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.
Douglas Brinkley, “Tour of Duty”; George Soros, “The Bubble of American Supremacy”; P. J. O'Rourke, “The Backside of War”; Samantha Power, “How to Kill a Country”; Christopher Buckley, “Scrutiny on the Bounty”; Christopher Hitchens, “Pictures From an Inquisition”; fiction by Lavanya Sankaran; and much more.
William Langewiesche, “Columbia's Last Flight”; James Mann, “Young Rumsfeld”; The Atlantic College-Admissions Survey; Caitlin Flanagan, “Let's Call the Whole Thing Off”; Christopher Hitchens, “American Radical”; Philip Jenkins, “Defender of the Faith”; fiction by Max Apple; and much more.
Mark Bowden, “The Dark Art of Interrogation”; Mary Anne Weaver, “Pharaohs-in-Waiting”; James Shreeve, “Oliver's Travels”; Jonathan Rauch, “Will Frankenfood Save the Planet?”; Christopher Hitchens, “That Blessed Plot, That Enigmatic Isle”; Joshua Green, “Force Multiplier”; fiction by Nicolas Pizzolatto; and much more.
James Fallows, “The Age of Murdoch”; H. W. Brands, “Founders Chic”; Paul Davies, “E.T. and God”; Christopher Hitchens, “Where the Twain Should Have Met”; Tish Durkin, “Bad Debt”; Caitlin Flanagan, “Housewife Confidential”; fiction by Elizabeth Stuckey-French; and much more.
“Headlines Over the Horizon”; Robert D. Kaplan, “Supremacy by Stealth”; Alan Berlow, “The Texas Clemency Memos”; Adam Bellow, “In Praise of Nepotism”; Seth Gitell, “'The Democratic Party Suicide Bill'”; Christopher Hitchens, “Thinking Like an Apparatchik”; David Quammen, “The Bear Slayer”; fiction by Garrison Keillor; and much more.
Bruce Hoffman, “The Logic of Suicide Terrorism”; James Fallows, “Who Shot Mohammed al-Dura?”; Robert Dallek, “JFK's Second Term”; Richard B. Woodward, “Too Much of a Good Thing”; Christopher Hitchens, “Aural History”; Michael Kelly, “A Transformative Moment”; fiction by Lysley Tenorio; and much more.
Gregg Easterbrook, “Long Shot”; Timothy W. Ryback, “Hitler's Forgotten Library”; Jonathan Rauch, “Let It Be”; David Brooks, “What Whitman Knew”; Christopher Hitchens, “The Permanent Adolescent”; Bernard Lewis, “I'm Right, You're Wrong, Go to Hell”; fiction by Geeta Sharma Jensen; and much more.
Richard Brookhiser, “The Mind of George W. Bush”; Robert D. Kaplan, “A Tale of Two Colonies”; Bruce Hoffman, “The Leadership Secrets of Osama bin Laden”; David Brooks, “The Return of the Pig”; Christopher Hitchens, “Holy Writ”; P. J. O'Rourke, “The Veterans of Domestic Disorders Memorial”; fiction by Christopher Buckley; and much more.
James Fallows, “Post-President for Life”; P. J. O'Rourke, “The Bill Show”; David Hajdu, “Wynton's Blues”; David Brooks, “Kicking the Secularist Habit”; Gertrude Himmelfarb, “The Victorian Achievement”; Christopher Hitchens, “The Perils of Partition”; Jonathan Rauch, “Caring for Your Introvert”; fiction by Kimberly Elkins; and much more.
“The Real State of the Union”; Robert F. Kennedy Jr., “In Defense of Michael Skakel”; Patricia Stacey, “Floor Time”; Ron Rosenbaum, “Sex Week at Yale”; Caitlin Flanagan, “The Wifely Duty”; Christopher Hitchens, “The Wartime Toll on Germany”; fiction by Alison Baker; and much more.
“Variety doesn’t really matter to me. I would be perfectly happy to eat the same Caesar salad or peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich every day.”
Vern Loomis, a retired structural draftsman in West Bloomfield, Michigan, had a standard office lunch: a peanut-butter sandwich, with various fruit, vegetable, and dessert accompaniments. He ate this, he estimates, nearly every workday for about 25 years.
His meal underwent slight modifications over time—jelly was added to the sandwich in the final five or so years—but its foundation remained the same. The meal was easy to prepare, cheap, and tasty. “And if you happen to be eating at your desk … it was something that was not too drippy,” he told me, so long as one applied the jelly a bit conservatively.
Last year, Loomis retired from his job but not his lunch, which he still eats three or four days a week (now with sliced bananas instead of jelly). “I never stopped liking it,” he says. “I still do.”
A devastating incident in Afghanistan shows the perils of relying on Special Operations alone to fight the nation’s battles.
Both the Trump and Obama administrations relied heavily on highly trained Special Forces units to keep Afghanistan from collapse. The strategy has kept recent episodes of the 21-year Afghan War out of the public eye, but it is failing to stabilize the country and is straining the United States military’s elite troops, who serve back-to-back combat tours without an end in sight and disproportionately give their lives in service of a war the public knows almost nothing about.
When Kunduz, a major city in northern Afghanistan, fell to the Taliban in 2015, U.S. Special Forces were dispatched on a secret mission to help Afghan commandos recapture it. Under-resourced and unprepared, the soldiers found themselves in the midst of a pitched battle with conflicting orders. The story of how it led to one of the U.S. military’s worst disasters in Afghanistan shows the perils of relying on Special Operations alone to fight the nation’s wars.
“You can understand the predator wanting to be near the prey, but not really the other way around.”
To watch a bald eagle raid a nesting colony of great blue herons is a gut-churning experience. “The herons have a progression of alarms,” explains Ross Vennesland, a researcher with Environment and Climate Change Canada. “They start with a chortle, and quickly move to really hideous screaming as the eagle swoops in and lands on the nest.” The adult herons are usually forced to flee, while the eagle cracks open an egg or flies away with a chick. “It’s a pretty horrible scene to witness,” he says.
You’d think the herons would want to build their nests as far away from bald eagles as possible. But you’d be dead wrong. Research on the southwest coast of British Columbia shows that herons are deliberately seeking out nesting pairs of eagles—and building right next to them.
After growing up in a family that never lied, I spent decades being off-puttingly truthful.
When I was a child, my dad invented a game that I loved. Wherever we went, he’d predict what strangers were about to say or do. We’d walk into a store and he’d point at the salesman and say something like, “Watch this. When I tell him how much I’m willing to spend, he’ll immediately show me something more expensive.” The salesman did exactly as Dad had prophesized. When Dad took me to my first concert, he told me the musician would ask the audience how they were feeling tonight and, when everyone cheered wildly, would respond, “I can’t hear you!” It wasn’t long before the musician spoke those exact words.
It felt like magic, like Dad was telling the future or reading minds, so I asked how he did it. Most people follow a script, he said. I asked him why and I remember him replying, “Because they’re afraid that if they say what they really feel, people won’t like them. And they’d rather be liked than be honest.” I knew then that I wanted to be honest, regardless of the consequences. I stuck to that for the next 25 years. And there were consequences.
Quarantine is turning you into a stiff, hunched-over, itchy, sore, headachy husk.
The first time my hips locked up, the reason was at least a little bit glamorous. It was 2018, and I was returning from vacation in Sicily, which was the fanciest thing I’d ever done by several orders of magnitude. As I went through the motions—and, perhaps more important, the lack of motion—of international flight, my gait began to stiffen, and my stride contracted to a fraction of its former self. My body, settling into its mid-30s, rebelled against the hours spent in airplane seats, the nights in unfamiliar beds, the constant, awkward physicality of travel.
The same thing happened a few more times over the next year and a half, always after long-haul flights. I began to think of it as “airplane hip,” and the condition was annoying but temporary; I don’t spend much time on planes, and a yoga move called “pigeon pose” would stretch my stiff waddle back into a walk in a day or two. Usually, the discomfort was worth it—a small musculoskeletal price to pay for the occasional privilege of seeing parts of the world still new to me.
A new study proves that half of people are correct. The other is also correct.
This is a time of much division. Families and communities are splintered by polarizing narratives. Outrage surrounds geopolitical discourse—so much so that anxiety often becomes a sort of white noise, making it increasingly difficult to trigger intense, acute anger. The effect can be desensitizing, like driving 60 miles per hour and losing hold of the reality that a minor error could result in instant death.
One thing that apparently still has the power to infuriate people, though, is how many spaces should be used after a period at the end of an English sentence.
The war is alive again of late because a study that came out this month from Skidmore College. The study is, somehow, the first to look specifically at this question. It is titled: “Are Two Spaces Better Than One? The Effect of Spacing Following Periods and Commas During Reading.”
The handover of power was a solemn affair. There was no mistaking the new administration for the old one.
At dawn this morning, workers loaded couches and tables into a moving truck parked outside the West Wing. Men wearing white coveralls and carrying roller brushes and paint cans walked across the north driveway. Inside the White House, pictures of the 45th president had been removed from the walls. Only the hooks remained, ready for a new set of portraits of the 46th.
A lone Donald Trump press deputy, Judd Deere, sat in his small office, writing a note on a piece of stationery to whoever would be taking over his desk in a few hours. Deere was attempting to describe what it’s like to work in the building. When I looked in at noon, after the Trump presidency had officially ended, he was gone, his desk cleared. Even the magazine racks hanging on the wall had been emptied.
Cloth masks are better than nothing, but they were supposed to be a stopgap measure.
If you’re like most Americans, there’s a good chance you’re going to wear a cloth mask today. Doing so makes sense. It remains the official recommendation in the United States, and it is something we’ve both advocated since the beginning of the pandemic. Both of us wrotearticles as far back as March urging people to wear homemade cloth masks. We’re also the authors (along with 17 other experts) of a paper titled “An Evidence Review of Face Masks Against COVID,” which was just published in peer-reviewed form in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. But it’s past time for better solutions to be available to the public.
We first released the paper as a preprint back in April, and it took nine months to go through peer review. We’re happy that it’s published but, to be honest, we’re also deeply disappointed that it’s still relevant. We’d hoped that by 2021 supply chains would have ramped up enough to ensure that everyone had better masks. Cloth masks, especially homemade ones, were supposed to be a stopgap measure. Why are so many of us still wearing them?
The uncertain meaning behind a half-black, half-white, two-headed toy: An Object Lesson
The doll is two-headed and two-bodied—one black body and one white, conjoined at the lower waist where the hips and legs would ordinarily be. The lining of one's dress is the outside of the other’s, so that the skirt flips over to conceal one body when the other is upright. Two dolls in one, yet only one can be played with at a time.
The topsy-turvy doll, as it’s known, most likely originated in American plantation nurseries of the early 19th century. By the mid-20th century, they’d grown so popular that they were mass-manufactured and widely available in department stores across the country, but today, they’re found mostly in museums, privatecollections, and contemporaryart. In recent years, the dolls have seen a renewed interest from collectors and scholars alike, largely motivated by the ongoing question that surrounds their use: What were they supposed to symbolize?
The best shows of the 45th presidency captured the essence of an unprecedented leader by seeing past his act.
Late last year, at the end of my parental leave, I finally caught up with The Comey Rule, Showtime’s stolid adaptation of former FBI Director James Comey’s memoir about—among other things—being fired by Donald Trump. A cluster of TV stars play the civil servants elevated by the MAGA internet into almost mythological characters: Jeff Daniels as Comey, Holly Hunter as Sally Yates, Steven Pasquale and Oona Chaplin as the text-crossed lovers Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. But the real draw is Brendan Gleeson playing Trump. The Irish actor gives a fantastic performance that dances between impersonation and interpretation: Physically, Gleeson has the lunatic bronzer, the grimace, the sagging tie. More crucially, he captures the former president’s pettiness and malice in a way that communicates how dangerous those qualities can be, in tandem and totally unchecked. Gleeson’s Trump seethes and crawls around the White House like a swamp creature in a Brioni suit. It’s one of the most striking TV performances of the past four years. And I watched it and felt nothing at all.