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• An American Revolution

  America Moved On From Its Gay-Rights Moment—And Left a Legal Mess Behind

  Half a decade after the Supreme Court’s same-sex-marriage decision, the justices and Congress are still trying to figure out what federal law should say about LGBTQ rights.

  • Emma Green
  • 7:00 AM ET
• Most Popular on The Atlantic

  • Scientifically Proven Sources of Sex Appeal

    • Ben Healy

    Beards, scars, red clothes, and other secrets of attraction

    Hot or not? The question of whom we’re attracted to and why has long confounded humankind’s greatest philosophers, scientists, and reality-show contestants.

    Scads of studies suggest that those of us looking for Mr. or Ms. Right may actually be looking for Mr. Facial Symmetry or Ms. Ideal Waist-to-Hip Ratio (about 0.7 for women). [1, 2] But other research suggests that whether a trait is attractive depends on the type of connection you’re looking for. For example, women in one study found men with facial scars more appealing than other men for short-term relationships, but not for long-term ones. [3] In another study, men with beards had an edge among women seeking long-term relationships—a finding that might give clean-shaven guys with scars an idea about how to turn a one-night stand into something lasting. [4] (If all of this sounds heteronormative, it is: Almost all research on attraction involves straight people.)

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  • Lyme Disease Is Baffling, Even to Experts

    • Meghan O'Rourke

    But new insights are at last accumulating.

    In the fall of 1997, after I graduated from college, I began experiencing what I called “electric shocks”—tiny stabbing sensations that flickered over my legs and arms every morning. They were so extreme that as I walked to work from my East Village basement apartment, I often had to stop on Ninth Street and rub my legs against a parking meter, or else my muscles would begin twitching and spasming. My doctor couldn’t figure out what was wrong—dry skin, he proposed—and eventually the shocks went away. A year later, they returned for a few months, only to go away again just when I couldn’t bear it anymore.

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    Over the years, the shocks and other strange symptoms—vertigo, fatigue, joint pain, memory problems, tremors—came and went. In 2002, I began waking up every night drenched in sweat, with hives covering my legs. A doctor I consulted thought, based on a test result, that I might have lupus, but I had few other markers of the autoimmune disease. In 2008, when I was 32, doctors identified arthritis in my hips and neck, for which I had surgery and physical therapy. I was also bizarrely exhausted. Nothing was really wrong, the doctors I visited told me; my tests looked fine.

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  • Jay-Z Helped the NFL Banish Colin Kaepernick

    • Jemele Hill

    The former quarterback caused a problem for the league—which turned to the celebrated rapper for assistance.

    Yesterday the hip-hop mogul Jay-Z and National Football League Commissioner Roger Goodell held a joint media session at the Roc Nation offices in New York to seal a once-implausible partnership that isn’t being received as positively as both parties probably hoped.

    I assume neither Goodell nor Jay-Z expected to be on the defensive once the NFL announced that it would give Roc Nation, the music mogul’s entertainment company, significant power in choosing the performers for the league’s signature events—including the coveted Super Bowl halftime show. Jay-Z and Roc Nation will also help augment the NFL’s social-justice initiatives by developing content and spaces where players can speak about the issues that concern them.

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  • Why It’s Immigrants Who Pack Your Meat

    • Eric Schlosser

    What Trump has called an “invasion” was actually a corporate recruitment drive.

    The immigration raid last week at seven poultry plants in rural Mississippi was a perfect symbol of the Trump administration’s racism, lies, hypocrisy, and contempt for the poor. It was also a case study in how an industry with a long history of defying the law has managed to shift the blame and punishment onto workers.

    Planned for more than a year, the raid involved at least 600 agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, helicopters, and a staging area at a local National Guard base. The agents carried handguns, wore black body armor, and led 680 immigrant workers—almost all Latino, many of them women—to waiting buses with their hands zip-tied behind their backs. One worker, an American citizen, was shot with a Taser for resisting arrest. Children gathered outside the poultry plants crying as their parents were taken away and sent to private prisons; other kids sat in classrooms and at day-care centers, unaware that their families were being torn apart. It was the first week of school.

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  • Secrets and Lies in the School Cafeteria

    • Sarah Schweitzer

    A tale of missing money, heated lunchroom arguments, and flaxseed pizza crusts

    Late on a fall afternoon, a skeleton crew staffed the cafeteria at New Canaan High School, in Connecticut. Custodial workers cleaned up the day’s remains while one of the cooks prepped for the evening’s athletic banquet.

    A woman entered quietly through the back door, the one designated for deliveries and employees. She wore a jacket over a loose gown. She clutched something to her chest that appeared to be a bag connected to an IV.

    “What are you doing here?” one of the workers asked.

    The woman said nothing. She shuffled to her small office. The door clicked shut. The workers exchanged looks.

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  • The Myth of the ‘Underage Woman’

    • Megan Garber

    One more shameful truth Jeffrey Epstein symbolized: a culture that continues to write girls out of its stories

    On Monday, the New York Times columnist James B. Stewart published a remarkable article: a summary of an interview he had conducted last August with Jeffrey Epstein. The two were ostensibly talking together about matters of business—about rumors that Epstein had been doing advisory work for the electric-car company Tesla. But Epstein, in Stewart’s telling, kept guiding the conversation toward the secret that was at that point no secret at all: the fact that Epstein was a convicted sex offender. “If he was reticent about Tesla,” Stewart wrote, “he was more at ease discussing his interest in young women”:

    He said that criminalizing sex with teenage girls was a cultural aberration and that at times in history it was perfectly acceptable. He pointed out that homosexuality had long been considered a crime and was still punishable by death in some parts of the world.

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  • The Great Land Robbery

    • Vann R. Newkirk II

    The shameful story of how 1 million black families have been ripped from their farms

    I. Wiped Out

    “You ever chop before?” Willena Scott-White was testing me. I sat with her in the cab of a Chevy Silverado pickup truck, swatting at the squadrons of giant, fluttering mosquitoes that had invaded the interior the last time she opened a window. I was spending the day with her family as they worked their fields just outside Ruleville, in Mississippi’s Leflore County. With her weathered brown hands, Scott-White gave me a pork sandwich wrapped in a grease-stained paper towel. I slapped my leg. Mosquitoes can bite through denim, it turns out.

    Cotton sowed with planters must be chopped—thinned and weeded manually with hoes—to produce orderly rows of fluffy bolls. The work is backbreaking, and the people who do it maintain that no other job on Earth is quite as demanding.

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  • When Women Are Accused of Complicity

    • Sophie Gilbert

    Recent television shows and news stories raise a similar question: Can systems of oppression function without the involvement of women?

    This article contains spoilers regarding recent episodes of The Handmaid’s Tale and The Loudest Voice.

    During its three seasons on Hulu, The Handmaid’s Tale has depicted all kinds of grim visuals: ritualized hangings, feet flayed with steel cables, women whose mouths have been bolted shut. And yet the image I couldn’t get out of my mind this week after watching the Season 3 finale was that of a generic to-go coffee cup. Early in the episode, Mark Tuello (Sam Jaeger), a representative of the U.S. Government-in-Exile, came to meet with Serena Waterford (Yvonne Strahovski), a recent defector from Gilead who’d turned in her husband in exchange for immunity. As Tuello walked up to greet her, Serena was sitting on a bench outside her detention center, placidly reading. She wore a long, dusky pink overcoat, tailored slacks, and ballet pumps. With her smooth blond curls, she looked like the very model of Apostate Girl Autumn. Tuello handed her a cup of coffee, just one human in a free, caffeine-permitting country to another, and the ordinariness of it—the banality, maybe—felt somehow obscene.

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  • ‘One Belt One Road’ Is Just a Marketing Campaign

    • Eyck Freymann

    China’s signature project is actually a sweeping, poorly coordinated branding effort posing as an infrastructure initiative.

    Chinese President Xi Jinping is a man in a rush to build a legacy. In 2013, only four months into his presidency, Xi launched the One Belt One Road initiative, billed as the largest international development scheme in history. The “New Silk Road Economic Belt” promises to connect Europe and Asia overland through a large network of highways, railways, pipelines, trade corridors, and digital infrastructure. The “21st Century Maritime Silk Road” will build up a string of industrial port cities tracing the coastline of the South China Sea, Indian Ocean, and Suez Canal all the way to the Mediterranean.

    The scope of the plan is mind-boggling, but the details are hazy. Neither the belt nor the road are actual routes connecting hub cities, as the Chinese government’s official maps depict them. Any country can join the initiative, but membership carries no concrete commitments. Some observers call One Belt One Road—OBOR—a “Chinese Marshall Plan.” Others have argued it will mark the “dawn of Eurasia” and profoundly reshape global politics. The Trump administration calls OBOR “debt-trap diplomacy”—a predatory scheme to get poor countries hooked on Chinese loans.

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  • A Tissue Sample From 1966 Held Traces of Early HIV

    • Ed Yong

    To understand the virus’s history, a team worked to reconstruct its genome from a time before anyone knew the virus existed.

    In 1966, a 38-year-old man visited a hospital in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. His name, his symptoms, and everything about him beyond his age and gender have been lost to history. But a piece of one of his lymph nodes was collected and preserved. By analyzing it, a team of researchers led by Michael Worobey from the University of Arizona have shown that the man was infected by HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. He wouldn’t have known it, though, and nor would his doctors. HIV was formally discovered 17 years later.

    By wresting tiny genetic fragments from that tissue sample, Worobey’s team has almost completely reconstructed HIV’s genome from a time before anyone even knew it existed. And that work helps to flesh out the origin story of what would become one of the most important pandemics in human history. “There’s no other way to test these important inferences about the origins of one of the most important infectious diseases to ever hit humans,” says Worobey, who spent about five years trying to piece together that one tiny genome. “In retrospect, we’d probably do it again, but it’s crazy how much work it was.”

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  More Popular Stories

• Stacey Abrams Is Playing the Long Game

  After skyrocketing to political stardom in 2018, the Georgia Democrat is now trying to get her party to care about voter suppression in 2020.

  • Adrienne Green
  • Aug 16, 2019

• Sometimes Winning Gets Old

  Rallies allow Trump to return to a time when his presidency was nothing more than an aspiration, uncomplicated by the demands of the job.

  • Elaina Plott
  • Aug 16, 2019
• Video

  He Fought for Migrant Kids. Then He Got Rich.

  Juan Sanchez built his career fighting for migrant children. Later, he made millions off them.

  • Jeremy Raff
  • Aug 16, 2019
• Newsletter

  

  The Atlantic Politics & Policy Daily: Stacey’s Nom?

  Stacey Abrams hinted this week that she’d be open to being vice president. Plus: Israel reversed course, but Representative Rashida Tlaib won’t go.

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• Science

  Trump Is Thinking of Buying a Giant Socialist Island

  The president has reportedly expressed interest in acquiring Greenland for the United States.

  • Robinson Meyer
  • Aug 16, 2019

• How Family Separations Brought Down a Migrant Mogul

  Juan Sanchez was once hailed as a champion for social justice. Then his network of shelters started taking in children split from their relatives.

  • Jeremy Raff
  • Aug 16, 2019
• Politics Daily

  The Atlantic Politics & Policy Daily: Gone Hickenlooper

  The former Colorado governor dropped out of the presidential race today. Plus: Israel banned Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib from entering the country.

  • Elaine Godfrey
  • Aug 15, 2019
• Writers
  • Emma Green
    America Moved On From Its Gay-Rights Moment—And Left a Legal Mess Behind
    7:00 AM ET
  • Russell Berman
    Trump Passed the Tax Cuts. Now He’s Undermining Them.
    Aug 9, 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
  • Nora Kelly
    Barack Obama’s Eulogy for John McCain
    Sep 1, 2018
  All Writers
• Culture

  Trump Has Enabled Israel’s Antidemocratic Tendencies at Every Turn

  The president tweeted that Israel should ban Representatives Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar from entering the country. Now Israel has barred the women from visiting.

  • Emma Green
  • Aug 15, 2019

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

  John Hickenlooper said his calling was to run for president. With that dream dead, does he have a new vocation to run for the Senate?

  • David A. Graham
  • Aug 15, 2019

• The Limits of Trump’s White Identity Politics

  The president is casting Democrats as the real racists to energize his base, but in doing so he’s hindering his capacity to reach beyond it.

  • Ronald Brownstein
  • Aug 15, 2019

• The End of the Dan Coats Era

  Whoever takes over from Coats permanently could serve as a needed voice of clarity about America’s biggest challenges—or see the intelligence community further sidelined.

  • Kathy Gilsinan
  • Aug 15, 2019

• The Pull of Andrew Yang’s Pessimism

  Once derided as a “novelty candidate,” the outsider Democrat is poised to hang on longer than many senators and governors in the 2020 primary race.

  • Edward-Isaac Dovere
  • Aug 15, 2019
• Congress

  Why Democrats May Not Want Steve King to Resign

  Several 2020 candidates have called for the congressman to step down following comments he made about rape and incest. But he represents the party’s best hope in Northwest Iowa.

  • Elaine Godfrey
  • Aug 14, 2019
• Politics Daily

  The Atlantic Politics & Policy Daily: The King and Iowa

  More politicians condemn the latest comments from Steve King, the controversial Iowa congressman facing a tough reelection come November. Plus: ICE’s Ken Cuccinelli has always been a hardliner.

  • Elaine Godfrey
  • Aug 14, 2019
• Criminal Justice

  How Trump Is Reversing Obama’s Nondiscrimination Legacy

  A new rule would allow federal contractors to make hiring and firing decisions based on their religious beliefs and practices.

  • Emma Green
  • Aug 14, 2019

• The New Stephen Miller

  In Ken Cuccinelli, President Trump’s biggest immigration hard-liner has found the consummate ideological ally.

  • Elaina Plott
  • Aug 14, 2019
• Politics Daily

  The Atlantic Politics & Policy Daily: Catching Steyer

  The billionaire climate-change activist has nearly clinched a spot on the debate stage. Plus, Trump delays the rollout of Chinese tariffs and John Hickenlooper mulls dropping out.

  • Christian Paz
  • Aug 13, 2019

• The DNC Debate Rules Are a Game

  Just weeks into his presidential campaign, the billionaire activist Tom Steyer is close to qualifying for the contests in Houston.

  • Edward-Isaac Dovere
  • Aug 13, 2019
• Politics Daily

  The Atlantic Politics & Policy Daily: Marianne Williamson Smells Like Rosewater

  The Democratic candidates descend on the Iowa State Fair while the country unravels—and why Marianne Williamson isn’t trying to appeal to voters’ rational side. Plus, why the Epstein conspiracy theories are the new normal.

  • Christian Paz
  • Aug 12, 2019

• The Contradictory Americana on Display at the Iowa State Fair

  Democrats went through the performative motions of the American electoral system this weekend—even though that system may be severely broken.

  • Edward-Isaac Dovere
  • Aug 12, 2019