Best of The Atlantic
U.S. Support for Israel's War Has Become Indefensible
Phil Klay
"This is our 9/11," an Israeli Defense Forces spokesperson said a few days after the rape, torture, kidnapping, and mass murder of Israelis on October 7. Or it was worse than 9/11. "Twenty 9/11s," Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said a few weeks later, once the scale of the devastation was evident. As for the current military campaign in Gaza? Earlier this month, Netanyahu told new IDF cadets, "We are preventing the next 9/11."I'm a New Yorker. For me, 9/11 was the unbearable loss of th...
Too Few Americans Are Eating a Remarkable Fruit
Zoe Schlanger
Someplace in the lush backroads of San Sebastian, in western Puerto Rico, my friend Carina pulled the car over. At a crest in the road stood a breadfruit tree, full of basketball-size, lime-green fruits, knobbled and prehistoric, like a dinosaur egg covered in ostrich leather. One had recently fallen. I jumped out to scoop it up, thinking about the breadfruit tostones we would make that afternoon. We'd fry chunks of the white, spongy flesh, then smash them with the back of a cast-iron pan, then f...
The Trolls Who Attack Dog Fosters
Caroline Mimbs Nyce
Lucchese is not the world's cutest dog. Picked up as a stray somewhere in Texas, he is scruffy and, as one person aptly observed online, looks a little like Steve Buscemi. (It's the eyes.)Isabel Klee, a professional influencer in New York City, had agreed to keep Lucchese, or Luc, until he found a forever home. Fosters such as Klee help move dogs out of loud and stressful shelters so they can relax and socialize before moving into a forever home. (The foster can then take on a new dog, and the pr...
The Patron Saint of Political Violence
Gal Beckerman
Some ideas exist so far beyond one's own moral boundaries that to hear them articulated out loud, unabashedly, is to experience something akin to awe. That's how I felt, anyway, when I watched the video of a Cornell professor speaking at a rally a week after Hamas's October 7 attack. "It was exhilarating!" he shouted. "It was energizing!" The mass murder and rape and kidnapping of Israelis on that day had already been well documented. I saw an atrocity; he saw renewal and life. Gazans, he exclaim...
I Just Want a Normal Drink
Yasmin Tayag
Recently, a balmy spring day left me feeling parched. I needed a beverage--stat!--and had forgotten my water bottle at home. I ducked into a nearby CVS to pick up a drink.The choices were so overwhelming, I nearly forgot my thirst. The drink aisle included a bevy of the usual thirst-quenching options--and some that looked like they belonged in an apothecary rather than next to the LaCroix. Row upon row of multicolored cans and bottles held drinks with purposes beyond mere hydration and flavor. Some ...
Middle Names Reveal More Than You Think
Michael Waters
This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.In 2011, demographic researchers across America realized something surprising: Census forms had a lot of spots left blank. When one person fills it out for the whole household, they might skip certain sections--especially the middle-name column. Sixty percent of people left out the middle names of their extended family members, and nearly 80 percent omitted those of roommates they weren't related to. Responden...
Trump Media Is the New Bed Bath & Beyond
James Surowiecki
Sign up for The Decision, a newsletter featuring our 2024 election coverage.After the stock-market frenzy that ensued when Trump Media & Technology Group started trading on Tuesday (under the ticker symbol DJT), one thing is almost certainly true: Donald Trump is now the chairman of the most overvalued company on Nasdaq. Trump Media had a grand total of $3.4 million in revenue in the first nine months of 2023, against more than $10 million in operating losses. Its only product is Truth Social, T...
Daniel Kahneman Wanted You to Realize How Wrong You Are
Daniel Engber
I first met Daniel Kahneman about 25 years ago. I'd applied to graduate school in neuroscience at Princeton University, where he was on the faculty, and I was sitting in his office for an interview. Kahneman, who died today at the age of 90, must not have thought too highly of the occasion. "Conducting an interview is likely to diminish the accuracy of a selection procedure," he'd later note in his best-selling book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. That had been the first finding in his long career as a...
Where RFK Jr. Goes From Here
John Hendrickson
Sign up for The Decision, a newsletter featuring our 2024 election coverage.Wasn't Robert F. Kennedy Jr. supposed to have flamed out by now? At a rally yesterday in Oakland, California, Kennedy--a lifelong Democrat turned independent--unveiled his 2024 running mate, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Nicole Shanahan. Kennedy selected Shanahan from a motley crew of reported vice-presidential contenders: Aaron Rodgers, Jesse Ventura, Mike Rowe, Tulsi Gabbard, and the rapper Killer Mike, to name a few.Sh...
The War at Stanford
Theo Baker
This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.One of the section leaders for my computer-science class, Hamza El Boudali, believes that President Joe Biden should be killed. "I'm not calling for a civilian to do it, but I think a military should," the 23-year-old Stanford University student told a small group of protesters last month. "I'd be happy if Biden was dead." He thinks that Stanford is complicit in what he calls the genocide of Palestinians, and...
Solving a Century-Old Byline Mystery
Shan Wang
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."Do you like to know whom a book's by?" E. M. Forster asks in a 1925 essay on the question of anonymity in literature and journalism. The practice is fine in fiction, he argues, but not in news writing. Forster, however, wasn't in charge: His essay, which appeared in the November 1925 issue of The Atlantic, was followed by an article by...
Can You Ever Really Escape Your Ex?
Faith Hill
This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.Cool-but-not-too-cool artists; warm, friendly nerds or cold, unfriendly secret nerds; emotionally distant people; bossy, round-faced women; sensitive weirdos.These are a few of the responses I got when I asked friends: "What's your type?" No one seemed particularly surprised by the question, and a significant number responded without missing a beat. Nearly everyone gave me a highly specific answer. Some of th...
Do Trump Supporters Mind When He Mocks Biden's Stutter?
Hanna Rosin
Sign up for The Decision, a newsletter featuring our 2024 election coverage.Recently the Atlantic political reporter John Hendrickson and I set out on a kind of social experiment. A friend of Hendrickson's had sent him a video of Donald Trump mocking President Joe Biden's stutter. In the hierarchy of Trump insults, this one did not rate especially high. But it resonated with Hendrickson, who wrote a book about his own stuttering. And what especially resonated with him was the audience's laughter....
How Not to Be Bored When You Have to Wait
Arthur C. Brooks
Want to stay current with Arthur's writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.Like many, I travel a lot for work. Unlike many, I never get tired of it. On the open road are always interesting people and new places. Phoenix in July or Fairbanks in the winter? Bring it on. There is one thing about travel that bugs me, though, and has ever since my tender years: the constant waiting. When I travel, I wait in the TSA line, wait to board the plane, wait in restaurants, wait to ...
A Bad Gamble
Jemele Hill
This week, the pro baseball superstar Shohei Ohtani addressed the media for the first time since his name surfaced in an investigation of an alleged illegal gambling ring. He told reporters that the $4.5 million in wire transfers from his account had been sent without his knowledge by his friend and interpreter, and that he had "never bet on baseball or any other sports."Opening Day is this week, and Major League Baseball can't be happy about this cloud over its biggest star. But with gambling so...
A Drug Half as Good as Ozempic for One-30th the Price
Daniel Engber
"In my lifetime, I never dreamed that we would be talking about medicines that are providing hope for people like me," Oprah Winfrey says at the top of her recent prime-time special on obesity. The program, called Shame, Blame and the Weight Loss Revolution, is very clear on which medicines she means. At one point, Oprah stares into the camera and carefully pronounces their brand names for the audience: "Ozempic and Wegovy," she says. "Mounjaro and Zepbound." The class of drugs to which these fou...
A New American Poet
Edward Garnett
A SHORT time ago I found on a London bookstall an odd number of The Poetry Review, with examples of and comments on "Modern American Poets,"--examples which whetted my curiosity. But the few quotations given appeared to me literary bric-a-brac, the fruit of light liaisons between American dilettantism and European models. Such poetry, aesthetic or sentimental,--reflections of vagrant influences, lyrical embroideries in the latest designs, with little imaginative insight into life or nature,--abounds...
Sex and the College Girl
Nora Johnson
Editor's Note: A native of California and a graduate of Smith College in the class of 1954, Nora Johnson has traveled widely, first through Europe, and after her marriage, through the Middle East. Now living in New York with her husband and small daughter, she is the author of a number of short stories, and her first novel, The World of Henry Orient, was published last year under the Atlantic-Little, Brown imprint. Ever since Gertrude Stein made her remark about the Lost Generation, every decade ...
The Atlantic Tops 1 Million Subscriptions and Reaches Profitability
The Atlantic
The Atlantic now has more than 1 million subscriptions and is profitable, surpassing two goals that the company set several years ago. In an email to The Atlantic's staff, quoted in part below, Editor in Chief Jeffrey Goldberg and CEO Nicholas Thompson announce this news.
Overall revenue is up more than 10 percent year over year; advertising booked year-to-date is also up 33 percent year over year. Subscriptions to The Atlantic have increased by double-digit percentages in each of the past four ...
How Climate Change Is Making Allergy Season Worse
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.Rising temperatures are leading to what my colleague Yasmin Tayag has called an "allergy apocalypse." I spoke with Yasmin, who covers science for The Atlantic, about our ever-expanding allergy season, the relationship between rising temperatures and pollen, and the extent to which pollen may rob us of t...
Family Ties
Hannah Giorgis
Photographs by LaToya Ruby FrazierThe steel industry was already collapsing by the time the photographer and visual artist LaToya Ruby Frazier was born, in 1982. Like many Rust Belt communities, her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania, has suffered both economic and environmental distress: Thousands of manufacturing jobs have vanished, but chemicals from the steel plants still pollute Braddock's skies.
U.S.S. Edgar Thomson Steel Works and Monongahela River (2013) ((c) 2024 LaToya Ruby Frazier, court...
The Impossible Fight to Live the Life You Want
Lily Meyer
From the very start, Memory Piece is a tale of escape and entanglement. Lisa Ko's limber, ambitious second novel opens with three teen girls, bored at a Fourth of July barbecue, sneaking into a neighbor's cookout to swipe burgers. The adventure jolts them briefly out of their boredom; it also creates a bond that lasts into adulthood. But Memory Piece is not, at its core, a novel of friendship. Ko isn't especially concerned with the summer-afternoon alchemy that ropes her protagonists--Giselle Chin, who becomes a conceptual artist;...