July/August 2008

In This Issue

Nicholas Carr on what the internet is doing to our brains; Hanna Rosin on why crime is making a mysterious comeback; Jonathan Rauch on the race for the electric car; Sandra Tsing Loh on feminism's dirty little secret; the 11.5 biggest ideas of the year; Christopher Hitchens on Salman Rushdie; Wayne Curtis visits a bizarre Frank Lloyd Wright building in Oklahoma; and much more.

Features

American Murder Mystery

Why is crime rising in so many American cities? The answer implicates one of the most celebrated antipoverty programs of recent decades.

Electro-Shock Therapy

With the Chevy Volt, General Motors—battered, struggling for profitability, fed up with being eclipsed by Toyota and the Prius—is out to reinvent the automobile, and itself.

Re-Thinking Jeffrey Goldberg

Intrigued (and alarmed) by the new science of “neuromarketing,” our correspondent peers into his own brain via an MRI machine and learns what he really thinks about Jimmy Carter, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bruce Springsteen, and Edie Falco.

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Agenda

Books

Pursuits

Also in this issue

  • Memo from the Editors

    We chose to build this, The Atlantic's first Ideas Issue, not around speculative experimentation, academic abstraction, or gee-whiz gizmos, but around real-world attempts to rethink big questions. [Web only: Submit your own suggestions for the idea (or ideas) that have been most important this year. Some submissions may be included in part or in full in a future issue of the magazine.]

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