The Atlantic
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...
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...
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 ...
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 ...
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 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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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....
Photographing Black Self-Creation in the American South
Imani Perry
Photos by Rahim FortuneContemporary rural places are rendered all but invisible in the American public imagination; we are a nation that celebrates big cities and suburbs. But rural towns are not only an integral part of the national fabric; they are often key to understanding our story. Hardtack, a new book from the photographer Rahim Fortune, is a case in point.Fortune's portraiture captures the work of Black self-creation in the thick of a humid, hard-earned history. In these images--all shot i...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Benjamin Netanyahu Is Israel's Worst Prime Minister Ever
Anshel Pfeffer
If Benjamin Netanyahu had accepted defeat in June 2021, finally yielding the stage to a coalition of his opponents, he could have retired at the age of 71 with a decent claim to having been one of Israel's more successful prime ministers.He had already surpassed the time in office of Israel's founder, David Ben-Gurion, becoming the country's longest-serving prime minister in 2019. His second stretch in office, from 2009 to 2021, coincided with perhaps the best 12 years Israel had known since its ...
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;...
Trump's Lucky Break
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.Donald Trump has built up his reputation as a rich guy. When he ended up unable to cover a massive bond, the courts threw him a lifeline, but just for now.First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
The aftermath of the Baltimore bridge collapse
The Supreme Court is shaming itself.
The war a...
Baltimore Lost More Than a Bridge
Rachel Gutman-Wei
You could see the Francis Scott Key Bridge from Fort McHenry, the pentagon-shaped keep that inspired the bridge's namesake to write the verses that became our national anthem. You could see it from the pagoda in Patterson Park, another strangely geometric landmark from which I've cheered on teams at Baltimore's annual kinetic-sculpture race. You could see it from the top of Johns Hopkins Hospital, the city's biggest employer. This morning, my husband sent me a photo of the familiar view out his w...
Winners of the 2024 World Nature Photography Awards
Alan Taylor
The winning images and photographers of this year's World Nature Photography Awards have just been announced. Contest organizers have once more shared some of the winning images, shown below, from their 14 categories. Captions were provided by the photographers and have been lightly edited for style and clarity.
The Aftermath of the Baltimore Bridge Collapse
Juliette Kayyem
The rapid collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore early this morning touched off a frantic search for survivors--and gave Americans a frightening reminder of the fragility of the many systems that allow us to go about our lives. The sun rose to reveal twisted metal atop the cargo ship Dali, a long underwater obstruction keeping ships from moving in and out of the port of Baltimore, a major tear in the transportation network, and great uncertainty about how the catastrophe would rippl...
The End of Foreign-Language Education
Louise Matsakis
A few days ago, I watched a video of myself talking in perfect Chinese. I've been studying the language on and off for only a few years, and I'm far from fluent. But there I was, pronouncing each character flawlessly in the correct tone, just as a native speaker would. Gone were my grammar mistakes and awkward pauses, replaced by a smooth and slightly alien-sounding voice. "My favorite food is sushi," I said--wo zui xihuan de shiwu shi shousi--with no hint of excitement or joy.I'd created the video...