Why George Zimmerman Got a Gun

A Confederate flag hangs in the window of a house. — Owaki / Kulla / Getty

Growing Up in the Shadow of the Confederacy

Vann R. Newkirk II

Memorials to the Lost Cause have always meant something sinister for the descendants of enslaved people.

For most of my life I didn’t know Confederate statues could come down.

Throughout my childhood, those equestrian statues of victory, obelisks, and granite figures of soldiers were as immovable and immutable as the hills and the lakes. Other symbols of the South as it was before 1865 were also part of the fabric of reality. Old battle flags were inevitabilities, waving in the wind. Plantations might as well have been wonders of the world, and old battlefields holy places. Part of living in the South, just as much as eating and breathing were, was partaking in a perpetual reenactment.

In my hometown of Rocky Mount, North Carolina, we have our own little shrine to the Confederacy. The Nash County Confederate Monument is a column with one soldier standing atop its apex, surrounded by four shorter empty columns.The base is engraved with two rifles crossed.

An Afghan man watches President Trump's address. — Omar Sobhani / Reuters

Trump's Speech Can't Change Recalcitrant Realities

David Frum

It was a performance that seemed designed to garner immediate approval, and it failed to grapple with long-term challenges.

President Trump will not rapidly withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan. But then, you already knew that: The first year of his presidency is two-thirds over, and there has been no move to implement his campaign promises to withdraw them.

Trump will focus the U.S. mission in Afghanistan, not on nation-building, but on chasing and killing military enemies one-by-one. But you already knew that too: The tempo of violence in all overseas U.S. operations has been accelerating under Trump, while other arms of U.S. power have shriveled from neglect.

Trump hopes to bluster Pakistan into solving the Afghanistan problem for him. You did not already know that, but you could have guessed from studying his approach to North Korea, where he is trying the same method with China.

Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?

Jean M. Twenge

More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”

An ambulance speeds down a city street. — Toby Melville / Reuters

Are You Sure You Want Single Payer?

Olga Khazan

“Medicare for all” is a popular idea, but for Americans, transitioning to such a system would be difficult, to say the least.

French women supposedly don’t get fat, and in the minds of many Americans, they also don’t get stuck with très gros medical bills. There’s long been a dream among some American progressives to truly live as the “Europeans¹” do and have single-payer health care.

Republicans’ failure—so far—to repeal and replace Obamacare has breathed new life into the single-payer dream. In June, the majority of Americans told Pew that the government has the responsibility to ensure health coverage for everyone, and 33 percent say this should take the form of a single government program. The majority of Democrats, in that poll, supported single payer. A June poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation even found that a slim majority of all Americans favor single payer.

Evangelicals Are Bitterly Split Over Advising Trump

Emma Green

Members of the president’s faith board did not step down after Charlottesville. They say they’re fulfilling their duty to advise America’s leader.

Last week, a few days after white supremacists rallied in Charlottesville, A.R. Bernard became the first member of President Trump’s evangelical advisory board to resign. “It became obvious that there was a deepening conflict in values between myself and the administration,” the pastor of New York City’s Christian Cultural Center wrote in a statement. He had been quietly backing away for months, he wrote. Trump’s reaction to Charlottesville seemed to be what it took to make Bernard’s decision official.

So far, he’s been the only one to step down since Trump took office. None of the other members have appeared to consider quitting over a “conflict in values,” despite the critics in and out of the church who have called on them to step down. While Trump’s advisers are largely standing unified behind him, the evangelical world is deeply split over the right way to approach politics. Are Christians better off trying to influence an imperfect president? Or should they disengage from a process that will never produce a leader who perfectly represents their worldview?

Deus Ex Westeros

Megan Garber

Absurd plot twists. Unanswered questions. Could Game of Thrones go the way of Lost?

This post contains spoilers through Season 7, Episode 6 of Game of Thrones.

A total solar eclipse in Svalbard, Longyearbyen, Norway, on March 20, 2015 — Jon Olav Nesvold / Stringer / Getty

Annie Dillard's Classic Essay: 'Total Eclipse'

Annie Dillard

“Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him.”

Ever since it was first published in 1982, readers—including this one—have thrilled to “Total Eclipse,” Annie Dillard’s masterpiece of literary nonfiction, which describes her personal experience of a solar eclipse in Washington State. It first appeared in Dillard’s landmark collection, Teaching a Stone to Talk, and was recently republished in The Abundance, a new anthology of her work. The Atlantic is pleased to offer the essay in full, here, until the day after the ‘Great American Eclipse’ on August 21.

-Ross Andersen

It had been like dying, that sliding down the mountain pass. It had been like the death of someone, irrational, that sliding down the mountain pass and into the region of dread. It was like slipping into fever, or falling down that hole in sleep from which you wake yourself whimpering. We had crossed the mountains that day, and now we were in a strange place—a hotel in central Washington, in a town near Yakima. The eclipse we had traveled here to see would occur early in the next morning.

President Trump points at the sun as he views the solar eclipse at the White House. — Andrew Harnik / AP

The President Who Looked at the Sun

James Hamblin

Despite warnings, Trump gazed directly at the eclipse.

During the solar eclipse today, President Donald Trump stepped onto the White House balcony with his wife and his son Barron, and he looked up at the sun.

According to White House reporters, an aide shouted a warning that he should not look at the sun. Nevertheless, he persisted.

There were parts of the United States, along path of totality, that allowed people to look directly at the eclipse. But Washington, D.C., was not among them.

How much damage can a person do by staring at the sun for a few seconds?

As many children are warned, there is indeed no “safe” amount of time to stare directly at the sun. Note that no ophthalmologists recommend any amount of glancing or squinting at the eclipse. Against the energy of the sun, human eyelids are like a dam built of tissue paper.

The Secret Life of a Book Manuscript

Thomas E. Ricks

A best-selling author submits a draft to his editor. Hijinks ensue.

I had written five books for Scott Moyers, following him as he moved from editing jobs at Scribner’s to Random House and then to Penguin Press. We worked well together, and in part thanks to his strong editing hand, my last three books had been bestsellers.

So what happened when I finished years of work and sent him the manuscript of my sixth book stunned me. In fact, I was in for a series of surprises.

They began about 18 months ago, after I emailed to him that manuscript, a dual appreciation of Winston Churchill and George Orwell. When I had begun work on it, in 2013, some old friends of mine thought the subject was a bit obscure. Why would anyone care how two long-dead Englishmen, a conservative politician and a socialist journalist who never met, had dealt with the polarized political turmoil of the 1930s and the world war that followed? By 2016, as people on both the American left and right increasingly seemed to favor opinion over fact, the book had become more timely.

Sansa and Arya Stark in 'Game of Thrones' — Helen Sloan / courtesy of HBO

Is Game of Thrones on Thin Ice?

Spencer Kornhaber, David Sims, and Lenika Cruz

Three Atlantic staffers discuss “Beyond the Wall,” the sixth episode of the seventh season.

Every week for the seventh season of Game of Thrones, three Atlantic staffers will discuss new episodes of the HBO drama. Because no screeners were made available to critics in advance this year, we'll be posting our thoughts in installments.

Let's Talk About Female Orgasms

James Hamblin, Katherine Wells, and Paul Rosenfeld

It doesn't have to be awkward. James Hamblin and Dr. Lauren Streicher, author of Love Sex Again, discuss how to bring up sexual issues with your doctor, partner, and friends.

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