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• The Consequences of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Canonization

  The civil-rights leader is now celebrated as a modern founding father, a celebration that gives those who oppose his policy agenda a claim to his legacy.

  • Vann R. Newkirk II
  • Jan 21, 2019
• Most Popular on The Atlantic

  • I Failed the Covington Catholic Test

    • Julie Irwin Zimmerman

    Next time there’s a viral story, I’ll wait for more facts to emerge.

    Like many people who spend too much time on Twitter, I watched with indignation Saturday morning as stories began appearing about a confrontation near the Lincoln Memorial between students from Covington Catholic High School and American Indians from the Indigenous Peoples March. The story felt personal to me; I live a few miles from the high school, and my son attends a nearby all-boys Catholic high school. I texted him right away, ready with a lesson on what the students had done wrong.

    “They were menacing a man much older than them,” I told him, “and chanting ‘Build the wall!’ And this smirking kid blocked his path and wouldn’t let him leave.” The short video, the subject of at least two-thirds of my Twitter feed on Saturday, made me cringe, and the smirking kid in particular got to me: His smugness, radiating from under that red MAGA hat, was everything I wanted my teenagers not to be.

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  • Stop Trusting Viral Videos

    • Ian Bogost

    A controversial video of Catholic students clashing with American Indians appeared to tell a simple truth. A second video called that story into question. But neither shows what truly happened.

    In a short, viral video shared widely since Friday, Catholic high-school students visiting Washington, D.C., from Kentucky for the March for Life appeared to confront, and mock, American Indians who had participated in the Indigenous Peoples March, taking place the same day.

    By Saturday, the video had been condensed into a single image: One of the students, wearing a “Make American Great Again” hat, smiles before an Omaha tribal elder, a confrontation viewers took as an act of aggression by a group of white youths against an indigenous community—and by extension, people of color more broadly. Online, reaction was swift and certain, with legislators, news outlets, and ordinary people denouncing the students and their actions as brazenly racist.

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  • What People Actually Say Before They Die

    • Michael Erard

    Insights into the little-studied realm of last words

    Mort Felix liked to say that his name, when read as two Latin words, meant “happy death.” When he was sick with the flu, he used to jokingly remind his wife, Susan, that he wanted Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” played at his deathbed. But when his life’s end arrived at the age of 77, he lay in his study in his Berkeley, California, home, his body besieged by cancer and his consciousness cradled in morphine, uninterested in music and refusing food as he dwindled away over three weeks in 2012. “Enough,” he told Susan. “Thank you, and I love you, and enough.” When she came downstairs the next morning, she found Felix dead.

    During those three weeks, Felix had talked. He was a clinical psychologist who had also spent a lifetime writing poetry, and though his end-of-life speech often didn’t make sense, it seemed to draw from his attention to language. “There’s so much so in sorrow,” he said at one point. “Let me down from here,” he said at another. “I’ve lost my modality.” To the surprise of his family members, the lifelong atheist also began hallucinating angels and complaining about the crowded room—even though no one was there.

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  • The Whitewashing of King’s Assassination

    • Vann R. Newkirk II

    The death of Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t a galvanizing event, but the premature end of a movement that had only just begun.

    “Woe to you, because you build tombs for the prophets, and it was your ancestors who killed them.” Jesus’s rebuke to the Pharisees descended upon me on a cold January morning in 2017, in West Potomac Park in Washington, D.C. On that Monday, the national holiday dedicated to the man at whose memorial I stood, the capital bustled in anticipation of a more pressing political event. That’s why I was at the park, pondering this granite stone of hope, carved out of a mountain of despair. The memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. cast its shadow over me, its presence just as conflicted as those tombs.

    As sure as Jesus’s words proved prescient about the adoption of Christianity in the empire that killed him, so too the modern-day legend of King writes itself in real time. In the official story told to children, King’s assassination is the transformational tragedy in a victorious struggle to overcome.

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  • Impeach Donald Trump

    • Yoni Appelbaum

    Starting the process will rein in a president who is undermining American ideals—and bring the debate about his fitness for office into Congress, where it belongs.

    On January 20, 2017, Donald Trump stood on the steps of the Capitol, raised his right hand, and solemnly swore to faithfully execute the office of president of the United States and, to the best of his ability, to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. He has not kept that promise.

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    Instead, he has mounted a concerted challenge to the separation of powers, to the rule of law, and to the civil liberties enshrined in our founding documents. He has purposefully inflamed America’s divisions. He has set himself against the American idea, the principle that all of us—of every race, gender, and creed—are created equal.

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  • How a Stroke Turned a 63-Year-Old Into a Rap Legend

    • Jeff Maysh

    The story of Dr. Rapp

    Dr. Sherman Hershfield woke up one morning and was surprised to find himself behind the wheel of his car. Somewhere between his Beverly Hills apartment and his practice in the San Fernando Valley, the silver-haired physician had blacked out. Somehow he’d avoided a crash, but this wasn’t the first time. “I didn’t know what was going on,” he admitted.

    Apart from his frequent blackouts, Hershfield was in fine health for a man in his 50s. He was tall and lean, ran six miles a day, and was a strict vegetarian. “I believe a physician should provide exemplary motivation to patients,” he once wrote. “I don’t smoke and have cut out all alcohol.” Hershfield specialized in physical medicine and rehabilitation, and for decades had helped patients with brain injuries learn to walk again and rebuild their lives. Even with his experience, Hershfield didn’t know what was wrong inside his own head.

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  • Why There Are No Nuclear Airplanes

    • Christian Ruhl

    Strategists considered sacrificing older pilots to patrol the skies in flying reactors. An Object Lesson.

    The U.S. Navy recently asked Congress for $139 billion to update its fleet of nuclear-powered submarines. Unlike “conventional” submarines, which need to surface frequently, nuclear submarines can cruise below the sea at high speeds for decades without ever needing to refuel. Defense planners expect that the new submarines will run on one fueling for the entirety of deployment—up to a half century.

    Read: What it felt like to test the first submarine nuclear reactor

    The advantages of nuclear submarines over their conventional cousins raise a question about another component of the military arsenal: Why don’t airplanes run on nuclear power?

    The reasons are many. Making a nuclear reactor flightworthy is difficult. Shielding it from spewing dangerous radiation into the bodies of its crew might be impossible. During the Cold War, when the threat of nuclear apocalypse led to surprisingly pragmatic plans, engineers proposed to solve the problem by hiring elderly Air Force crews to pilot the hypothetical nuclear planes, because they would die before radiation exposure gave them fatal cancers.

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  • Nancy Pelosi Is Winning

    • Peter Beinart

    She beat George W. Bush on Social Security privatization, and she’ll beat Trump on the wall.

    Democrats sometimes portray themselves as high-minded and naive—unwilling to play as rough as the GOP. Speaker Nancy Pelosi is, once again, proving that self-image wrong. She’s not only refusing Donald Trump’s demand for a border wall. She’s trying to cripple his presidency. And she may well succeed.

    Pelosi’s strategy resembles the one she employed to debilitate another Republican president: George W. Bush. Bush returned to Washington after his 2004 reelection victory determined to partially privatize Social Security. “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital,” he told the press, “and I intend to spend it.” Bush’s plan contained two main elements. The first was convincing the public that there was a crisis. Social Security, he declared in his 2005 State of the Union address, “is headed toward bankruptcy.” The second was persuading Democrats to offer their own proposals for changing it.

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  • The Confrontation on the Mall

    • James Fallows

    None

    I am familiar with the ambiguities of video evidence—for example, through this piece I wrote from Israel more than 15 years ago, “Who Shot Mohammed al-Dura,” about the battle over the meaning of an inflammatory video there;  or these two separate Twitter threads, first here then here, in the past few days from James Martin, a Jesuit priest and editor for America magazine, about the meanings of the multiple videos from the confrontation on the National Mall this past weekend.

    I now believe that the “meaning” or “truth” of this recent encounter is likely to remain as contested as anything in the al-Dura case. The more additional evidence comes in, the more clearly it is taken to “prove” one interpretation of the case, or its opposite. “You must not have seen the full videos” is meant to be a conclusory statement, either way.

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  • The Yellow Vests Are Going to Change France. We Just Don’t Know How.

    • Rachel Donadio

    By inaugurating a national “grand debate,” can Macron harness the concerns of citizens without undermining his government’s own mandate?

    PARIS—This past week, President Emmanuel Macron inaugurated a vast national debate, a kind of ongoing town hall and airing of grievances that will unfold across France for the next two months. The grand débat, as it’s called, is the government’s response to the “yellow vest” protest movement that began in November with citizens protesting a fuel-tax hike and has grown exponentially into a massive groundswell of popular discontent, peppered with occasional flare-ups of violence.

    By organizing these discussions, which will be mediated by mayors, the government is essentially acknowledging that frustrations now run so deep that they can’t be ignored. Much of the anger has been aimed at Macron, who was elected on a platform of change but has come to be seen as arrogant, imperious, and tone-deaf to the concerns of the less fortunate. The French leader didn’t exactly dispel that perception when he sent an open letter to the nation outlining the themes of the debate—the environment, taxes and public spending, political representation and public services—essentially saying, “We can talk about anything you want, as long as it’s what I want.”

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  More Popular Stories

• Ex-envoy to the Anti-ISIS Coalition Says Trump Has ‘No Plan’ for What’s Next in Syria

  Brett McGurk faulted the president for completely reversing Syria policy after one telephone conversation with Turkey’s president.

  • Andrew Kragie
  • Jan 21, 2019

• Trump and Cohen May Have Discussed the Moscow Project. ‘So What?’

  Rudy Giuliani, on the Sunday shows, says the president never told Michael Cohen to lie about pursuing Trump Tower Moscow during the 2016 campaign.

  • Andrew Kragie
  • Jan 21, 2019

• Elizabeth Warren’s Early Stroke of Genius

  The senator from Massachusetts announced she was running for president on New Year’s Eve—and then had the field largely to herself.

  • Edward-Isaac Dovere
  • Jan 20, 2019
• Newsletter

  

  The Atlantic Politics & Policy Daily: How’s It Cohen?

  Donald Trump allegedly directed Michael Cohen, then his personal lawyer, to lie to Congress about a real-estate deal he was pursuing in Moscow during the 2016 election.

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• Trump’s ‘Major’ Border Deal Is No Deal for Democrats

  The president offered three-year protection for “Dreamers” and immigrants with protective status in exchange for $5.7 billion in border-wall funding. Democrats rejected it out of hand.

  • Elaina Plott, Elaine Godfrey, and Andrew Kragie
  • Jan 19, 2019

• The ‘Bright Spot’ for Trump in the Government Shutdown

  The president used the closures as justification for skipping the World Economic Forum, in Davos. But he’s never shown a desire to engage with voters or leaders who challenge him.

  • Elaina Plott
  • Jan 19, 2019
• Culture

  Women Are Not a Monolith

  Women from around the country will march this weekend. But they won’t all be marching together.

  • Emma Green
  • Jan 19, 2019
• Writers
  • Vann R. Newkirk II
    The Consequences of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Canonization
    Jan 21, 2019
  • Emma Green
    Women Are Not a Monolith
    Jan 19, 2019
  • Russell Berman
    A Vengeful Start to the Trump-Pelosi Rivalry
    Jan 17, 2019
  • Yoni Appelbaum
    Impeach Donald Trump
    Jan 16, 2019
  • Adrienne LaFrance
    Six Hours and Three Minutes of Internet Chaos
    Jan 13, 2019
  All Writers

• What to Expect From Trump-Kim Take Two

  If the first summit accomplished little, the second could be the same—but there are many wild cards.

  • Uri Friedman
  • Jan 18, 2019
• Global

  America Scrambles to Catch Up With Chinese and Russian Weapons

  Trump’s new missile-defense strategy adds up to an effort to solve a political problem with expensive hardware.

  • Kathy Gilsinan and Patrick Tucker
  • Jan 18, 2019

• Trump’s Entire Shutdown Approach, Encapsulated in One Tweet

  Seldom can one find so succinct a demonstration of the president’s anti-Muslim sentiments, reliance on right-wing media, and lack of interest in accuracy or truth.

  • David A. Graham
  • Jan 18, 2019

• Why Democrats Have Suddenly Started Talking About Impeachment

  A BuzzFeed report says President Trump directed Michael Cohen to lie to Congress, prompting the talk of impeachment even before the special counsel finishes his probe.

  • Natasha Bertrand
  • Jan 18, 2019

• Waiting for a Shutdown to End in Disaster

  Aides on Capitol Hill fear that a dramatic government failure may be the only thing to force President Trump and the Democrats back to the table.

  • McKay Coppins
  • Jan 18, 2019
• Global

  Trump Flirts With Leaving NATO, and ‘Zero’ Republicans in Congress Are Impressed

  For someone who actively avoids criticizing the president, Senator Jim Risch has a lot to say about how he will deal with Trump.

  • Uri Friedman
  • Jan 17, 2019

• Radio Atlantic: Is the President a Russian Asset?

  The staff writer Franklin Foer joins Alex Wagner to make sense of new questions about President Trump’s relationship with Russia.

  • Kevin Townsend
  • Jan 17, 2019
• Politics Daily

  The Atlantic Politics & Policy Daily: No-Fly Zone

  The president canceled House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s planned congressional delegation trip overseas, after she disinvited him from delivering the State of the Union.

  • Madeleine Carlisle and Olivia Paschal
  • Jan 17, 2019

• A Vengeful Start to the Trump-Pelosi Rivalry

  The speaker threatened to scrap his speech. The president grounded her plane.

  • Russell Berman
  • Jan 17, 2019

• Trump Isn’t Even Trying to Convince Voters on the Shutdown

  The president and his party have grown accustomed to representing a minority of Americans—and ignoring majority opinion.

  • Ronald Brownstein
  • Jan 17, 2019
• Video

  It’s Time to Impeach Trump

  President Trump is unfit for the office he holds.

  • Yoni Appelbaum and Vishakha Darbha
  • Jan 17, 2019

• Democratic Operatives Are Building Beto O’Rourke’s Campaign Without Him

  The Draft Beto movement is raising money for a 2020 presidential run and releasing a campaign-style video.  

  • Edward-Isaac Dovere
  • Jan 17, 2019
• Ideas

  Impeach Donald Trump

  Starting the process will rein in a president who is undermining American ideals—and bring the debate about his fitness for office into Congress, where it belongs.

  • Yoni Appelbaum
  • March 2019 Issue