11, a typical American kid, before I realized who she was.

The ashes filled a black plastic box about the size of a toaster. It weighed three and a half pounds. I put it in a canvas tote bag and packed it in my suitcase this past July for the transpacific flight to Manila. From there I would travel by car to a rural village. When I arrived, I would hand over all that was left of the woman who had spent 56 years as a slave in my family’s household.

The Real Reasons for Marvel Comics’ Woes

Asher Elbein

A recent push for diversity has been blamed for weak print sales, but the company’s decades-old business practices are the true culprit.

Marvel Comics has been having a rough time lately. Readers and critics met last year’s Civil War 2—a blockbuster crossover event (and a spiritual tie-in to the year’s big Marvel movie)—with disinterest and scorn. Two years of plummeting print comics sales culminated in a February during which only one series managed to sell over 50,000 copies. Three crossover events designed to pump up excitement came and went with little fanfare, while the lead-up to 2017’s blockbuster crossover Secret Empire—where a fascist Captain America subverts and conquers the United States—sparked such a negative response that the company later put out a statement imploring readers to buy the whole thing before judging it. On March 30, a battered Marvel decided to try and get to the bottom of the problem with a retailer summit—and promptly stuck its foot in its mouth.

An Apple employee poses with a personal computer in 1986. — Corbis Historical / Getty

Why American Workers Now Dress So Casually

Deirdre Clemente

The office was, until a few decades ago, the last stronghold of fashion formality. Silicon Valley changed that.

Americans began the 20th century in bustles and bowler hats and ended it in velour sweatsuits and flannel shirts—the most radical shift in dress standards in human history. At the center of this sartorial revolution was business casual, a genre of dress that broke the last bastion of formality—office attire—to redefine the American wardrobe.

Born in Silicon Valley in the early 1980s, business casual consists of khaki pants, sensible shoes, and button-down collared shirts. By the time it was mainstream, in the 1990s, it flummoxed HR managers and employees alike. “Welcome to the confusing world of business casual,” declared a fashion writer for the Chicago Tribune in 1995. With time and some coaching, people caught on. Today, though, the term “business casual” is nearly obsolete for describing the clothing of a workforce that includes many who work from home in yoga pants, put on a clean T-shirt for a Skype meeting, and don’t always go into the office.

Trump pauses during his comments about the attack in Manchester, England. — Jonathan Ernst / Reuters

What Trump Reveals by Calling Terrorists 'Losers'

Peter Beinart

Why is the president putting ISIS in the same category in which he places Rosie O’Donnell?

Donald Trump has coined a term to describe terrorists like those who murdered 22 people on Monday in Manchester: “Losers.” White House officials claim he came up with it on his own.

That’s not surprising. As USA Today has noted, “losers” is Trump’s go-to epithet. He’s applied the term to the Standard & Poor’s credit-ratings agency, Rosie O’Donnell, George Will, Cher, Salon, Huffington Post, Karl Rove, Graydon Carter, Marc Cuban, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, the Club for Growth, Anna Navarro, The New York Daily News, a Scottish farmer who tried to keep him from building a golf course, and the Republican Party, among others. Maybe the term will prove effective in undermining the aura of rebellious cool that attracts some young Muslims to ISIS, as my Atlantic colleague Uri Friedman suggests, although I have my doubts about Trump’s ability to arbitrate what young Muslims find hip.

A World Without People

Alan Taylor

For a number of reasons, natural and human, people have abandoned many places around the world.

For a number of reasons, natural and human, people have evacuated or otherwise abandoned many places around the world—large and small, old and new. Gathering images of deserted areas into a single photo essay, one can get a sense of what the world might look like if humans were to suddenly vanish from the planet. Collected here are recent scenes from abandoned construction projects, industrial disaster zones, blighted urban neighborhoods, towns where residents left to escape violence or natural disasters, derelict Olympic venues, ghost towns, and more.

What ISIS Really Wants

Graeme Wood

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

The Trump Organization Says It's 'Not Practical' to Comply With the Emoluments Clause

Russell Berman

The president’s business tells lawmakers it is too difficult to track all its foreign revenue in accordance with constitutional requirements, and it hasn’t asked Congress for a permission slip.

Days before taking office, Donald Trump said his company would donate all profits from foreign governments to the U.S. Treasury, part of an effort to avoid even the appearance of a conflict with the Constitution’s emoluments clause.

Now, however, the Trump Organization is telling Congress that determining exactly how much of its profits come from foreign governments is simply more trouble than it’s worth.

In response to a document request from the House Oversight Committee, Trump’s company sent a copy of an eight-page pamphlet detailing how it plans to track payments it receives from foreign governments at the firm’s many hotels, golf courses, and restaurants across the globe. But while the Trump Organization said it would set aside all money it collects from customers that identify themselves as representing a foreign government, it would not undertake a more intensive effort to determine if a payment would violate the Constitution’s prohibition on public office holders accepting an “emolument” from a foreign state.

Pope Francis, Trump Whisperer?

Emma Green

What started as a cold meeting between the pontiff and the U.S. president turned friendly after a brief closed-door discussion.

Meeting Pope Francis can really mess with a guy. The day after then-House Speaker John Boehner met with the pope during his visit to the U.S. in 2015, the Republican politician tearfully resigned. The former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly spent the morning of his last day with the network in Rome, where he met Francis in the Vatican receiving line.

Depressed liberals who hate President Trump and (incorrectly) see Pope Francis as a global avatar for their progressive agenda might have hoped something similar would go down during the meeting between the two leaders at the Vatican on Wednesday. It’s unlikely that their wishful thinking will come to pass, but the two men seem to have warmed to one another during their visit. The Italian newspaper La Stampa noted the tension in the room when the meeting began: Posing for press photos, “Trump smiled, Bergoglio a little less,” they said, referring to Francis by his given name. After a half-hour-long closed-door meeting, though, “the slightly tense climate that marked the beginning of the visit melted,” the newspaper reported. By the end of the visit, members of the two delegations were joking and laughing. “I will not forget what you said,” Trump said.

What If Politicians Studied the Social Fabric Like Economists Studied GDP?

Annie Lowrey

One of Washington’s most conservative legislators on an age of polarization, inequality, and fragmentation

Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah is worried. He is worried about the country’s economic trajectory, given rising inequality, the shrinking of the middle class, and the persistence of intergenerational poverty. And he is worried about its social trajectory, based on growing political and regional polarization, rising distrust in institutions, falling rates of marriage and churchgoing, the dearth of mixed-income neighborhoods, and declining voter turnout.

While he and other legislators seemed to have a decent understanding of the former, Lee told me, sitting in his Senate office last week, they had less data on the latter—trends that in his mind signaled a nationwide loss of social capital. “We have a lot of metrics by which we gauge the health of the economy and the health of the government,” he said. “There are other things that reflect the health of the country in one way or another that aren’t as frequently measured and even less frequently discussed by policymakers.”

Why America Needs a Slavery Museum

Paul Rosenfeld

A wealthy white lawyer has spent 16 years and millions of dollars turning the Whitney Plantation into a memorial to the nation's past.

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A New Understanding of the Childhood Brain

Nicolas Pollock

Uncovering the link between early trauma and lifelong illness

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Why the White, Working Class Voted for Trump

Tynesha Foreman and Nicolas Pollock

New data and analysis from PRRI and The Atlantic suggests that it was cultural anxiety more than economic distress that fueled white, working-class support for Trump.

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Study: Tai Chi Increases Brain Size, Boosts Memory, May Delay Dementia

About the Author

Most Popular

When Your Child Is a Psychopath

My Family’s Slave

The Real Reasons for Marvel Comics’ Woes

Why American Workers Now Dress So Casually

What Trump Reveals by Calling Terrorists 'Losers'

A World Without People

What ISIS Really Wants

The Trump Organization Says It's 'Not Practical' to Comply With the Emoluments Clause

Pope Francis, Trump Whisperer?

What If Politicians Studied the Social Fabric Like Economists Studied GDP?

Why America Needs a Slavery Museum

A New Understanding of the Childhood Brain

Why the White, Working Class Voted for Trump

Study: Tai Chi Increases Brain Size, Boosts Memory, May Delay Dementia

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About the Author

Most Popular

When Your Child Is a Psychopath

My Family’s Slave

The Real Reasons for Marvel Comics’ Woes

Why American Workers Now Dress So Casually

What Trump Reveals by Calling Terrorists 'Losers'

A World Without People

What ISIS Really Wants

The Trump Organization Says It's 'Not Practical' to Comply With the Emoluments Clause

Pope Francis, Trump Whisperer?

What If Politicians Studied the Social Fabric Like Economists Studied GDP?

Why America Needs a Slavery Museum

A New Understanding of the Childhood Brain

Why the White, Working Class Voted for Trump