Politics & Policy

The Future of the American Idea

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  • Yuri Gripas / Reuters

    The Anguish of John Kelly

    The White House chief of staff decried the desacralization of military deaths—but it was the president he serves who politicized condolence calls.

  • Most Popular on The Atlantic
    • A young man and woman
      SWNS

      A Catfishing With a Happy Ending

      Emma Perrier was deceived by an older man on the internet—a hoax that turned into an unbelievable love story.

      Emma Perrier spent the summer of 2015 mending a broken heart, after a recent breakup. By September, the restaurant manager had grown tired of watching The Notebook alone in her apartment in Twickenham, a leafy suburb southwest of London, and decided it was time to get back out there. Despite the horror stories she’d heard about online dating, Emma, 33, downloaded a matchmaking app called Zoosk. The second “o” in the Zoosk logo looks like a diamond engagement ring, which suggested that its 38 million members were seeking more than the one-night stands offered by apps like Tinder.

      She snapped the three selfies the app required to “verify her identity.” Emma, who is from a volcanic city near the French Alps, not far from the source of Perrier mineral water, is petite, and brunette. She found it difficult to meet men, especially as she avoided pubs and nightclubs, and worked such long hours at a coffee shop in the city’s financial district that she met only stockbrokers, who were mostly looking for cappuccinos, not love.

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    • Jasu Hu

      Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?

      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.”

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    • rangizzz / oasis15 / Shutterstock / Katie Martin / The Atlantic

      How Money Became the Measure of Everything

      Two centuries ago, America pioneered a way of thinking that puts human well-being in economic terms.

      Money and markets have been around for thousands of years. Yet as central as currency has been to so many civilizations, people in societies as different as ancient Greece, imperial China, medieval Europe, and colonial America did not measure residents’ well-being in terms of monetary earnings or economic output.

      In the mid-19th century, the United States—and to a lesser extent other industrializing nations such as England and Germany—departed from this historical pattern. It was then that American businesspeople and policymakers started to measure progress in dollar amounts, tabulating social welfare based on people’s capacity to generate income. This fundamental shift, in time, transformed the way Americans appraised not only investments and businesses but also their communities, their environment, and even themselves.

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    • Francois Lenoir / Reuters

      Hating Queerness Without Hating the Queer

      The views of religiously conservative Americans no longer dominate U.S. culture or law. How will LGBT supporters engage with their perspectives on sexuality?  

      Among socially conservative religious leaders, the rapid shift of the cultural and legal status quo on issues of sexuality has created a palpable sense of disorientation. Some, like Russell Moore of the Southern Baptist Convention, have argued that this is a time of clarity for Christians: It will become harder for evangelicals to blend into mass culture, and while that separation comes with costs, it may actually be a boon to the faith. Others, like the writer Rod Dreher, have suggested that conservatives may be forced into a sort of cultural withdrawal, a retreat into self-sustaining communities of people who share similar values.

      In a new book, Albert Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, offers a third way: stand up and debate, even on issues that seem to be moving toward an ever-firmer cultural consensus. In some ways, Mohler neatly fits the stereotype of an evangelical leader who has taken up a stand against queerness. He’s white, he’s male, he’s Southern; he makes no apologies for his view that homosexuality is intertwined with sin. But he could also probably ace a Women and Gender Studies seminar. (He even once wrote an essay for The Atlantic on the Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown.) In his book, We Cannot Be Silent, he cites sociologists like Jürgen Habermas and discusses television shows like Modern Family. He explores the difference between gender and sex and transgender and intersex.

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    • Yuri Gripas / Reuters

      The Anguish of John Kelly

      The White House chief of staff decried the desacralization of military deaths—but it was the president he serves who politicized condolence calls.

      White House Chief of Staff John Kelly made some extraordinary remarks during Thursday’s White House briefing. They were extraordinary not only because Kelly seldom speaks on the record to the press and was doing so for the second time in a week, but also for the deeply personal nature of what he said—discussing the death of his son in combat, a topic he has in the past been careful to avoid. Yet Kelly’s defense of President Trump, who is embroiled in a self-inflicted crisis over his condolences for the families of fallen servicemembers, also contained the grain of a strong rebuke to the president.

      Kelly began with a description of what happens when a soldier, sailor, marine, or airman or -woman is killed in battle. Then he said:

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    • A dragonfly in the sunset
      Todd Korol / Reuters

      Insects Are In Serious Trouble

      In western Germany, populations of flying insects have fallen by around 80 percent in the last three decades.

      The bottles were getting emptier: That was the first sign that something awful was happening.

      Since 1989, scientists from the Entomological Society Krefeld had been collecting insects in the nature reserves and protected areas of western Germany. They set up malaise traps—large tents that funnel any incoming insect upward through a cone of fabric and into a bottle of alcohol. These traps are used by entomologists to collect specimens of local insects, for research or education. “But over the years, [the Krefeld team] realized that the bottles were getting emptier and emptier,” says Caspar Hallmann, from Radboud University.

      By analyzing the Krefeld data—1,503 traps, and 27 years of work—Hallmann and his colleagues have shown that most of the flying insects in this part of Germany are flying no more. Between 1989 and 2016, the average weight of insects that were caught between May and October fell by an astonishing 77 percent. Over the same period, the weight of insects caught in the height of summer, when these creatures should be at their buzziest, fell by 82 percent.

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    • Health workers pack dead chickens into bins at a poultry market.
      Tyrone Siu / Reuters

      Will the World's Most Worrying Flu Virus Go Pandemic?

      There’s good news and bad news.

      The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) keeps a Most Wanted list for flu viruses. The agency evaluates every potentially dangerous strain, and gives them two scores out of 10—one reflecting how likely they are to trigger a pandemic, and another that measures how bad that pandemic would be. At the top of the list, with scores of 6.5 for emergence and 7.5 for impact, is H7N9.

      Influenza viruses come in many flavors—H5N1, H1N1, H3N2, and so on. The H and N refer to two proteins on their surface, and the numbers refer to the versions of those proteins that a particular virus carries. H1N1 was responsible for both the catastrophic pandemic of 1918 that killed millions of people, and the most recent (and much milder) one from 2009. H5N1 is the bird-flu subtype that has been worrying scientists for almost two decades. But H7N9? Until recently, it had flown under the radar.

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    • Cartoonish figures interact with the world through code.
      Lynn Scurfield

      The Coming Software Apocalypse

      A small group of programmers wants to change how we code—before catastrophe strikes.

      There were six hours during the night of April 10, 2014, when the entire population of Washington State had no 911 service. People who called for help got a busy signal. One Seattle woman dialed 911 at least 37 times while a stranger was trying to break into her house. When he finally crawled into her living room through a window, she picked up a kitchen knife. The man fled.

      Listen to the audio version of this article:Feature stories, read aloud: download the Audm app for your iPhone.

      The 911 outage, at the time the largest ever reported, was traced to software running on a server in Englewood, Colorado. Operated by a systems provider named Intrado, the server kept a running counter of how many calls it had routed to 911 dispatchers around the country. Intrado programmers had set a threshold for how high the counter could go. They picked a number in the millions.

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    • New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez pictured with two other people
      Joe Penney / Reuters

      Has the Supreme Court Legalized Public Corruption?

      By making it harder to punish official misconduct, the justices risk damage to America's republican institutions.

      For a few days earlier this month, it looked like the years-long corruption probe targeting New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez would fall apart seven weeks into his trial. At issue was the prosecution’s “stream of benefits” theory, which argues that the steady flow of donations and gifts from a wealthy Florida doctor to the Democratic senator—and the flow of favors from the senator to the doctor—amounted to quid pro quo corruption.

      During a hearing last week, Judge William Walls seemed to signal that argument was dead on arrival by citing a recent Supreme Court ruling that has vexed public-corruption investigators across the country. “I frankly don’t think McDonnell will allow that,” Walls told prosecutors, referring to the decision in McDonnell v. United States that fundamentally changed the standard for bribery.

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    • The continental United States with the Facebook logo superimposed
      Luchenko Yana / Shutterstock / Zak Bickel / The Atlantic

      What Facebook Did to American Democracy

      And why it was so hard to see it coming

      In the media world, as in so many other realms, there is a sharp discontinuity in the timeline: before the 2016 election, and after.

      Things we thought we understood—narratives, data, software, news events—have had to be reinterpreted in light of Donald Trump’s surprising win as well as the continuing questions about the role that misinformation and disinformation played in his election.

      Tech journalists covering Facebook had a duty to cover what was happening before, during, and after the election. Reporters tried to see past their often liberal political orientations and the unprecedented actions of Donald Trump to see how 2016 was playing out on the internet. Every component of the chaotic digital campaign has been reported on, here at The Atlantic, and elsewhere: Facebook’s enormous distribution power for political information, rapacious partisanship reinforced by distinct media information spheres, the increasing scourge of “viral” hoaxes and other kinds of misinformation that could propagate through those networks, and the Russian information ops agency.

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    More Popular Stories
  • Joe Penney / Reuters

    Has the Supreme Court Legalized Public Corruption?

    By making it harder to punish official misconduct, the justices risk damage to America's republican institutions.

  • George Rose / Getty Images

    Rich City, Poor City

    An increasing number of American mayors are trying to channel recent economic growth to neglected neighborhoods.

  • Joshua Roberts / Reuters

    Trump's Unforced Error

    A series of damaging stories about the president's methods of consoling grieving Gold Star families represent the president’s latest entirely self-inflicted wound.

  • Newsletter
    Yuri Gripas / Reuters

    The Atlantic Politics & Policy Daily: Kelly's Defense

    During an emotional address at the daily White House press briefing, Chief of Staff John Kelly defended President Trump’s handling of a phone call with a Gold Star family.

  • Politics Daily
    J. Scott Applewhite / AP

    The Atlantic Politics & Policy Daily: Schrödinger’s Endorsement

    President Trump criticized a new bipartisan deal aimed at stabilizing Obamacare exchanges, a day after he publicly praised the proposal.

  • Vann R. Newkirk II / The Atlantic

    Puerto Rico's Environmental Catastrophe

    Hurricane Maria has exposed and intensified the island’s ecological crisis and its human consequences. Can it build a sustainable future?

  • The Presence of Justice
    Matt Slocum / AP

    The Federal Jail Blocking Some Inmates' Kids From Visiting

    Since last year, a detention center in Philadelphia has had one of the strictest visitation policies in the country. “Now it’s a different world in there,” one local lawyer said.

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  • Congress
    Evan Vucci / AP

    Donald Trump's Obamacare Whiplash

    Does the president want Congress to strike a bipartisan deal on health care? As with so many other issues, it depends on the hour.

  • Mike Theiler / Reuters

    'President Trump Did Disrespect My Son'

    Despite claiming he was better at consoling the families of slain servicemembers than his predecessors, Trump offended the family of La David Johnson and skipped calls and letters to other grieving loved ones.

  • Shannon Stapleton / Reuters

    The Populist Right Tears Down a Press It Can't Replace

    Critics of the mainstream media were quick to charge that Harvey Weinstein’s misdeeds were an open secret, yet none of them were able to expose it.

  • Patrick Semansky / AP

    How Will the Boy Scouts' Decision Affect the Girl Scouts?

    The organization’s choice to admit girls is a major reversal that could ultimately hurt the Girl Scouts and undermine their mission.

  • Global
    Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

    Is Obama's Foreign-Policy Legacy Disappearing?

    Several of his achievements are under threat—and it’s not all because of Donald Trump.

  • Politics Daily
    Susan Walsh / AP

    The Atlantic Politics & Policy Daily: The Fault in Our Czars

    Representative Tom Marino withdrew his name from consideration to be the White House drug czar.

  • Congress
    Charles Mostoller / Reuters

    What John McCain Gets Wrong About Trump's Nationalism

    The last seventy-five years of American foreign policy are not the story of a country consistently pursuing democratic ideals, only to see them undermined now by a fearful “blood and soil” isolationism.

  • Healthcare
    Susan Walsh / AP

    A Bipartisan Obamacare Breakthrough

    A pair of key senators has reached a deal to stabilize the law, but Republican leaders in Congress—not to mention President Trump—could still sink its prospects.

  • Yuri Gripas / Reuters

    How Trump Changed the Topic to Obama's Consolation Calls

    Instead of explaining to Americans why four soldiers were killed in Niger, the president commandeered the news cycle, focusing on a narrow and unrelated claim.

  • Congress
    Susan Walsh / AP

    Trump's Nominee for Drug Czar Is Out

    Representative Tom Marino withdrew from consideration after a recent news report detailed how a law he helped pass benefited narcotics distributors.

  • Jeff Roberson / AP

    The Great Undoer

    Donald Trump’s biggest political wins have come in dismantling existing policies, but constructive and proactive steps have eluded him.

  • Yoichi Okamoto / LBJ Library

    What Hollywood Forgets About LBJ

    Even as they stress his civil-rights legacy, popular portrayals ignore the issue that loomed largest over Lyndon B. Johnson's presidency: the Vietnam War.

  • Politics Daily
    Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

    The Atlantic Politics & Policy Daily: Best Frenemies

    During a news conference, President Trump said he and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell are “closer than ever before.”