The Atlantic
A Vision of the City as a Live Organism
Talya Zax
Imagine a city of staggering, sometimes menacing beauty. Its history is bloody, but it carries on, becoming more mesmerizingly strange with each era.Now imagine that the city is sentient. It has agency and consciousness; it decides who gets to stay and who needs to leave. It's both a physical place and an ambient spirit that constantly inhabits different forms; it can seduce a visitor and twist time backwards. A talking, typing version of that city somehow ends up in a WhatsApp group for people w...
Solar Eclipses Are Always With Us
Marina Koren
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.Cosmically speaking, the alignment of Earth, the sun, and the moon is ordinary. But from our corner of the universe, the occurrence produces something wondrous: a total solar eclipse. On April 8, the moon will pass between the sun and Earth, casting a shadow along a narrow strip of the country, from Texas to Maine. Outside this path, th...
AI Has Lost Its Magic
Ian Bogost
I frequently ask ChatGPT to write poems in the style of the American modernist poet Hart Crane. It does an admirable job of delivering. But the other day, when I instructed the software to give the Crane treatment to a plate of ice-cream sandwiches, I felt bored before I even saw the answer. "The oozing cream, like time, escapes our grasp, / Each moment slipping with a silent gasp." This was fine. It was competent. I read the poem, Slacked part of it to a colleague, and closed the window. Whateve...
A Secret Code May Have Been Hiding in Classical Music for 200 Years
S. I. Rosenbaum
In the spring of 1825, Ludwig van Beethoven was struck by a gut ailment so severe that he thought he might die. That summer, after he recovered, he returned to the string quartet he'd been writing before his illness--Quartet No. 15 in A Minor, Op. 132--and added a new segment inspired by his survival. To this day, the piece is known for the slowly unfolding, baffled joy of its third movement, where the music seems to trace the shuffling steps of an invalid breathing fresh air for the first time in ...
An Utterly Misleading Book About Rural America
Tyler Austin Harper
Rage is the subject of a new book by the political scientist Tom Schaller and the journalist Paul Waldman. White Rural Rage, specifically. In 255 pages, the authors chart the racism, homophobia, xenophobia, violent predilections, and vulnerability to authoritarianism that they claim make white rural voters a unique "threat to American democracy." White Rural Rage is a screed lobbed at a familiar target of elite liberal ire. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, the authors appeared on Morning J...
The Trump Two-Step
David A. Graham
Is Donald Trump that clever, or are the media still just that unprepared? Whatever the reason, he continues to be just as adept as ever at running circles around the press and public.One of his most effective tools is what we might call the Trump Two-Step, in which the former president says something outrageous, backs away from it in the face of criticism, and then fully embraces it. The goal here is to create a veneer of deniability. It doesn't even need to be plausible; it just needs to muddy t...
The Great Democratic Success Story That Wasn't
Timothy McLaughlin
The Obama administration seemed to take special pride in its policy toward Myanmar. American statecraft had coaxed the country's reclusive military dictatorship onto a path of democratic transformation, Kurt Campbell, who served as an assistant secretary of state at the time, wrote in his 2016 book, Pivot: "One of the world's most isolated, tragic, and magical lands had finally opened to the world because of intrepid American diplomacy, perhaps fundamentally changing the trajectory of Asia."Then,...
Do Voters Care About Policy Even a Little?
Roge Karma
Suppose the president asked you to design the ideal piece of legislation--the perfect mix of good politics and good policy. You'd probably want to pick something that saves people a lot of money. You'd want it to fix a problem that people have been mad about for a long time, in an area that voters say they care about a lot--such as, say, health care. You'd want it to appeal to voters across the political spectrum. And you'd want it to be a policy that polls well.You would, in other words, want some...
The One Big Thing You Can Do for Your Kids
Arthur C. Brooks
Want to stay current with Arthur's writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.When one of my now-adult kids was in middle school, I had a small epiphany about parenting. I had been haranguing him constantly about his homework and grades, which were indeed a problem. One night, after an especially bad day, I was taking stock of the situation, and came to a realization: I didn't actually care very much about his grades. What I wanted was for him to grow up to become a respon...
Crying Myself to Sleep on the Biggest Cruise Ship Ever
Gary Shteyngart
Photographs by Gary ShteyngartDay 1MY FIRST GLIMPSE of Royal Caribbean's Icon of the Seas, from the window of an approaching Miami cab, brings on a feeling of vertigo, nausea, amazement, and distress. I shut my eyes in defense, as my brain tells my optical nerve to try again.The ship makes no sense, vertically or horizontally. It makes no sense on sea, or on land, or in outer space. It looks like a hodgepodge of domes and minarets, tubes and canopies, like Istanbul had it been designed by idiots....
During the Eclipse, Don't Just Look Up
Hanna Rosin
There are people who have organized their lives around the appearance of a total eclipse. They're known as eclipse chasers, or more obscurely, "umbraphiles" (shadow lovers). They'll travel across continents for perfect weather, collect decades' worth of eclipse-related life stories, speak lovingly about the sun's corona. One example is the retired astrophysicist Fred Espenak, who earned a bit of celebrity when the United States Postal Service chose his photo of an eclipse for a 2017 stamp--an effi...
A Great Day for <em>The Atlantic</em>
Jeffrey Goldberg
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.Pardon the interruption, but I'm breaking into our regular programming to share some good news about The Atlantic.First, here are three new stories that are worth your time:
The coming birth-control revolution
The politics of gun safety are changing.
There is more good than evil in this country.
Exce...
The Atlantic's 2024 National Magazine Award Winners and Finalists
The Editors
For the third consecutive year, The Atlantic has won the top honor of General Excellence for a News, Sports, and Entertainment publication at the 2024 National Magazine Awards.Below is a list of the stories that received recognition from the American Society of Magazine Editors:Winner: Profile Writing"Inside the Meltdown at CNN"
Mark Peterson / Redux for The Atlantic
By Tim AlbertaCEO Chris Licht felt he was on a mission to restore the network's reputation for serious journalism. How did it all g...
Seven Books to Read in the Sunshine
Chelsea Leu
As spring takes hold, the days arrive with a freshness that makes people want to linger outside; the balmy days almost feel wasted indoors. While you're taking in the warm air, you might as well also be reading. Enjoying a book at a park, a beach, or an open-air cafe encourages a particular leisurely frame of mind. It allows a reader to let their thoughts wander, reflecting on matters that for once aren't workaday or practical.Reading outside also takes the particular pleasures of literature and ...
There Is More Good Than Evil in This Country
Alex Kotlowitz
When Upton Sinclair published his novel The Jungle, the reaction was different from what he'd imagined. He had hoped to expose the deplorable working conditions in Chicago's slaughterhouses, but most readers, instead of championing the workers, came away flinching at the depictions of all the unsanitary ways meat was produced. Of his readers' response, Upton famously said, "I aimed at the public's heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach." This reaction captures something of how I felt after...
The Coming Birth-Control Revolution
Katherine J. Wu
This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.Within the next couple of decades, a new generation of contraceptives could hit the American market. One, a pill that blocks certain cells from accessing vitamin A, might be able to limit fertility without flooding the body with hormones; another is an injection that temporarily blocks up the reproductive plumbing. The method that's furthest along in trials is a topical gel that promises to induce temporary i...
If Teenage Girls Ran America
Shirley Li
Early in the new documentary Girls State, one of the participants in the titular leadership program for high schoolers chuckles after learning the camp song. She feels silly practicing the flashy choreography and rousing lyrics when the weeklong intensive is meant for building a mock government with other civic-minded teenagers. "If the boys don't have to do this," she says, "I'm going to be pissed."As it turns out, the boys don't--and she's not the only one miffed about the disparity between the ...
Helen of Troy Meets Her First Husband
Maria Zoccola
as in the dampest part of winter, when rain
flushes down from a sky
with spring growing in its eye like a cataract
not yet thick enough to film,
wetting branches already spongy with snowmelt
and too old to bargain another year's sap
from the mother trunk,
and the wind blows with sudden exclamation
against the topmost bough,
and that bough tumbles down,
knocking here and there and falling square against
a se...
The True Cost of the Churchgoing Bust
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.As an agnostic, I have spent most of my life thinking about the decline of faith in America in mostly positive terms. Organized religion seemed, to me, beset by scandal and entangled in noxious politics. So, I thought, what is there really to mourn? Only in the past few years have I come around to a different view. Maybe religion, for all of its faults, works a bit like...
A Study in Senate Cowardice
Jeffrey Goldberg
In late June of 2022, Cassidy Hutchinson, a former Trump-administration aide, provided testimony to the congressional committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol. This testimony was unnerving, even compared with previous revelations concerning Donald Trump's malignant behavior that day. Hutchinson testified that the president, when told that some of his supporters were carrying weapons, said, "I don't fucking care that they have weapons. They're not here to hurt me. Take the fucki...
The Atlantic Wins Top Honor for Third Straight Year at 2024 National Magazine Awards
The Atlantic
For the third consecutive year, The Atlantic was awarded the top honor of General Excellence for a News, Sports, and Entertainment publication at the 2024 National Magazine Awards, the most prestigious category in the annual honors from the American Society of Magazine Editors.
The Atlantic also won reporting awards for "Inside the Meltdown at CNN," by staff writer Tim Alberta; "The Ones We Sent Away," the September cover by staff writer Jennifer Senior; and cultural reviews and criticism by sta...
The Big Money of College Basketball
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.My personal foray into college-basketball fandom comes at a transformational time for the sport, as players accept major promotional deals and gambling reshapes the economics of the game.First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
A deadly strike in Gaza
What the suburb haters don't understan...
A Tour Through Solar Eclipses of the Past
Alan Taylor
As much of North America prepares for the upcoming total solar eclipse next week, I thought it would be fun to share some images from the recent (and not-so-recent) past of previous eclipses--annular, partial, and total--from around the world. Also pictured are some of the many observers sharing this fleeting experience, "witnessing the planetary version of a lightning strike," together in stadiums, parks, and beaches.
A 600-Year-Old Blueprint for Weathering Climate Change
Kathleen DuVal
Around the year 1300, the Huhugam great chief Siwani ruled over a mighty city near what is now Phoenix, Arizona. His domain included adobe-and-stone pyramids that towered several stories above the desert; an irrigation system that watered 15,000 acres of crops; and a large castle. The O'odham descendants of the Huhugam tell in their oral history that Siwani "reaped very large harvests with his two servants, the Wind and the Storm-cloud." By Siwani's time, Huhugam farms and cities had thrived in t...
A Deadly Strike in Gaza
David A. Graham
Seven people working for a humanitarian aid group led by the chef Jose Andres were killed in an Israeli air strike in the central Gaza Strip today. The strike is a black mark for the Israel Defense Forces, and likely to turn world opinion further against the Gaza campaign. But more than its geopolitical significance, the strike is a horrifying moment on a human level. Innocent people, doing good work to feed a starving population, have died for no reason at all.The group, World Central Kitchen, h...