The Atlantic
The Most Powerful Rocket in History Had a Good Morning
Marina Koren
SpaceX has once again launched the most powerful rocket in history into the sky, and this time, the mission seems to have passed most of its key milestones. Starship took off without a hitch this morning, separated from its booster, and cruised through space for a while before SpaceX lost contact with it. Instead of splashing down in the ocean as planned, Starship seems to have been destroyed during reentry in Earth's atmosphere.The flight was the third try in an ambitious testing campaign that b...
The Eternal Scrutiny of Kate Middleton
Hillary Kelly
Kate Middleton has been reduced to her body. By which I mean: Many weeks into her recovery from surgery, and many years into her life as a royal, the physical form of Catherine, Princess of Wales, has become a commodity that the public feels entitled to consume. Her image has been on screens and in print for the past 20 years, so scrutinized and idolized that now, while she's out of sight, newspaper columnists and intrepid TikTokers are fixated on not just where she is but also how she might look...
Supreme Betrayal
Laurence H. Tribe
The Supreme Court of the United States did a grave disservice to both the Constitution and the nation in Trump v. Anderson.In a stunning disfigurement of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Court impressed upon it an ahistorical misinterpretation that defies both its plain text and its original meaning. Despite disagreement within the Court that led to a 5-4 split among the justices over momentous but tangential issues that it had no need to reach in order to resolve the controversy before it, the Cour...
We're Already Living in the Post-Truth Era
Damon Beres
This is Atlantic Intelligence, a limited-run series in which our writers help you wrap your mind around artificial intelligence and a new machine age. Sign up here.For years, experts have worried that artificial intelligence will produce a new disinformation crisis on the internet. Image-, audio-, and video-generating tools allow people to rapidly create high-quality fakes to spread on social media, potentially tricking people into believing fiction is fact. But as my colleague Charlie Warzel wri...
The Atlantic Publishes "The Great American Novels," a New List of the Most Consequential Novels of the Past 100 Years
The Atlantic
Today The Atlantic launches "The Great American Novels," an ambitious new project that brings together the most consequential novels of the past 100 years. Focusing on 1924 to 2023--a period that began as literary modernism was cresting and includes all manner of literary possibility, including the experimentations of postmodernism and the narrative satisfactions of genre fiction--the 136 novels on the list include 45 debut novels, nine winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and three childre...
Of Course America Fell for Liquid Death
Jacob Stern
When you think about it, the business of bottled water is pretty odd. What other industry produces billions in revenue selling something that almost everyone in America--with some notable and appalling exceptions--can get basically for free? Almost every brand claims in one way or another to be the purest or best-tasting or most luxurious, but very little distinguishes Poland Spring from Aquafina or Dasani or Evian. And then there is Liquid Death. The company sells its water in tallboy cans branded...
I'm Disabled. Please Help Me.
Michael Schuman
One cold November morning, I was on Seventh Avenue and 50th Street in Manhattan, on my way to a Dunkin' Donuts. For most people, such an excursion is not a particularly exciting part of the day. But when you are almost blind, as I am, the expedition has a certain complexity.I knew the shop was somewhere just past the northeast corner on 50th, but when I got there, I could not identify the correct storefront. The cane I walk with can prevent me from slamming into a wall or tumbling down a staircas...
Don't Let Your Disgust Be Manipulated
Arthur C. Brooks
Want to stay current with Arthur's writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.Disgust is an incredibly powerful negative emotion, capable of inducing vomiting, panic, and rage. The sound evolutionary reason for our experience of disgust is that it helped keep us alive--by making repellent the tastes, sights, smells, and other sensations associated with death, rottenness, or toxicity. So when your refrigerator smells wrong and, upon inspection, you find that the culprit is a...
What's Happening in Russia Is Not an Election
Brian Klaas
If you read global news, you'll be told that Russia is holding an election this weekend. That's not true. Millions of Russians will be voting, but not in an election: Call it an "election-style event."Terminology matters. Many people wrongly see elections as synonymous with democracy because the same word is used to refer to wildly different events. A genuine election, when it takes place, is one of the fundamental pillars that uphold democracy. But a rigged contest marks the death of democracy a...
Inside a Hospital's Abortion Committee
Hanna Rosin
Sarah Osmundson knows how to talk about abortion. She's learned over the course of her career as a maternal-fetal medicine doctor that some patients are comfortable with the option, and others would never consider it. Osmundson deals with hard cases: Her patients are women with preexisting conditions that make pregnancy dangerous, women who develop life-threatening conditions during pregnancy, and fetuses with conditions that are not survivable. She's trained and practiced in different parts of t...
The Great American Novels
The Atlantic Culture Desk
In 1868, a little-known writer by the name of John William DeForest proposed a new type of literature, a collective artistic project for a nation just emerging from an existential conflict: a work of fiction that accomplished "the task of painting the American soul." It would be called the Great American Novel, and no one had written it yet, DeForest admitted. Maybe soon.A century and a half later, the idea has endured, even as it has become more complicated. In 2024, our definition of literary g...
Donald Trump Is a National-Security Risk
Tom Nichols
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Since 1952, the White House has allowed major-party candidates access to classified intelligence briefings so that they will be current on important issues if they win the election. Trump should be denied this courtesy.First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
How Hur misled the country on B...
Gaza on the Brink of Famine
Alan Taylor
The United Nations is warning that famine in Gaza is "almost inevitable." Palestinians living in Gaza are struggling with extreme shortages of food, clean water, and medicine. Several countries, including Jordan, France, Egypt, the U.S., the United Arab Emirates, and now Germany, are coordinating airdrops of humanitarian aid to help alleviate the crisis, and the U.S. military is working to a build a temporary port on Gaza's coastline to bring in additional aid. Critics have pointed out that airdr...
It's Just an App
Kate Lindsay
In 2019, I had full-blown app fatigue. My scrolling time was dominated by Instagram and Twitter, my idle hours by YouTube, and on top of that I was still checking Facebook, Snapchat, and whatever buzzy platform my friends were touting that week. (Remember Lasso? Anyone?) There was no room for any more, I told the publicist sitting across from me in a conference room in Anaheim, California. But she was insistent that, as a journalist writing about internet culture, I needed to start paying more at...
The Pleasure of Judging a Pop Star
Spencer Kornhaber
Divorce is the hot cultural topic of the year, judging by 2024's most-discussed memoir, magazine column, and 50-part, eight-hour TikTok series titled "Who TF Did I Marry?" The specifics of each tale differ--unhappy families and all that--but they all share something: a pretense of public service. Lyz Lenz warns women that the institution of marriage is sexist; Emily Gould practices radical honesty about mental health; Reesa Teesa exposes a dating-app scammer. Having a larger point, a useful meaning...
How Hur Misled the Country on Biden's Memory
Adam Serwer
Sign up for The Decision, a newsletter featuring our 2024 election coverage.First impressions stick. After a big story hits, the initial conclusions can turn out to be wrong, or partly wrong, but the revisions are not what people remember. They remember the headlines in imposing font, the solemn tone from a presenter, the avalanche of ironic summaries on social media. Political operatives know this, and it's that indelible impression they want, one that sticks like a greasy fingerprint and that n...
The Bump-Stocks Case Is About Something Far Bigger Than Gun Regulations
Stephen I. Vladeck
Sometimes a Supreme Court case appears to be about a minor technical issue, but is in fact a reflection of a much broader and significant legal development--one that could upend years of settled precedent and, with it, basic understandings of the allocation of powers across our system of government.That's exactly what is happening in Garland v. Cargill, a case for which the Supreme Court heard oral argument at the end of February. The specific challenge in the case is to a Trump-era federal regula...
'Some Damn Fine Shoes'
Steven Kurutz
In 1989, the American workwear brand Carhartt produced a special clothing collection to mark its centennial. While shopping with my wife at a vintage store in New Jersey a few years ago, I came across one of these garments--a cotton-duck work jacket with a patch on the chest pocket that read 100 Years, 1889-1989. The same was stamped on each brass button. Intrigued, I took the jacket off its hanger. The inside was lined with a blanketlike fabric to provide extra warmth when working outdoors. Craft...
End the Phone-Based Childhood Now
Jonathan Haidt
Photographs by Maggie ShannonThis article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.Something went suddenly and horribly wrong for adolescents in the early 2010s. By now you've likely seen the statistics: Rates of depression and anxiety in the United States--fairly stable in the 2000s--rose by more than 50 percent in many studies from 2010 to 2019. The suicide rate rose 48 percent for adolescents ages 10 to 19. For girls ages 10 to 14, it rose 131 percent.The probl...
The Cowardice of <em>Guernica</em>
Phil Klay
In the days after October 7, the writer and translator Joanna Chen spoke with a neighbor in Israel whose children were frightened by the constant sound of warplanes. "I tell them these are good booms," the neighbor said to Chen with a grimace. "I understood the subtext," Chen wrote later in an essay published in Guernica magazine on March 4, titled "From the Edges of a Broken World." The booms were, of course, the Israeli army bombing Gaza, part of a campaign that has left at least 30,000 civilia...
Could a TikTok Ban Actually Happen?
Lora Kelley
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Efforts to crack down on TikTok are picking up momentum in Congress. What was once a Trump-led effort boosted by Republicans has since become a bipartisan priority for lawmakers hoping to look tough on China in an election year.First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:
The return of measles
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The Ozempic Revolution Is Stuck
Yasmin Tayag
The irony undergirding the new wave of obesity drugs is that they initially weren't created for obesity at all. The weight loss spurred by Ozempic, a diabetes drug in the class of so-called GLP-1 agonists, gave way to Wegovy--the same drug, repackaged for obesity. Zepbound, another medication, soon followed. Now these drugs have a new purpose: heart health.On Friday, the FDA approved the use of Wegovy for reducing the risk of heart attack, stroke, and death in adults who are overweight and have ca...
The Return of Measles
Daniel Engber
Measles seems poised to make a comeback in America. Two adults and two children staying at a migrant shelter in Chicago have gotten sick with the disease. A sick kid in Sacramento, California, may have exposed hundreds of people to the virus at the hospital. Three other people were diagnosed in Michigan, along with seven from the same elementary school in Florida. As of Thursday, 17 states have reported cases to the CDC since the start of the year. (For comparison, that total was 19, plus the Dis...
Trump Repeats Obama's Mistake
David A. Graham
Sign up for The Decision, a newsletter featuring our 2024 election coverage.Donald Trump has long detested Barack Obama and sought to present himself as the opposite of his presidential predecessor in every way. But in his takeover of the Republican National Committee, he risks echoing one of Obama's biggest political mistakes.Last night, Trump's handpicked leadership of the RNC took charge and conducted a purge. The new regime, led by the new chair, Michael Whatley; the vice chair, Lara Trump; a...
Winners of the 2024 Sony World Photography Awards Open Competition
Alan Taylor
The top entries in the 2024 Sony World Photography Awards Open Competition have been announced, and competition organizers were once more kind enough to share some of the winning and shortlisted photos from their 10 categories: Architecture, Creative, Landscape, Lifestyle, Motion, Natural World & Wildlife, Object, Portraiture, Street Photography, and Travel. Captions have been provided by the photographers.