Best of The Atlantic
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...
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...
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 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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
The Only Force Stronger Than Polarization? Rising Home Prices
Jerusalem Demsas
Updated at 1:25 p.m. ET on March 11, 2024.For days before his State of the Union address last week, there were whispers that Joe Biden would make a major push to expand the nation's housing supply--a possibility that worried the yes-in-my-backyard activists who push for more construction in communities across the country. Political polarization in the United States has grown so dire that getting the president on your side can backfire. The morning of the speech, the White House rolled out some mod...
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...
Why Does Romance Now Feel Like Work?
Hannah Giorgis
Complaints about the current state of dating tend to revolve around the impersonal, gamelike behavior that apps such as Tinder, Hinge, and Bumble encourage. In theory, sifting through hundreds of profiles within minutes is supposed to be a convenient means of finding the perfect partner you may never have bumped into offline--or a lively, empowering way to occasionally dip into the dating pool without making any serious commitment. But in reality, the process of searching for your best-possible, m...
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...
The People Rooting for the End of IVF
Elaine Godfrey
Updated at 4:10 p.m. ET on March 11, 2024Chaos reigns in Alabama--or at least in the Alabama world of reproductive health. Three weeks ago, the state's supreme court ruled that embryos should be treated as children, thrusting the future of in vitro fertilization, and of thousands of would-be Alabama parents, into uncertainty. Last week, state lawmakers scrambled to pass a legislative fix to protect the right of prospective parents to seek IVF, but they did so without addressing the court's existen...
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...
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...
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
...