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• Trump Goes After Iran’s Supreme Leader

  After pulling back from a strike on Iran, the Trump administration opted to impose sanctions on Ali Khamenei. But it’s unclear how effective they’ll really be.

  • Kathy Gilsinan
  • 1:17 PM ET
• Most Popular on The Atlantic

  • The Boomers Ruined Everything

    • Lyman Stone

    The mistakes of the past are fast creating a crisis for younger Americans.

    The Baby Boomers ruined America. That sounds like a hyperbolic claim, but it’s one way to state what I found as I tried to solve a riddle. American society is going through a strange set of shifts: Even as cultural values are in rapid flux, political institutions seem frozen in time. The average U.S. state constitution is more than 100 years old. We are in the third-longest period without a constitutional amendment in American history: The longest such period ended in the Civil War. So what’s to blame for this institutional aging?

    One possibility is simply that Americans got older. The average American was 32 years old in 2000, and 37 in 2018. The retiree share of the population is booming, while birth rates are plummeting. When a society gets older, its politics change. Older voters have different interests than younger voters: Cuts to retiree-focused benefits are scarier, while long-term problems such as excessive student debt, climate change, and low birth rates are more easily ignored.

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  • What Really Happened to Malaysia’s Missing Airplane

    • William Langewiesche

    Five years ago, the flight vanished into the Indian Ocean. Officials on land know more about why than they dare to say.

    1. The Disappearance

    At 12:42 a.m. on the quiet, moonlit night of March 8, 2014, a Boeing 777-200ER operated by Malaysia Airlines took off from Kuala Lumpur and turned toward Beijing, climbing to its assigned cruising altitude of 35,000 feet. The designator for Malaysia Airlines is MH. The flight number was 370. Fariq Hamid, the first officer, was flying the airplane. He was 27 years old. This was a training flight for him, the last one; he would soon be fully certified. His trainer was the pilot in command, a man named Zaharie Ahmad Shah, who at 53 was one of the most senior captains at Malaysia Airlines. In Malaysian style, he was known by his first name, Zaharie. He was married and had three adult children. He lived in a gated development. He owned two houses. In his first house he had installed an elaborate Microsoft flight simulator.

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  • Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think

    • Arthur C. Brooks

    Here’s how to make the most of it.

    "It’s not true that no one needs you anymore.”

    These words came from an elderly woman sitting behind me on a late-night flight from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. The plane was dark and quiet. A man I assumed to be her husband murmured almost inaudibly in response, something to the effect of “I wish I was dead.”

    Again, the woman: “Oh, stop saying that.”

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    I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but couldn’t help it. I listened with morbid fascination, forming an image of the man in my head as they talked. I imagined someone who had worked hard all his life in relative obscurity, someone with unfulfilled dreams—perhaps of the degree he never attained, the career he never pursued, the company he never started.

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  • At Work, Expertise Is Falling Out of Favor

    • Jerry Useem

    These days, it seems, just about all organizations are asking their employees to do more with less. Is that actually a good idea?

    In the faint predawn light, the ship doesn’t look unusual. It is one more silhouette looming pier-side at Naval Base San Diego, a home port of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. And the scene playing out in its forward compartment, as the crew members ready themselves for departure, is as old as the Navy itself. Three sailors in blue coveralls heave on a massive rope. “Avast!” a fourth shouts. A percussive thwack announces the pull of a tugboat—and 3,000 tons of warship are under way.

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    But now the sun is up, and the differences start to show.

    Most obvious is the ship’s lower contour. Built in 2014 from 30 million cans’ worth of Alcoa aluminum, Littoral Combat Ship 10, the USS Gabrielle Giffords, rides high in the water on three separate hulls and is powered like a jet ski—that is, by water-breathing jets instead of propellers. This lets it move swiftly in the coastal shallows (or “littorals,” in seagoing parlance), where it’s meant to dominate. Unlike the older ships now gliding past—guided-missile cruisers, destroyers, amphibious transports—the littoral combat ship was built on the concept of “modularity.” There’s a voluminous hollow in the ship’s belly, and its insides can be swapped out in port, allowing it to set sail as a submarine hunter, minesweeper, or surface combatant, depending on the mission.

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  • The Cruel Paradox at the Heart of E. Jean Carroll’s Allegation Against Trump

    • Megan Garber

    The famous writer’s rape accusation against the president fell victim to the familiar workings of attention fatigue.

    On Friday, E. Jean Carroll, the journalist and advice columnist, published a new piece of writing: an excerpt from her forthcoming book, What Do We Need Men For? Posted on The Cut, the essay is a meditation on the sexual abuses that have accumulated, like plaque in the artery, over the course of her life; it contains allegations that several culturally prominent men have assaulted her. One of those men is the current president of the United States. In the mid-1990s, Carroll writes, she had a chance encounter with Donald Trump, then known primarily as a real-estate developer, at Bergdorf Goodman; he asked her to help him pick out a gift for, he told her, another woman. The encounter began as a friendly one between two New York City celebrities; it ended, Carroll writes, with Trump cornering her in a dressing room and raping her.

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  • Republicans Don’t Understand Democrats—And Democrats Don’t Understand Republicans

    • Yascha Mounk

    A new study shows Americans have little understanding of their political adversaries—and education doesn’t help.

    Americans often lament the rise of “extreme partisanship,” but this is a poor description of political reality: Far from increasing, Americans’ attachment to their political parties has considerably weakened over the past years. Liberals no longer strongly identify with the Democratic Party and conservatives no longer strongly identify with the Republican Party.

    What is corroding American politics is, specifically, negative partisanship: Although most liberals feel conflicted about the Democratic Party, they really hate the Republican Party. And even though most conservatives feel conflicted about the Republican Party, they really hate the Democratic Party.

    America’s political divisions are driven by hatred of an out-group rather than love of the in-group. The question is: Why?

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  • Why a Government Lawyer Argued Against Giving Immigrant Kids Toothbrushes

    • Ken White

    The sheer effrontery of the government’s argument may be explained, but not excused, by its long backstory.

    Arguments before the United States Court of Appeals are usually dry, esoteric, and nerdy. What would it take to make one go viral? This week, in a clip that launched a million angry Facebook posts, we found out. It took a lawyer for the United States telling a panel of incredulous Ninth Circuit judges that it is “safe and sanitary” to confine immigrant children in facilities without soap or toothbrushes and to make them sleep on concrete floors under bright lights.

    This assertion generated widespread outrage. Sarah Fabian, the senior attorney in the Department of Justice’s Office of Immigration Litigation who uttered it, was instantly excoriated online. As fate would have it, the clip of her argument went viral at the same time as a new wave of reports of brutal and inhumane conditions at immigrant confinement centers. It also immediately followed the raucous debate over Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez referring to the confinement centers as concentration camps. The juxtaposition suggested, misleadingly, that the Trump administration was explicitly justifying the worst sorts of child mistreatment we were seeing on the news.

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  • Children Cannot Parent Other Children

    • Ashley Fetters

    Reports of babies and toddlers being left in the care of slightly older children in detention facilities at the U.S.-Mexico border reveal an ongoing atrocity.

    A fundamental truth about children is that they have needs they cannot themselves fulfill. They need people who acquire and prepare food for them, and people who look out for their safety and cleanliness. Beyond those material needs, they also need people who care for them emotionally, tending to them when they are sick and supporting them through tough times. Normally these duties fall to parents, but they can also fall to relatives, family friends, babysitters, teachers, or social workers. At the border, in detention centers, they are falling to other detained children, a harrowing detail in a sea of harrowing details now being reported.

    Lawyers who visited a border station in Clint, Texas, this week told the Associated Press that during their visit, they encountered small children who had been taken from their parents under the Trump administration’s family-separation policy, some of them infants and toddlers, who are receiving little time or attention from adult caregivers or supervisors. Instead, some detained children receive affection and care—such as being held, rocked, bathed, fed, and even changed—only from other, slightly older detained children. As the AP reported Saturday:

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  • What Do You Do When No One Takes You Seriously?

    • Russell Berman

    The political rookies Andrew Yang and Marianne Williamson will get their shot at Thursday’s Democratic debate, sharing the stage with eight politicians with a combined 150 years of elected experience.

    Andrew Yang leaned toward me inside his 2020-campaign headquarters, as he compared federal economic policy to baking muffins. He suggested that his progressive 2020 rivals, like Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, want to change some ingredients and try again. Yang wants to start from scratch instead.

    “The recipe’s not working; this tastes like shit,” Yang said, talking quickly. “Instead of saying, ‘I’m going to make this recipe less shitty,’ it’s like, ‘You know what? Maybe I’m going to bake something else and stop trying to salvage this shit-muffin!’”

    He broke out laughing.

    “I’ve never used that metaphor,” he explained excitedly. “That’s new!”

    Yang, a first-time candidate known mostly for his proposal to give every American a universal basic income of $1,000 a month, is himself new to this whole running-for-president thing. When potential voters watch the first Democratic presidential primary debates next week, arrayed before them will be a former vice president, four U.S. senators, a former governor, a congressman, a mayor, and two people that, polls show, most Americans have never heard of: Yang and Marianne Williamson.

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  • Weird, Wonderful Photos From Another Era

    • Alan Taylor

    A grab bag of interesting, seldom-seen historic images depicting myriad people, places, and things—from epic achievements to small moments.

    While doing my job of researching photos for various stories, I always come across more interesting images than I need, or photos that are unrelated to the story yet still remarkable, strange, hilarious, or just great shots. I tuck the best of those into a folder without a clear plan for future use. Today, I offer another sampling from that folder—a grab bag of historic images depicting land-speed records, underwater photography, Italian elections, a young Princess Elizabeth, a streamlined ferry, and more—from epic achievements to small moments. There isn’t really a theme here, other than “I thought these were neat photos, many rarely seen, and thought you’d enjoy them as well.” This is part of an ongoing series of collections of interesting photos from the past. See the previous entry: Weird, Wonderful Photos From the Archives.

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  More Popular Stories

• The 2020 U.S. Presidential Race: A Cheat Sheet

  Joe Sestak is jumping into the crowded Democratic race—just in time for the coming postdebate cull of the field.

  • David A. Graham
  • 11:42 AM ET

• What Do You Do When No One Takes You Seriously?

  The political rookies Andrew Yang and Marianne Williamson will get their shot at Thursday’s Democratic debate, sharing the stage with eight politicians with a combined 150 years of elected experience.

  • Russell Berman
  • 8:13 AM ET

• Pete Buttigieg’s Crash Course in Crisis

  For all those nationally who’ve been dazzled by the mayor, the voters of South Bend aren’t satisfied with his response to a fatal police shooting last week.

  • Edward-Isaac Dovere
  • 5:00 AM ET
• Newsletter

  

  The Atlantic Politics & Policy Daily: No More Mr. Tough Guy

  The week ahead in national security. Plus: Trump now finds himself in the surprising and peculiar position of trying to stop further escalation in Iran. Plus: G20 is coming.

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• Democrats’ Grand Plan to Contain Iran? Just Beat Trump

  What the president does in the coming days could reshape the world order. But in the race to beat him, the crisis has barely made a ripple.

  • Edward-Isaac Dovere
  • Jun 23, 2019

• Is There Still a Deal to Be Done With Iran?

  Below the surface, there are faint signs of how both parties can exit the crisis.

  • Uri Friedman and Kathy Gilsinan
  • Jun 22, 2019

• Radio Atlantic: The Fight for Reparations

  Vann R. Newkirk II discusses the Juneteenth congressional hearing on reparations.

  • Kevin Townsend
  • Jun 21, 2019
• Writers
  • David A. Graham
    The 2020 U.S. Presidential Race: A Cheat Sheet
    11:42 AM ET
  • Russell Berman
    What Do You Do When No One Takes You Seriously?
    8:13 AM ET
  • Emma Green
    Why Democrats Ditched the Hyde Amendment
    Jun 14, 2019
  • Adrienne LaFrance
    The ‘Undesirable Militants’ Behind the Nineteenth Amendment
    Jun 4, 2019
  • Priscilla Alvarez
    Trump’s Deal With Mexico Could Make Asylum Next to Impossible
    Nov 28, 2018
  All Writers
• Politics Daily

  The Atlantic Politics & Policy Daily: ‘And That Was My Last Hideous Man.’

  President Donald Trump faces a new sexual-assault allegation. Plus: Newspaper archives are filled with Joe Biden’s struggles to explain himself on race and civil rights.

  • Elaine Godfrey
  • Jun 21, 2019

• Joe Biden’s Endless Search for the Middle on Race

  Newspaper archives are full of the former vice president’s efforts to explain his thinking on civil rights.

  • Edward-Isaac Dovere
  • Jun 21, 2019

• The Iran Crisis Is Forcing Trump Into Uncomfortable Territory

  The president is fighting two impulses: not backing down against an adversary, and his aversion to a new conflict.

  • Peter Nicholas and Elaina Plott
  • Jun 21, 2019

• Cory Booker’s One-State Plan

  The senator from New Jersey doesn’t want to be considered a 2020 also-ran.

  • Edward-Isaac Dovere
  • Jun 21, 2019

• The Old Senate Is Hardwired Into Joe Biden

  The body he was elected to in 1972 required even the bitterest rivals to maintain a veneer of civility. But the country has long moved on from that brand of politics.

  • Todd S. Purdum
  • Jun 21, 2019
• Politics Daily

  The Atlantic Politics & Policy Daily: More Roy

  Republican Roy Moore, who has been accused of sexual misconduct, announced he would run for Senate again. Plus: Who’s steering policy on Iran?

  • Olivia Paschal and Madeleine Carlisle
  • Jun 20, 2019

• The White House Is Nowhere Near Ready for Impeachment

  The president is stewing over the possibility Democrats could try to remove him from office. His reelection-minded advisers want him focused on just about anything else.

  • Peter Nicholas
  • Jun 20, 2019

• The Biggest Obstacle to Trump’s Victory in 2020

  There may be an unprecedented level of discontent with the president among voters satisfied with the economy.

  • Ronald Brownstein
  • Jun 20, 2019

• Trump Might Not Want War, but the Military Is Steering His Iran Policy

  The buildup in the Middle East is coming at the request of the forces responsible for the region.

  • Kathy Gilsinan
  • Jun 20, 2019
• Politics Daily

  The Atlantic Politics & Policy Daily: On This Day in June

  It’s Juneteenth. Cory Booker, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and others testified about reparations at a House hearing. Plus: Joe Biden faces heat for remarks about two segregationist senators.

  • Elaine Godfrey
  • Jun 19, 2019

• Everyone Wants to Talk About Reparations. But for How Long?

  The issue makes the occasional blip in the national conversation. Yet in communities that have been fighting inequality for generations, it is more like the steady thumping of a drum.

  • Adam Harris
  • Jun 19, 2019

• Read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Testimony on Reparations

  “The question really is not whether we’ll be tied to the somethings of our past, but whether we are courageous enough to be tied to the whole of them.”

  • Olivia Paschal and Madeleine Carlisle
  • Jun 19, 2019

• For True Trump Believers, the Magic Isn’t Lost

  The president’s 2020 campaign-kickoff rally in Orlando was an attempt to hark back to the old days … of four years ago.

  • Elaina Plott
  • Jun 19, 2019