On Thursday, the Republican senator Deb Fischer of Nebraska introduced a bill aimed at addressing paid family leave. The Strong Families Act creates a tax incentive—25 percent of what employees are paid during the leave—for businesses to offer two weeks of paid family leave a yea … | Continue reading
Earlier this month, Jonathan Martin jotted off a sad tweet. “I’ve lost count of the number of people who say they’ve had ministry jobs threatened/been fired for speaking out in some way in this season,” the Christian author and speaker wrote. Confirmation rolled in: one story fro … | Continue reading
The deportation of Guadalupe García de Rayos in Phoenix, Arizona, may be giving the undocumented population in the U.S. its first sense of what the next four years will feel like. Rayos is a 35-year-old mother of two who has lived in the U.S. for 21 years. In 2008, local deputies … | Continue reading
What We’re FollowingThe Flynn Scandal: National Security Adviser Michael Flynn is facing harsh scrutiny today following reports that—contrary to what Vice President Pence and Flynn himself have claimed—he discussed U.S. sanctions against Russia with that country’s ambassador duri … | Continue reading
On January 18, two days before the inauguration of Donald Trump, Clifton Mosque in Cincinnati announced its intention to become a sanctuary congregation. It would shield undocumented people from deportation and provide shelter to any refugee or immigrant in need, regardless of re … | Continue reading
Today in 5 LinesDuring a joint news conference with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Trump said the U.S.-Japan relationship is the “cornerstone of peace and stability in the Pacific region.” Trump said he is considering a “brand new order” after his travel ban was stalled in c … | Continue reading
The raucous crowd of Utahans that booed Rep. Jason Chaffetz off the stage Thursday night were, in many ways, a motley lot. Some were progressive organizers rallying against President Trump’s agenda; others were hunters and hippies who had come to sound off on the hot-button publi … | Continue reading
Don’t MissThe Imperfect Power of I Am Not Your Negro—Dagmawi Woubshet praises Raoul Peck’s new documentary on James Baldwin, but critiques its omission of the writer’s sexuality.Summit EntertainmentFilmJohn Wick: Chapter 2 Is More Brilliant, Bloody Fun—David Sims revels in the se … | Continue reading
Claudia Kilbourne LuxThe poet Thomas Lux died earlier this week. It seems fitting to honor him and his decades of Atlantic contributions with a brief history, but also with his own words in his own voice.Speaking about his craft in an Atlantic interview from 2004, Lux is both mag … | Continue reading
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals dealt President Trump a major blow on Thursday by rejecting his request to lift a lower court’s nationwide injunction against his immigration and travel ban. But that’s not the end of the legal saga.Trump still has multiple legal options he coul … | Continue reading
The Wall Street Journal’s editorial features editor has left the paper following tensions over the section drifting in a pro-Donald Trump direction.News of the departure of Mark Lasswell, who edited op-eds for the Journal, comes as the paper’s internal tensions over Trump have be … | Continue reading
“What sites do you visit? And give us your passwords.”That’s what U.S. Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly wants foreign visitors to hear before they’re allowed to enter the United States. “If they don’t want to give us that information, then they don’t come,” he said, while t … | Continue reading
In the wake of Donald Trump’s executive order banning refugees from seven Muslim-majority countries, one of the loudest outcries against it was that it could serve as a de facto rallying cry for the Islamic State. In a recent article, Simon Cottee, curiously, rejected that notion … | Continue reading
Long Horn Miao in China, a super catch in the Super Bowl, whales stranded in New Zealand, a banana-eating camel, an oil spill on an Indian shoreline, tornadoes wreak havoc in New Orleans, “adult wrapping” therapy in Japan, and much more. | Continue reading
The Parenting Pressure-CookerRyan Avent | 1843 MagazineInstead of increasingly outsourcing child-rearing, parents are devoting more of the scarce time left outside working hours to their children. Over the last two decades, time spent by parents on child-rearing has jumped. ... a … | Continue reading
Sarah Zhang recently looked at a pathbreaking effort by James Feeney to expand the use of medical marijuana in the U.S. He’s surgeon in Connecticut conducting a clinical trial to compare the use of marijuana and opioids when it comes to treating acute pain, rather than chronic pa … | Continue reading
Lo, the singer most associated with poorly trained shark dancers and weaponized bras and the last forthright celebration of homophobia on the pop charts has mentally molted: “Artist. Activist. Conscious,” reads Katy Perry’s recently updated Twitter bio. In late January she hinted … | Continue reading
It is a truth universally peddled by wisemen and -women in Washington, though not necessarily obeyed by presidents, that when the White House is in trouble, the best cure is to hoist the head of an adviser on a spike of the fence encircling the executive mansion.Firing—sorry, acc … | Continue reading
Legally, the Dakota Access pipeline is closer to completion than it has been in months.In his first three weeks in office, President Donald Trump bucked norms about executive propriety and canceled an environmental-impact review ordered by the Obama administration. On Wednesday, … | Continue reading
Faced with the unenviable task of summing up an entire year in a huge art form, “Music’s Biggest Night” is often music’s awkwardest night. The 59th Grammy Awards may be even weirder than usual: Some stars are sitting it out for “irrelevance,” and Donald Trump’s culture-warrior pr … | Continue reading
Murderous Manila: On the Night ShiftJames Fenton | The New York Review of Books“There are two chief kinds of carnage taking place here, these wet Manila nights. There is the ‘buy-bust’ operation, in which the targeted criminal attempts to buy some drugs, only to find that he is d … | Continue reading
“Make this one out of cast-iron,” the late Judge John Butzner said to me one day in chambers. “There are going to be a lot of weasels sniffing around it.”I was Butzner’s clerk. He was assigning me to draft an opinion in a case on an abstruse point of federal law. No court had eve … | Continue reading
Whatever world leaders think about Trump’s pledge to put “America First,” there’s one thing they can’t deny: It’s a political winner. No surprise then that others will adopt and adapt the idea. This form of imitation may not qualify as flattery, but all politicians understand tha … | Continue reading
“This reminds me of the run-up to Iran- Contra.”The person offering that gloomy observation was a veteran of many years in and around the US defense community. Unusually for a person with such a background, he had been a Trump supporter even during the Republican primaries. Now, … | Continue reading
There might be no getting around what Albert Einstein called “spooky action at a distance.” With an experiment described today in Physical Review Letters—a feat that involved harnessing starlight to control measurements of particles shot between buildings in Vienna—some of the wo … | Continue reading
Marco Rubio did something unexpected on Wednesday.If you reflect on Adam Serwer’s dissection of the civil-rights credentials that Republicans fabricated for Senator Jeff Sessions when he was nominated to be attorney general; the scathing 1986 letter that Coretta Scott King sent t … | Continue reading
“I want you back. We can renegotiate terms.”Ah, love.The above line is delivered to Anastasia Steele by Christian Grey near the beginning of Fifty Shades Darker, the second movie adaptation of the trilogy of zillion-selling erotic novels by Erika Mitchell (pen name E. L. James). … | Continue reading
Starting around the time I was 10, my brother took me with him on runs I could barely complete—off our street, across the Brooklyn Bridge, and back. I hated every minute of it. Each time my chest filled with a cold-metal ache that reinforced that this was not for me—to this day I … | Continue reading
—Mike Flynn, Donald Trump’s national-security adviser, reportedly discussed sanctions with Russia before the president took office—an account that is at odds with the administration’s account of the conversations.—French police said they arrested four people in Montpelier in conn … | Continue reading
There has been a subtle shift recently in the rhetoric of many conservative pundits and politicians around climate change. For decades, the common refrain has been flat-out denial—either that climate change is not happening, or that any change is not caused by human activity. Whi … | Continue reading
In 2015, the FCC introduced new rules that would cap some of mind-boggling costs associated with making phone calls inside American prisons. Some inmates and their families, the commission noted, were paying as much as $14 a minute for calls. Other inmates were subject to burdens … | Continue reading
In “American Bitch,” the remarkable third episode of the sixth and final season of HBO’s Girls, Hannah (Lena Dunham) has a confrontation with a writer (Matthew Rhys) who’s been outed online as a sexual predator by several female college students. He insists that the women all pur … | Continue reading
Having picked Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions for attorney general, the Trump administration might have made the case for conservative leadership at the Justice Department. Instead, it chose to portray Sessions as a stalwart defender of civil rights.This was largely a fiction, one … | Continue reading
“No more playtime,” said the French presidential candidate Marine le Pen in a speech in December, as she called for an end to free education for the children of undocumented immigrants. “I tell them: If you come to our country, don’t expect to be taken care of.” Le Pen, who leads … | Continue reading
White House chief strategist Steve Bannon has been in contact via intermediaries with Curtis Yarvin, Politico Magazine reported this week. Yarvin, a software engineer and blogger, writes under the name Mencius Moldbug. His anti-egalitarian arguments have formed the basis for a mo … | Continue reading
In the two weeks since Donald Trump barred refugees and residents of seven countries from the United States—from the early chaos at airports to the latest judicial ruling against the policy—members of his administration have given inconsistent answers to a persistent question: Wh … | Continue reading
What We’re FollowingCrime and Embellishment: President Trump followed up today’s swearing-in of Attorney General Jeff Sessions by signing three more executive orders, this time focusing on crime. The orders create a task force for studying crime reduction, emphasize prosecution o … | Continue reading
A three-judge panel in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously upheld a lower court’s order blocking the Trump administration from enforcing its immigration and refugee order, handing the president his highest-profile defeat yet over the controversial ban.In an unsigned op … | Continue reading
Today in 5 LinesJeff Sessions was sworn in as attorney general. Shortly after, President Trump signed three executive orders that, in his words, are “designed to restore safety in America.” Trump falsely accused Senator Richard Blumenthal of misrepresenting Supreme Court nominee … | Continue reading
(Editor’s note: David Frum dropped in on the TAD discussion group of Atlantic readers for an “Ask Me Anything,” and a lightly-edited version of that Q&A is below. Reader questions are in bold, followed by Frum’s replies.)This reader community was founded as a refuge from the chao … | Continue reading
In Donald Trump’s first term there is a serious possibility of a military conflict, whether intentional or inadvertent, between the United States or Israel and Iran. What follows is how it could unfold, and how it might be avoided.Step 1: Provocations“It is an undeniable privileg … | Continue reading
Jeff Sessions issued a de facto mission statement within moments of being sworn in attorney general on Thursday.“We have a crime problem,” the former Alabama senator said. “I wish the rise we were seeing in crime in American today were a blip. My best judgment, having been involv … | Continue reading
From the standpoint of democratic theory, the basic problem with school choice is this: Religious belief and affiliation can be vital sites of civic learning for many Americans. In their temples, mosques, and megachurches, Americans learn to cooperate, organize, identify, and eng … | Continue reading
President Donald Trump has begun forging his own legacy in the ongoing wars on terror. On the same weekend that he signed his executive order temporarily banning travel to the United States from seven Muslim-majority countries, U.S. Navy SEALs, alongside UAE special forces, were … | Continue reading
Video games have perhaps never been as embedded in mainstream culture as they are now. It’s become almost a cliché to note that the video-game industry has equaled, if not surpassed Hollywood in terms of sheer profitability in recent years. Technology has improved to make games f … | Continue reading
Nothing in recent cinema can top 2014’s John Wick for pure, furious, elemental action. The first half hour of Chad Stahelski’s directorial debut is like a spooky bedtime story whispered by a hardened mobster: A punk criminal (Alfie Allen) breaks into a man’s home, steals his car, … | Continue reading
A half-century ago, protests erupted around the world against the Vietnam War, Montreal hosted Expo ‘67, race riots in the U.S. destroyed parts of Detroit and other northern cities, Elvis Presley married Priscilla in Las Vegas, O.J. Simpson was a running back for the University o … | Continue reading
The Obama administration wanted to send humans to Mars. But the Trump administration wants to put them back on the moon first, and quickly.That ambition is inside internal documents reported by Politico on Thursday that describe what would be a dramatic shift in mission for NASA. … | Continue reading