Best of The Atlantic
How It All Went Wrong for Eric Adams
Michael Powell
On a soggy January day, New York Mayor Eric Adams travels to a theater in the Bronx to deliver his State of the City address. As dignitaries and the odd reporter take their seats, an Afro-Latino jazz band jams onstage, followed by a flamenco dance company, a gospel choir, and a gamut of religious leaders--Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, Sikh. "O Lord, in obedience with your holy word, we intercede on behalf of our mayor," a Latina evangelical minister says, setting the mood. "Bless him with courage like ...
America's Magical Thinking About Housing
Derek Thompson
This is Work in Progress, a newsletter about work, technology, and how to solve some of America's biggest problems. Sign up here.If you want to understand America's strange relationship with housing in the 21st century, look at Austin, where no matter what happens to prices, someone's always claiming that the sky is falling.In the 2010s, the capital of Texas grew faster than any other major U.S. metro, pulling in movers from around the country. Initially, downtown and suburban areas struggled to ...
Whatever Happened to All Those Care Robots?
Stephanie H. Murray
The first thing Pepper told me was that he was running out of battery. "He's got about 15 minutes before he dies," Emanuel Nunez Sardinha, a Ph.D. candidate in robotics at Bristol Robotics Laboratory, told me. That turned out to be plenty. Sardinha greeted Pepper; then I did. I asked Pepper how he was doing, to which he replied, "How are you doing?" Then Sardinha resumed telling me about the sorts of things Pepper, a friendly, wide-eyed robot designed to assist humans through social interaction, ...
Even Oprah Doesn't Know How to Talk About Weight Loss Now
Hannah Giorgis
Nearly 13 years after the final episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show, it's easy to forget just how vicious the public scrutiny of Winfrey's body was during her talk show's decades-long run. But those memories haven't left Winfrey, and they take center stage in her new prime-time special, Shame, Blame and the Weight Loss Revolution. "For 25 years, making fun of my weight was national sport," she recalls in the opening monologue, which addresses the stigma of obesity and the emerging culture around we...
Miranda's Last Gift
David Frum
I was at the kitchen counter making coffee when my daughter Miranda's dog approached. Ringo stands about 10 inches high at the shoulder, but he carries himself with supreme confidence. He fixed his lustrous black eyes on mine. Staring straight at me, he lifted his leg and urinated on the oven door.After the mess was cleaned up, I complained to Miranda, "I don't think Ringo likes me."Miranda replied, "Ringo loves you. He just doesn't respect you."Theoretically, Ringo is a Cavalier King Charles spa...
Too Much Purity Is Bad for the Left
Arash Azizi
American leftists are facing a question that has become a perennial bugbear. Come November, should they support the Democratic incumbent Joe Biden to defeat Donald Trump? Or, given their profound reservations about both candidates, should they abstain from voting at all?Biden's support for Israel's brutal war in Gaza has given the conundrum special urgency this year, but the question has become exhaustingly familiar. Four years ago, the country's largest leftist organization, the Democratic Socia...
What Trump Supporters Think When He Mocks People With Disabilities
John Hendrickson
Last weekend, I stood among thousands of Donald Trump supporters in a windy airfield, watching them watch their candidate. I traveled to the former president's event just outside Dayton, Ohio, because I couldn't stop thinking about something that had happened one week earlier, at his rally in Georgia: Trump had broken into an imitation of President Joe Biden's lifelong stutter, and the crowd had cackled.Mocking Biden is not the worst thing Trump has ever done. Biden is a grown man, and the most p...
Whatever You Do, Don't Do the Silent Treatment
Arthur C. Brooks
Want to stay current with Arthur's writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.Life for a 19th-century sailor was hard: Months at sea were accompanied by constant danger and deprivation. To make matters worse, mariners saw the same few people all day, every day, in a radically confined space where they were expected to get along and look after one another. On a long voyage, one obnoxious person could make life utterly miserable for everyone.So sailors used a tried technique...
Don't Miss This Eclipse
Marina Koren
Right now, a special cosmic arrangement is sliding into place. The moon has positioned itself on the same side of Earth as the sun. The moon has drawn closer to Earth, and its orbit is tilted just so. On April 8, our silvery satellite will pass between our star and our planet, and cast its shadow upon us. In the United States, the darkness will trace a ribbonlike path about 115 miles wide from Texas to Maine, temporarily extinguishing the daylight. Within that area, in cloud-free conditions, the ...
The Smartphone Kids Are Not All Right
Hanna Rosin
I did not know this at the time, but apparently my children were part of a generation of guinea pigs. "It's as though we sent Gen Z to grow up on Mars when we gave them smartphones in the early 2010s in the largest uncontrolled experiment humanity has ever performed on its own children," Jonathan Haidt writes in The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.Haidt convincingly uses data to argue that a sharp uptick in depression, anxiety, lone...
DNA Tests Are Uncovering the True Prevalence of Incest
Sarah Zhang
When Steve Edsel was a boy, his adoptive parents kept a scrapbook of newspaper clippings in their bedroom closet. He would ask for it sometimes, poring over the headlines about his birth. Headlines like this: "Mother Deserts Son, Flees From Hospital," Winston-Salem Journal, December 30, 1973.The mother in question was 14 years old, "5 feet 6 with reddish brown hair," and she had come to the hospital early one morning with her own parents. They gave names that all turned out to be fake. And by 8 o...
The IRS Finally Has an Answer to TurboTax
Saahil Desai
During the torture ritual that was doing my taxes this year, I was surprised to find myself giddy after reading these words: "You are now chatting with IRS Representative-1004671045." I had gotten stuck trying to parse my W-2, which, under "Box 14: Other," contained a mysterious $389.70 deduction from my overall pay last year. No explanation. No clues. Nothing. I tapped the chat button on my tax software for help, expecting to be sucked into customer-service hell. Instead, a real IRS employee ans...
The Art of Communing With Trees
Rachel Gutman-Wei
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic's archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.Trees can seem like timeless beings. Many a giant sequoia has racked up three millennia on this Earth. A pine in California's White Mountains is estimated to be nearly 5,000 years old. A colony of aspens in Utah may well have originated during the Stone Age, and to this day, its leaves glitter gold in the autumn sun.A tree's life span, ...
Flying Is Weird Right Now
Charlie Warzel
Somewhere over Colorado this weekend, while I sat in seat 21F, my plane began to buck, jostle, and rattle. Within seconds, the seat-belt indicator dinged as the pilot asked flight attendants to return to their seats. We were experiencing what I, a frequent flier, might describe as "intermediate turbulence"--a sustained parade of midair bumps that can be uncomfortable but by no means terrifying.Generally, I do not fear hurtling through the sky at 500 miles per hour, but at this moment I felt an unu...
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...
There Was No Russian Election
Anne Applebaum
There was no election in Russia last weekend. There was no campaign. There were no debates, which was unsurprising, because no issues could be debated. Above all, there were no real candidates, bar one: the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, the man who has just started his fifth, unconstitutional term in office.Russians did line up at polling stations, but these were not actually polling stations. They were props in an elaborate piece of political theater, a months-long exercise in the project...
Joe Biden and Donald Trump Have Thoughts About Your Next Car
Zoe Schlanger
The Biden administration earlier today issued a major new rule intended to spur the country's electric-vehicle industry and slash future sales of new gas-powered cars. The rule is not a ban on gas cars, nor does it mandate electric-vehicle sales. It is a new emissions standard, requiring automakers to cut the average carbon emission of their fleets by nearly 50 percent by 2032.This would speed up the transformation of the car industry: The simplest way for automakers to cut emissions will likely ...
Photos: Spring in Bloom
Alan Taylor
Tuesday marked the first day of spring, and the Northern Hemisphere has begun to warm, with flowers and trees in bloom. Gathered below is a small collection of images from recent weeks in North America, Asia, and Europe, of people enjoying flowering fields and trees--signs of warmer days to come.
Trump's Dangerous January 6-Pardon Promise
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.Donald Trump's plan to pardon people in prison for their crimes on January 6--people he now calls "hostages"--is yet another dangerous and un-American attack on the rule of law.First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
The British right's favorite sex offender
What Trump supporters think when...
Valencia's Fallas Festival: Welcoming Spring with Fire
Alan Taylor
For hundreds of years, residents of Valencia, Spain, have celebrated the arrival of spring and paid tribute to San Jose, the patron saint of the carpenters' guild, by building and then ceremonially burning huge monuments made of wood, cardboard, and paper. The monuments, or fallas, consist of ninots, or figures, many of which are caricatures that portray current events and celebrities. The two-week-long festival features parades, fireworks, and fiestas, and ends with the burning of hundreds of fa...
I'm Begging the Courts to Stop Citing My Work
Radley Balko
A little while ago, a reader sent me a Nevada Supreme Court ruling. In the unanimous opinion, the justices cited my work from the mid-2000s criticizing the use of bite-mark identification in criminal trials. For a journalist who writes and reports on the criminal-justice system, getting cited in a court opinion can be gratifying. You want to feel like your work matters; you aren't shouting into a void.Even so, a citation isn't always a win. Of the dozen-odd times I've seen my work cited by a cour...