The message President Trump delivered to House Republicans on the evening of March 23 was unambiguous: Pass the American Health Care Act the next day, his top advisers told them, or the president would scrap the whole effort to repeal Obamacare and move on to the rest of his agen … | Continue reading
Jeff Kazanow understands firsthand how difficult it can be to run as a Democrat in the red state of Georgia. In 2012, he lost badly to Tom Price, who was up for re-election as the Republican Representative for the sixth congressional district. But Kazanow thinks things are differ … | Continue reading
What We’re FollowingForeign Policy: Today, in a thorough reversal of one of his most memorable campaign statements, President Trump praised NATO’s role in fighting terrorism and preserving international peace. (He also reversed some of his former key economic positions.) It’s har … | Continue reading
Today in 5 LinesIn a joint press conference with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, President Trump reversed his position on NATO, saying “it’s no longer obsolete.” In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Trump said he fears the U.S. dollar is “getting too strong,” an … | Continue reading
Sometimes it seems like President Donald Trump and candidate Donald Trump are two very different people.On Wednesday, the president spoke to The Wall Street Journal about the global economy and expressed some opinions that contradict the economic talking points he focused on whil … | Continue reading
The Civil War began on this day in 1861, when Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter in South Carolina.I grew up in northern California, far from the battlefields on which the conflict was fought. My local forerunners were Spanish explorers and gold seekers, not musket-wielding … | Continue reading
If there’s one institution that President Donald Trump has invigorated with his airstrikes in Syria, it is the United Nations. This might seem like a paradox: How could the UN, guardian of territorial sovereignty and custodian of international law, benefit from an impulsive presi … | Continue reading
The financial scandals of the past decade or so—the subprime-mortgage crisis, the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme, ENRON—make it easy to wonder whether the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is responsible for regulating stock markets, could be doing a better job. The agency, a … | Continue reading
In several Western European countries, some politicians want to force imams to deliver sermons only in the official language: In Germany, imams should preach in German; it Italy, in Italian; in Britain, in English; in France, in French.To justify this requirement, two rationales … | Continue reading
Until Friday, California had been in a state of drought emergency since 2014. Reservoirs had dropped to a fraction of capacity and residents were required to conserve and cut back on water usage for years. Now, huge areas of northern California have just experienced the wettest w … | Continue reading
I could have picked any number of wonderful poems, but the first that popped to mind was one I found five years ago in a poetry book I randomly bought at a used bookstore in Oakland. (The shop’s name is too good not to mention: Walden Pond Books. Looking back, maybe it was a sign … | Continue reading
This year’s MTV Movie & TV Awards will feature a whole host of unusual categories. Online voters will decide the “Best Kiss,” as they always have, and the “Best On-Screen Duo,” but they’ll also weigh in on the “Best Fight Against the System” (Get Out, Loving, and Mr. Robot are am … | Continue reading
Air pollution—particulates tossed into the air from car exhaust, factory fumes, and power plants—is nasty stuff. Breathing it in causes damage to your lung tissue. It can trigger asthma attacks. It increases the risk of heart attacks, strokes, and lung cancer. And now, researcher … | Continue reading
The creature known as Teleocrater has been described as one of the most notorious fossils in paleontology. Pieces of its limbs, spine, and tail were excavated from Tanzania in 1933, and the British paleontologist Alan Charig discussed it 23 years later in his Ph.D. thesis. But ev … | Continue reading
O-sana va-sili too Esraeel At Saint George Church, a Coptic church in Tanta, Egypt, the deacons were finishing the final vowels in Evlogimenos (the Hosanna to the King of Israel), when the bomb exploded, leaving 28 worshipers dead and many others wounded. Shortly afterwards, a su … | Continue reading
Baseball season has returned, and with it the now perennial questions about its health. Even as local-television revenues and player contracts swell to sizes unprecedented in the Major Leagues and unmatched in other American sports, the game seems forever susceptible to rumors of … | Continue reading
It’s now been more than a month since Donald Trump tweeted, without offering any evidence, that Barack Obama had Trump’s “wires tapped” (the scare quotes were his) at Trump Tower prior to the election.Related StorySusan Rice's Careful Dance on Trump Surveillance Since then, the p … | Continue reading
Washington, D.C. (April 12, 2017)-- Smog and air pollution trigger millions of hospital visits and health problems for Americans each year; even the air we breathe indoors is often polluted with chemicals and poor ventilation. On April 20, The Atlantic will convene its first-ever … | Continue reading
Remember when Luke’s running the trench in the Death Star, and he’s about to fire his fateful shot, and at the last minute he decides to turn off the targeting computer and use the Force instead? We romanticize that moment—not just because it represents Luke’s coming into his own … | Continue reading
The video of a United passenger getting dragged off a Louisville-bound plane in Chicago on Sunday has dominated news and social media for the past two days, with outrage spanning the United States, Europe, and even China, where it was the top trending topic on the social-media pl … | Continue reading
Besides the common questions I addressed in my last note, many readers raised questions about the logistics of implementing FIT (feedback-informed treatment, in which therapists use computer surveys and algorithms to track clients’ progress and predict whether they’re at risk of … | Continue reading
Every 20 years or so—the regularity is a little astonishing—Americans hold a serious debate about their place in the world. What, they ask, is going wrong? And how can it be fixed? The discussion, moreover, almost always starts the same way. Having extricated itself with some suc … | Continue reading
—U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is meeting with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, today. Russia’s role in the Syrian civil war is likely to dominate the conversation.—Daily Mail, the British tabloid, has agreed to apologize and pay a reported $2.9 million in damages … | Continue reading
In the fall of 2013, in a hotel suite overlooking New York City’s Times Square, the gaming giant Electronic Arts unveiled Cities of Tomorrow, the latest addition to its hugely successful SimCity franchise of computer games. Rather than racking up points the usual way, by killing … | Continue reading
When the comedy-drama film Bend It Like Beckham premiered in the U.K. 15 years ago, frenzy for the impending World Cup was ramping up. I was 12 at the time and happened to be visiting England that summer for family weddings; I can vividly recall the football fever that gripped th … | Continue reading
On March 13, the board of education in Sag Harbor, New York, a wealthy town on the eastern end of Long Island, sat down to discuss what time local schools should start. The principal question in front of the board was simple: Should Pierson Middle-High School, which is located in … | Continue reading
New statistics released Tuesday by U.S. Customs and Border Protection reveal that the rate of digital border searches is on pace to quadruple since 2015. That means more and more travelers entering the U.S. are being asked to turn over their electronic devices to be analyzed.The … | Continue reading
From the moment Donald Trump first launched his unlikely ascent to the presidency, Republicans fiercely debated whether they could consider him a true conservative. Now, there’s evidence that Trump’s conquest of the GOP is causing activists to redefine “conservatism” itself.In a … | Continue reading
Republicans narrowly avoided an embarrassing defeat in the first congressional election of Donald Trump’s presidency on Tuesday, as the party retained a House seat in a deeply-red Kansas district that became surprisingly competitive.Ron Estes, the Kansas state treasurer, held off … | Continue reading
A Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge approved a secret warrant request by the FBI to monitor Trump advisor Carter Page last year, the Washington Post reported Tuesday. Page would be the first known member of a presidential campaign to be targeted by a FISA court warran … | Continue reading
What We’re FollowingSpicer Stumbles on Syria: White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer caused outrage this afternoon when he claimed that unlike Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Hitler “didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons,” and then dug himself deeper in his attempts to re … | Continue reading
Today in 5 LinesSean Spicer’s comments on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Adolf Hitler drew ire on social media, leading the White House press secretary to release a clarification to the press. During remarks at a G-7 meeting in Italy, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said A … | Continue reading
The rich metaphors and descriptions in Derek Walcott’s poetry render the Caribbean world where he grew up almost tangible: the tropical ocean air; the warm beaches; the birds and sea creatures that populated the coasts—and the specter of colonialism, too, lingering on after the d … | Continue reading
There’s no good time to make a Hitler comparison, but deploying one in the midst of Passover to justify voluntary airstrikes is an especially unwise choice, as White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer realized, to his chagrin, Tuesday afternoon.Spicer was fielding questions about … | Continue reading
The Washington Post reports that Attorney General Jeff Sessions “will end a Justice Department partnership with independent scientists to raise forensic science standards.” If that doesn’t scan as hugely important subject a bit of background is needed.In 1989, when a wrongly impr … | Continue reading
To understand the ideas shaping the Trump administration, the political scientist Cas Mudde once told me, you have to understand populism, authoritarianism, and nativism, because Donald Trump “fires on all three cylinders.” I’ve previously explored the definitions of populism and … | Continue reading
Opposition groups have taken to the streets in Venezuela five times in the last week, protesting against the government of President Nicolas Maduro, and its recent attempts to curb the existing power of the opposition party and limit who is eligible to run for office in the futur … | Continue reading
“When I was a little boy my grandmother bought me a new couch, and I looked at it, and I said, ‘Where’s the rest of it?’” our host asks, turning to the camera derisively. “That is the first of many stories you’re going to hear.” So begins “Sectionals,” Saturday Night Live’s recen … | Continue reading
As Secretary of State Rex Tillerson landed in Moscow Tuesday, a fire blazed on the margins of Vnukovo Airport. This provided at least a couple useful metaphors, depending on one’s view of the situation. Russian officials said the fire was at a garbage dump, meaning it was a liter … | Continue reading
More than 50 years after her death, it’s difficult to untie Sylvia Plath’s poetic legacy from her sensational, tragic trajectory: a troubled poet who succumbed to her mental illness. And yet, she was so much more than those last days: a Fulbright scholar, self-aware and brilliant … | Continue reading
In a recent interview on NPR’s Weekend Edition, Scott Simon spoke to Lesley Nneka Arimah days before the publication of her highly anticipated debut story collection. Why, he asked, did she think post-apocalyptic worlds hold so much interest for today’s readers? The answer she ga … | Continue reading
At about the same moment that millions of Americans sat staring at their television or laptop or phone—watching the results from the presidential election stream in, seeing state after state called for Donald Trump—Kim Cobb was SCUBA diving near the center of the Pacific Ocean. S … | Continue reading
In recent decades, Walmart has come to represent the epitome of capitalist success: The company’s founder, Sam Walton of Oklahoma, was a self-made billionaire and a retail pioneer who built his business on rock-bottom prices.But for many of Walmart’s workers, the company illumina … | Continue reading
Along religious lines, Americans see discrimination very differently. About two-thirds of Americans say Muslims face a lot of discrimination, but white Evangelical Christians have a different opinion. They are much more likely to say that Christians face more discrimination. In t … | Continue reading
Compiling more than 10,000 lines of data on the waste products of aquatic animals, from lake trout to pond insects to ocean shellfish, was more time-consuming than the ecologist Michael Vanni had expected. But he didn’t mind. “I love data on fish pee,” he says.Vanni, of Miami Uni … | Continue reading
The machines are getting smarter. They can now recognize us, carry on conversations, and perceive complex details about the world around them. This is just the beginning.As computers become more human-like, many worry that robots and algorithms will displace people. And they are … | Continue reading
By punishing Syria for its use of chemical weapons, President Donald Trump effectively broke with Barack Obama’s foreign policy toward the Middle East. In a bit of irony for a committed anti-interventionist, Trump enforced Obama’s red line in Syria against the use of chemical wea … | Continue reading
The well-documented pay disparity between women and men becomes especially pronounced as women reach their late 20s and early 30s. Researchers suggest that being aware of this divergence may have implications not just for how young women make choices about internships and jobs, b … | Continue reading