Browse back issues of The Atlantic from 1857 to present
that have appeared on the Web.
From September 1995 to the present, the archive is essentially complete,
with the exception of a few articles,
the online rights to which are held exclusively by the authors.
How animals perceive the world, a return to Chagos, Steve Bannon, and a mad hunt for Civil War gold. Plus Jack White, how the U.S. has no nuclear strategy, dad rage, Ulysses at 100, one family’s doll test, downsides of beach resorts, and more.
Chasing Joan Didion, flawed forensic science, Ukrainian refugees in Poland, and how politics poisoned evangelical churches. Plus losing Medgar Evers, the words that lead to mass murder, Tracy Flick, Werner Herzog, chewing gum, primates and patriarchy, and more.
Preparing for the end of Roe, Europe’s ex-royals, tour guides to a tragedy, and how social media shattered society. Plus Winslow Homer, the myth of the liberal world order, a new history of WWII, ending mom guilt, the price of privacy, and more.
Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, an inmate advocates for his own death, finding empathy for COVID skeptics, and new fiction by Paul Yoon. Plus Death Be Not Proud, a Beat Generation friendship, lessons from Harry Truman, and more.
How to find happiness: the satisfaction trap, friendship, and changing your personality. Plus the betrayal of Afghan allies, the myth of ‘the Latino vote,’ bald eagles, Sheila Heti, Method acting, lateness, and more.
Trump’s next coup, the myth of voter fraud, Peter Meijer’s lonely stand, and what happened to American conservatism. Plus moral panic, Johnny Cash, U.S. money laundering, Milton, civil-war prophecies, Hanya Yanagihara’s latest, and more.
The autocrats are winning, the antiquities cop, death comes to the boxing ring, and France’s God complex. Plus the end of trust, the advertising singularity, BBQ chips, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, Mozart and forgiveness, new fiction by hurmat kazmi, and more.
The men killing America’s newspapers, how Slack upended the workplace, and the new meth. Plus how Facebook is a hostile foreign power, the engineers’ daughter, the collapse of music genres, Dostoyevsky, W. G. Sebald, nasty return logistics, and more.
Black TV writers and producers, converging megafires, America’s Atlantis, and the new Puritans. Plus portraits from Afghanistan, Colson Whitehead’s new novel, Peter Thiel, Nate Bargatze, Formula 1, guilt-free sex, and more.
One family 20 years after 9/11, how the creative class broke America, and remembering Emmett Till. Plus a 17th-century priest’s radical feminism, the problem with anti-racist self-help, morning people, why Millennials love dogs, Sally Rooney, Douglas Tompkins, and more.
Boris Johnson, the world Kodak made, six months in a meatpacking plant, and George Packer on the four Americas. Plus drinking alone, police unions, Top Gun, the war on Bollywood, an ode to procrastination, and more.
Why Confederate lies live on, Black America’s origin stories, Red Cross quarantine ships, Brett Kavanaugh, and new fiction from Morgan Thomas. Plus the Appalachian Elvis, Richard Wright, post-COVID fashion, Stacey Abrams’s fiction, flip phones, and more.
Return the national parks to the tribes, how we’ll remember the pandemic, a kidnapping gone wrong, and the women reinventing the Western. Plus American exclusion, Zoom justice, Andrew Yang, puberty TV, first ladies, giant closets, and more.
Private schools and inequity, fixing the internet, America’s reliance on special ops, and understanding long COVID. Plus new fiction by Paul Yoon, pandemic merch, Beirut after the blast, Kazuo Ishiguro’s radiant robot, Sam Sifton’s no-recipe recipes, and more.
Inheritance: Narratives of the enslaved, forgotten founder Prince Hall, the Voting Rights Act, and Anna Deavere Smith on forging Black identity. Plus Charles “Teenie” Harris, ultra-fast fashion, the Earth’s deep past, Caroline Shaw, hyperpop, nervous breakdowns, and more.
The pandemic endgame, the most American religion, and how Biden should hold Trump accountable. Plus Martellus Bennett, China’s rebel historians, new fiction by Te-Ping Chen, installment plans, suffragists, Martin Amis, and more.
The Tech Issue: The last children of Down syndrome, the most famous teens on TikTok, and can history predict the future? Plus therapy and parental alienation, why remote learning isn’t the only problem with school, Eddie Murphy’s return, the existential despair of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Adrienne Rich, and more.
The election that could break America, pro-Trump militant groups, niche sports and Ivy League admissions, and how China is rewriting global rules. Plus the last exit before autocracy, the making of Malcolm X, agony aunts, pandemic nesting, the Jefferson Bible, Kamala Harris’s ambition, British police shows, and more.
Making America again: The new Reconstruction, America’s plastic hour, and the flawed genius of the Constitution. Plus disaster and the modern city, Donald Judd, Black mayors remaking the South, Claudia Rankine, Hillary Rodham Clinton on women’s rights, and more.
How the virus won, America’s denial about racism, China’s AI surveillance state, what MasterClass really sells, and novelist Gayl Jones. Plus racial-progess myths, how protest works, Elena Ferrante’s latest, Erin Brockovich, looking for Frederick Douglass, Putin’s rise, and more.
Trump’s collaborators, the genius of supermarkets, the looming bank collapse, and unloved children. Plus new fiction by Andrew Martin, the end of minimalism, Big Tech and the plague, Kevin Kwan, Ai Weiwei on the pandemic, Lauren Groff on Florida, and more.
QAnon and conspiracies, the phantom papyrus, Russian election hacking, and the summer of Snowden. Plus sadcoms, the U.S. as failed state, and birds, with essays by Caitlin Flanagan, Thomas Lynch, Vann R. Newkirk II, and more.
The anxious child, the lawyer whose clients didn’t exist, fighting America’s opioid epidemic, and H. R. McMaster on what China wants. Plus friendship with Philip Roth, ending the office dress code, Joey Votto, Calder’s art, Robert Stone’s novels, and more.
How to destroy a government, tackling giraffes, and does Reiki work? Plus a Colorado murder, capitalism’s addiction problem, Michael Pollan on coffee, “premiocrity,” fallibility, weirdos, Hilary Mantel, and more.
The 2020 disinformation war, David Brooks on the nuclear family, #MeToo and the abortion-rights movement, and new fiction by Samantha Hunt. Plus trusting Nate Silver, the Supreme Court’s enduring bias, climate change and peer pressure, an ode to cold showers, and more.
Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony was damning. If anyone was surprised, they shouldn’t have been.
The portrait painted yesterday at the January 6 hearing by Cassidy Hutchinson, a top aide to former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, wasn’t simply of a criminal president, but of a seditious madman.
Even Republican members of Congress who have long supported Donald Trump told reporters, anonymously, that Hutchinson’s testimony was “worse than they imagined.” They were “stunned” and “left speechless.”
If they were, they shouldn’t have been.
According to Hutchinson, the president of the United States knew that his supporters attending the January 6 rally near the White House were armed—and he still wanted security removed from the area and the crowd to march to the Capitol. “I overheard the president say something to the effect of ‘I don’t f-ing care that they have weapons. They’re not here to hurt me. Take the f-ing mags [magnetometers] away. Let my people in. They can march to the Capitol from here,’” Hutchinson said. Not long after that, Trump told the crowd that stormed the Capitol, “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
If, after the latest January 6 hearing, House Republicans persist in their policy of pro-Trump cover-up, American democracy is in dire peril.
In the last few minutes of today’s January 6 committee hearing, Representative Liz Cheney presented evidence of possible witness intimidation. Several witnesses, she reported, had received messages from shadowy persons purportedly close to former President Donald Trump that implicitly warned of consequences to follow if those witnesses told the truth about his conduct.
That is one sort of attempted cover-up. The most effective cover-up of the January 6 conspiracy is not the one being organized in the shadows but the one taking place in broad daylight.
Everybody in any way connected to the investigation anticipates that if Republicans win control of the House of Representatives in November, these hearings will be shut down. Congressional Republicans who took the other side against Trump have lost their political careers: Liz Cheney is now a pariah within a party that has a place for Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar. The hearings happened only because the Democrats held a majority in the House, and the hearings will continue only so long as that majority remains in place.
Yesterday Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, told the House’s January 6 committee that Donald Trump knew rioters were armed, and urged them to go to the Capitol anyway. But the most surprising element of her testimony was her claim that Trump lunged for the steering wheel of his armored limousine and tried to force his Secret Service detail to take him to the Capitol. “I’m the f-ing president,” she said he told his chief bodyguard. “Take me up to the Capitol now.” The agent refused. If true, I believe this would be the first known example of Trump’s physically exerting himself when not on a golf course. It would also be the first instance of his volunteering to join a melee, rather than just letting one erupt in his name at a safe distance.
In many households, men think like helpers and women think like managers. A gender expert’s new book suggests ways for couples to escape that dynamic.
One of the exasperating features of everyday gender inequality is that couples can be aware of imbalances in doing housework, state a dislike of them, and yet fall right into them anyway.
The discrepancy shows up most obviously in the amount of time men and women spend on tasks such as cleaning and caregiving, including when both work full-time. Yet even many couples who pride themselves on a fair distribution of duties aren’t so balanced when it comes to carrying the harder-to-quantify “mental load,” the taxing work of managing a household and anticipating its many needs. (Same-sex couples tend to be more egalitarian, but can end up in lopsided arrangements as well.) Today, men in different-sex relationships contribute more than they did in the 1960s and ’70s (a low bar), but often take on a “helper” role under the “manager” role of their female partner, who’s saddled with noticing what must be done.
Most public servants who move into the private sector do so honorably, but I’ve seen the minority who go money-grubbing.
Two weeks ago, retired Marine General John Allen resigned as the head of the prestigious Washington think tank the Brookings Institution, following revelations of what federal prosecutors allege was his unregistered lobbying for the government of Qatar. I briefly worked with Allen in the Obama administration, and his record of public service is lengthy and admirable. But after reading through both the court documents and media reporting on what happened, the problem that most worries me is what I perceive to be a dangerous sense of entitlement among some of our most senior public servants.
That sense of entitlement undermines the esteem in which the American public holds its institutions. As the Tufts University professor Dan Drezner noted of the affair in comments to Politico: Retired military officers “feel like they’re making up for lost time. And the problem is because they’ve been in the military world, they have no idea what the rules are.”
A cryptic utterance from a supposed spambot never lost its relevance.
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Though everybody complains about Twitter, no one can deny that it has brought some amazing phrases into our lives—things we can’t imagine having read in any other place, or at any other time in history.
Near the top of any list of the most treasured sentence fragments posted there, the now-defunct account @Horse_ebooks would have several entries. Twitter users still recirculate strange classics like “(using fingers to indicate triangular shape) SMELL SMELL SMELL GOOD NEW NEW NEW slice drink MATCH SPARKLER (thrown in air) STARS STARS STARS.” But the best-known @Horse_ebooks tweet, posted 10 years ago today, was astounding in its clarity and salience. It described both the internet and our entire human world. “Everything happens so much,” @Horse_ebooks tweeted on June 28, 2012.
Cassidy Hutchinson’s account of Donald Trump’s behavior destroys any defense the president once had.
Updated at 6:28 p.m. ET on June 28, 2022.
Donald Trump knew the protesters marching on the Capitol on January 6 were armed. He knew they could do harm to someone. He wanted to go to the Capitol with them as they marched that afternoon. And he did nothing to stop them as they attacked.
These are the stark and rattling takeaways from today’s hearing of the House committee investigating former President Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, which centered on first-person accounts from the former Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson, who was deep inside the president’s inner sanctum in the days leading up to the insurrection and that day.
By the morning of January 6, Trump’s attempts to steal the election had largely failed. Every lawsuit had foundered, every state-level ploy seemed to have stalled, and Vice President Mike Pence had declared that he would not engage in chicanery concocted by the attorney John Eastman and his confederates. There was one last hope: somehow disrupting Congress’s certification of the result.
The great “convergence” of the mid-20th century may have been an anomaly.
It may be time to stop talking about “red” and “blue” America. That’s the provocative conclusion of Michael Podhorzer, a longtime political strategist for labor unions and the chair of the Analyst Institute, a collaborative of progressive groups that studies elections. In a private newsletter that he writes for a small group of activists, Podhorzer recently laid out a detailed case for thinking of the two blocs as fundamentally different nations uneasily sharing the same geographic space.
“When we think about the United States, we make the essential error of imagining it as a single nation, a marbled mix of Red and Blue people,” Podhorzer writes. “But in truth, we have never been one nation. We are more like a federated republic of two nations: Blue Nation and Red Nation. This is not a metaphor; it is a geographic and historical reality.”
My daughter-in-law is a wonderful young woman, but we do not see eye to eye on anything.
The trouble started soon after she and my son became engaged. Before the engagement, she acted like she wanted to be my new best friend or for me to be her “surrogate mom.” As soon as she had a ring, the switch flipped! She found fault with everything I said or did, and had my son call me and correct me for her, to the point of asking me to change my outward appearance and mode of clothing to suit her idea of how I should behave. According to her, via my son, I didn’t dress appropriately for my age, 50ish. So now I buy my clothes two sizes too big, and have sworn off glitter, rhinestones, and sequins, even though I love sparkly clothing. I have also toned down my otherwise sedate makeup routine.
For the first time, COVID vaccines are getting an update in the U.S. But Americans still need to be persuaded to take them.
In one sense, this is how it was always supposed to go: When viruses evolve, vaccines should follow, and sometimes try to leap ahead. The COVID-19 shots that the U.S. has used to inoculate hundreds of millions of people are simply so new that they’ve never had to undergo a metamorphosis; up until now, their original-recipe ingredients have stood up to SARS-CoV-2 well enough. But the virus they fight has changed quite radically, and this fall, the vaccines will finally, finally follow suit.
Today, an advisory committee to the FDA recommended that our current slate of shots be updated to include a piece of an Omicron subvariant, with the aim of better tailoring the vaccine to the coronavirus variants that could trouble us this fall. Neither the agency nor its outside expert panel has yet reached consensus on which version of Omicron will be the best choice, and whether the next round of shots will still contain the original version of the virus as well. Regardless, a new formulation with any bit of Omicron will constitute a bet that these ingredients will better protect people than another dose of the original vaccine recipe, whose protective powers have been fading for many months.