Science
The Atlantic
The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books - To read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school.
Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University's required greatbooks course, since 1988. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading, College kids have never read everything they're assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames's students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem.
9 min |
November 2024
The Atlantic
What Zoya Sees
Long a fearless critic of Israeli society, since October 7 Zoya Cherkassky-Nnadi has made wrenching portraits of her nation's sufferingand become a target of protest.
10+ min |
November 2024
The Atlantic
Malcolm Gladwell, Meet Mark Zuckerberg
The writer’ insistence on ignoring the web is an even bigger blind spot today than it was when The Tipping Point came out.
10+ min |
November 2024
The Atlantic
Alan Hollinghurst's Lost England
In his new novel, the present isnt much better than the past—and its a lot less sexy.
8 min |
November 2024
The Atlantic
Scent of a Man
In a new memoir, Al Pacino promises to reveal the person behind the actor. But is he holding something back?
5 min |
November 2024
The Atlantic
THE RIGHT-WING PLAN TO MAKE EVERYONE AN INFORMANT
In Texas and elsewhere, new laws and policies have encouraged neighbors to report neighbors to the government.
10+ min |
November 2024
The Atlantic
The Playwright in the Age of AI
In his new play, McNeal, Ayad Akhtar confronts, and subverts, the idea that artificial intelligence threatens human ingenuity.
10+ min |
November 2024
The Atlantic
Is Forgiveness Possible?
Thirty years after the genocide in Rwanda
10+ min |
November 2024
The Atlantic
Books- Rachel Kushner's Surprising Swerve - She and her narrators have always relied on swagger-but not this time.
Sometimes I am boggled by the gallery of souls I've known. By the lore. The wild history, unsung, Rachel Kushner writes in The Hard Crowd, her 2021 essay collection. People crowd in and talk to me in dreams. People who died or disappeared or whose connection to my own life makes no logical sense, but exists as strong as ever, in a past that seeps and stains instead of fades. As a girl in San Francisco's Sunset District, Kushner ran with a group whom she has described as ratty delinquents-kids who fought, who set fires, who got high too young and too often, who in some cases wound up incarcerated or addicted or dead. At 16, she headed to UC Berkeley for college, but returned to the city after graduating working at bars and immersing herself in the motorcycle scene. Almost immersing herself, anyway. Even when she was a 14-year-old sampling strangers' drugs at rock concerts, some piece of Kushner was an observer as well as a participant, a student of unsung histories.
9 min |
October 2024
The Atlantic
Men on Trips Eating Food - Why TV is full of late-career Hollywood guys at restaurants
As a reverse foodie-a rudie, a gastronomically ungluedie, a don't-bother-cooking-for-that-dudie'm not exactly a target viewer for the eating-and-traveling shows. I'm happy sitting behind my stacked up cans of Dinty Moore Beef Stew, reading Frederick Seidel. But now and again I'm touched; an image or a moment from one of these shows will move me.
5 min |
October 2024
The Atlantic
What Abortion Bans Do to Doctors - In Idaho and other states, draconian laws are forcing physicians to ignore their training and put patients' lives at risk.
Kylie Cooper has seen all the ways a pregnancy can go terrifyingly, perilously wrong. She is an obstetrician who manages high-risk patients, also known as a maternal-fetal-medicine specialist, or MFM. The awkward hyphenation highlights the duality of the role. Cooper must care for two patients at once: mother and fetus, mom and baby. On good days, she helps women with complicated pregnancies bring home healthy babies. On bad days, she has to tell families that this will not be possible. Sometimes, they ask her to end the pregnancy; prior to the summer of 2022, she was able to do so
10+ min |
October 2024
The Atlantic
Mapping Mississippi's Violent Past - I wanted to understand the forces that shaped my state's dark history. I ended up in Spain, holding an object I'd never known existed.
I'd come researching my new book, The Barn, a history of the 36 square miles of dirt around the place where Emmett Till was tortured and killed in 1955. The barn, which I first wrote about for this magazine, sits in the southwestern quarter of Section 2, Township 22 North, Range 4 West, measured from the Choctaw Meridian. The township has been home to the civil-rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer; to the family of the Confederate general and early Ku Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest; to farmland owned by James R. Binford, an original legal architect of Jim Crow.
8 min |
October 2024
The Atlantic
A Brief History of Yuval Noah Harari - How the scholar became Silicon Valley's favorite guru
"About 14 billion years ago, matter, energy, time and space came into being." So begins Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011), by the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, and so began one of the 21st century's most astonishing academic careers. Sapiens has sold more than 25 million copies in various languages. Since then, Harari has published several other books, which have also sold millions. He now employs some 15 people to organize his affairs and promote his ideas.
10+ min |
October 2024
The Atlantic
Boat Fish Don't Count
The wild, obsessive, dangerous pursuit of Montauk's biggest striped bass
10+ min |
October 2024
The Atlantic
The Anti-Rock Star
Leonard Cohen's battle against shameless male egoism
10+ min |
October 2024
The Atlantic
You Think You're So Heterodox
Joe Rogan has turned Austin into a haven for manosphere influencers, just-asking-questions tech bros, and other \"free thinkers\" who happen to all think alike.
10+ min |
October 2024
The Atlantic
THE LOYALIST KASH PATEL WILL DO EXACTLY WHAT TRUMP WANTS.
A 40-year-old lawyer with little government experience, he joined the administration in 2019 and rose rapidly. Each new title set off new alarms.
10+ min |
October 2024
The Atlantic
THE RADICAL CONVERSION OF MIKE LEE
IN 2016, HE TRIED TO STOP TRUMP FROM BECOMING PRESIDENT. BY 2020, HE WAS TRYING TO HELP TRUMP OVERTURN THE ELECTION. NOW HE COULD BECOME TRUMP'S ATTORNEY GENERAL.
10+ min |
October 2024
The Atlantic
HYPOCRISY, SPINELESSNESS, AND THE TRIUMPH OF DONALD TRUMP
He said Republican politicians would be easy to break. He was right.
10+ min |
October 2024
The Atlantic
THE END OF JUDICIAL INDEPENDENCE
One of America's greatest achievements could disappear overnight.
10 min |
October 2024
The Atlantic
'Lord, Help Us Make America Great Again' - A close reading of Trump-rally prayers
A week before Christmas, an evangelical minister named Paul Terry stood before thousands of Christians, their heads bowed, in Durham, New Hampshire, and pleaded with God for deliverance. Th e nation was in crisis, he told the Lord— racked with death and addiction, led by wicked men who “rule with imperial disdain.”
10 min |
September 2024
The Atlantic
Seventy Miles in the Darién Gap - The Impossible Pad to America - I went to the Darién Gap in December with the photographer Lynsey Addario because I wanted to see for myself what people were willing to risk to get to the United States.
I went to the Darién Gap in December with the photographer Lynsey Addario because I wanted to see for myself what people were willing to risk to get to the United States. Before making the journey, I spoke with a handful of journalists who had done so before. They had dealt with typhoid, rashes, emergency evacuations, and mysterious illnesses that lingered for months. One was tied up in the forest and robbed at gunpoint. They said that we could take measures to make the journey safer but that ultimately, survival required luck.
10+ min |
September 2024
The Atlantic
An Intoxicating 500-Yearold Mystery - The Voynich Manuscript has long baffled scholars-and attracted cranks and conspiracy theorists.
The Voynich Manuscript has long baffled scholars-and attracted cranks and conspiracy theorists. Now a prominent medievalist is taking a new approach to unlocking its secrets.
10+ min |
September 2024
The Atlantic
Pity the Bad Man
A bold new novel invites the reader to consider the plight of the bullies and the boors.
9 min |
September 2024
The Atlantic
The Wild Adventures of Fanny Stevenson
Her surprising marriage to Robert Louis Stevenson changed literary history.
10+ min |
September 2024
The Atlantic
Does the World Need a Great American Biracial Novel?
The hero of Danzy Senna’ new satire is trying, and failing, to write one.
9 min |
September 2024
The Atlantic
How Greed Got Good Again
In HBO's Industry, Gen Z reveals itself to be just as moneyobsessed as the corporate raiders of Wall Street.
7 min |
September 2024
The Atlantic
My Mother the Revolutionary
She cared about saving the world more than she cared about me.
10+ min |
September 2024
The Atlantic
HOW M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN CAME BACK FROM THE DEAD
The filmmaker weathered some of the wildest hype and harshest backlash that Hollywood has to offer. Then he found a different path.
10+ min |
September 2024
The Atlantic
AMERICAN FURY
For years, experts have warned of a wave of political violence. We should prepare for things to get worse before they get better.
4 min |