For those of you who are sick of wondering, this is what happens at a Billy Joel concert: A mother tries to cajole her reluctant young son to twist with her to “Only the Good Die Young.” A 45-year-old man in a Billy Joel-themed softball jersey, sitting third row and visible to al … | Continue reading
Among the less-noted cardinal rules of cinema is that any movie that takes the title Unforgettable will prove to be anything but. Do you remember the 1996 Unforgettable, in which Ray Liotta tried to solve his wife’s murder with the help of a memory-enhancement drug? Of course you … | Continue reading
This Saturday, in Washington, D.C. and around the world, scientists and their supporters will hit the streets. From Ketchikan to Buenos Aires to Bhutan, marchers will demand that politicians support scientific research, publish its results widely, and base their policies on those … | Continue reading
There are more than 18,000 police departments in the United States, spread out in a vast jurisdictional patchwork of federal, state, local, and tribal agencies that stretches from Hawaii to Maine. This month, Alabama could add to their ranks something unprecedented in American hi … | Continue reading
People don’t often click on banner ads these days—at least not on purpose, anyway. In fact, many internet users actively go out of their way to never see advertisements.Ad blockers create all kinds of problems for companies that rely on ad dollars to pay their workers (cough coug … | Continue reading
Immigration courts in the United States are overwhelmed with cases.By last September, the end of the 2016 fiscal year, there were more than 500,000 of them pending, according to a March report by the Executive Office for Immigration Review, a branch of the U.S. Department of Just … | Continue reading
The attack Thursday on the Champs Elysées in Paris that resulted in the death of an officer is the latest assault in a country that has been repeatedly struck by Islamists since at least 2012. In that time, militants have attacked a Jewish school near Toulouse; the offices of Cha … | Continue reading
What We’re FollowingHealth Complications: The GOP plan to repeal and replace Obamacare is back: Paul Ryan says a new bill is nearly done, President Trump is pushing Congress to pass it, and some reports say conservatives and moderates have reached a tentative agreement. But congr … | Continue reading
Democrats are facing their first high-profile tests of whether the party can win back seats in Congress in the Trump era. But rather than unifying in opposition to the new administration, the political left is riven by division over what it means to be progressive.The same debate … | Continue reading
Today in 5 LinesDuring a joint press conference with Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni, President Trump said he’d like to pass “both” health-care reform and a spending bill by the end of next week. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said he will meet with Trump at the Wh … | Continue reading
When you hear the name Ivanka, what do you think?Chances are that the first thing that springs to mind is President Donald Trump’s eldest daughter. And she wants to keep it that way: According to Advertising Age, Ivanka Trump has filed for trademarks in both the United States and … | Continue reading
Washington, D.C. (April 20, 2017)—The Atlantic today announced that John Swansburg will join the staff of the magazine as a senior editor. Swansburg has spent the past ten years at Slate magazine, most recently as deputy editor. He joins The Atlantic as it continues a run of reco … | Continue reading
President Trump desperately wants a deal on health care, and he wants the House to pass it next week before his first 100 days in the White House are out.That much is clear from the reports of a tentative agreement between the leader of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, Repr … | Continue reading
Yesterday I wrote about the patriotic myth of “Paul Revere’s Ride,” recounted in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s famous 1861 poem.Longfellow’s fellow Atlantic founder John Greenleaf Whittier put a similar, though less historically accurate, myth to paper in “Barbara Frietchie,” from … | Continue reading
When people enter a new workplace or new office, one thing is almost a given: Some people will be hard to get along with. Difficult co-workers are a headache, and with American workers spending an average of 9 hours at work every day, working more than they sleep, a disruptive re … | Continue reading
For years, researchers have been complaining: This is some schwag.Since marijuana is still illegal under federal law, scientists who want to study the drug in their labs have to get it from a government-run facility at the University of Mississippi. Such has been the arrangement … | Continue reading
The Arctic Ocean is small, shallow, and—most importantly—shrouded. Unlike the other large oceans of the world, it is closely hemmed in by Asia, Europe, and North America, with very few watery entrances in and out. Some oceanographers call it the “Arctic Mediterranean Sea,” a nod … | Continue reading
The last time Kendrick Lamar released a set of songs, it was an untitled, unmastered, and mostly unfriendly collection in which Lamar argued to God that rap can be righteous so long as it’s difficult. “I made To Pimp a Butterfly, for you told me to use my vocals to save mankind f … | Continue reading
Oxygen makes up around 20 percent of the air around you. If it fell to 5 percent, you’d pass out after 3 minutes or so. Then, your brain would start to die. To fuel itself, this gas-guzzling organ requires a constant supply of sugar and oxygen—even when you’re not doing anything. … | Continue reading
Astronomers are like the detectives of the cosmos, searching for clues to mysteries in the universe with an ever-growing toolkit of telescopes, spectroscopes, robotic probes, and other instruments. But sometimes, the universe chips in with a gadget of its own: a galactic magnifyi … | Continue reading
On Wednesday, hundreds of thousands of protesters gathered in Caracas and other Venezuelan cities to step up their continuing demonstrations against the government of President Nicolas Maduro. The march, called the “mother of all marches” by organizers, was met by riot police w … | Continue reading
Agha Shahid Ali, a Kashmiri-American poet who passed away in 2001, wrote about a lot of things. Some of those things were specific—Hindu ceremonies, American highways, his mother—but many of them were universal: saying goodbye, the moon, friendship, God. What strikes me about Ali … | Continue reading
On March 16, Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister, stood before reporters on a stairwell at Holyrood, the home of the Scottish Parliament. Theresa May, the prime minister of the United Kingdom, which includes England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, had just dismisse … | Continue reading
Last week, I wrote about some of the reasons airlines can get away with bad customer service. One extreme example came earlier this month, when a passenger was seriously injured while being forcibly removed from a United Airlines flight—but overall, the amount of control airlines … | Continue reading
The bicentennial of Frankenstein started early. While Mary Shelley’s momentous novel was published anonymously in 1818, the commemorations began last year to mark the dark and stormy night on Lake Geneva when she (then still Mary Godwin, having eloped with her married lover Percy … | Continue reading
The latest update came quietly on Tuesday night. “We’re sorry to say that we have reached a significant transition point,” wrote the Glowing Plant project’s creator, Antony Evans. This “transition point” was more of an endpoint: The project had run out of money. The quest to gene … | Continue reading
Yahoo filed its final quarterly report this week. And just like that, the once-mighty tech firm is exiting public trading.The company has been unraveling—slowly and spectacularly—for more than a decade now. But this particular moment is a good one for reflecting on how Yahoo’s tr … | Continue reading
You were going to get one-click access to the full text of nearly every book that’s ever been published. Books still in print you’d have to pay for, but everything else—a collection slated to grow larger than the holdings at the Library of Congress, Harvard, the University of Mic … | Continue reading
The rented robes are itchy, the mortarboard hats make everyone look dopey, and the patience required to snap the perfect picture makes Cubs fans who waited 108 years for a World Series title look unimpressive. College-graduation ceremonies have a lot working against them.Despite … | Continue reading
A handful of character actors and an Oscar-winner walk into an abandoned factory, decked out in the finest ’70s polyester suits and most garish wigs imaginable. They’re all packing heat. Most of them have brought their baddest attitudes as well, the kind of hair-trigger tempers t … | Continue reading
This post contains some spoilers for the first episode of Fargo Season 3.Wednesday’s third-season premiere of Fargo began as so many Fargo storylines have before: with an apparently senseless and possibly deadly twist of fate. A frightened-looking man is called into a darkened of … | Continue reading
On Wednesday, the University of California, Berkeley announced that it was canceling a scheduled speech by Ann Coulter, citing security concerns. Just weeks ago, Berkeley cancelled a speech by Milo Yiannopolous after armed radicals clad in black overwhelmed event security, threw … | Continue reading
—A leading South Korean presidential candidate has questioned whether his country can trust what the U.S. says during the Trump presidency after it emerged that a promised U.S. “armada” to the region to protect against threats from North Korea was a no-show.—Pakistan’s Supreme Co … | Continue reading
It’s impossible to know what the brilliant British writer Angela Carter would have thought of any biography of her life, let alone Edmund Gordon’s meticulous but at times exhausting The Invention of Angela Carter. The title alone might have elicited a snort, considering Carter wa … | Continue reading
The idea that politicians operate on a spectrum, with the right on one end and the left on the other, originated with the French Revolution, when royalists sat on the right side of the National Assembly and revolutionaries on the left. So it’s only fitting that, 228 years later, … | Continue reading
CHICAGO—A surge of innovation in states and cities is building momentum for what could become a seismic shift in American education.Just as the country came to expect in the decades around World War II that young people would finish at least 12 years of school, more local governm … | Continue reading
Let the betting pools begin: What will be the next policy issue that Donald Trump suddenly discovers is way more complicated than “anyone” ever imagined?Already, the aggressively policy-ignorant president has marveled that dealing with touchy issues such as North Korea, China, th … | Continue reading
On Wednesday afternoon, the king of cable was summarily—and in the eyes of many, finally—dethroned.Bill O’Reilly’s stunning fall was both swift and extraordinarily prolonged: Swift for a public newly woken to his alleged transgressions, courtesy of a bombshell New York Times inve … | Continue reading
What We’re FollowingGoings-On in Congress: House Oversight Committee chair Jason Chaffetz announced today that he wouldn’t seek reelection next year in Utah, surprising both his supporters and the critics who say he hasn’t been hard enough on the president (an issue we explored i … | Continue reading
Here are some of the things Bill O’Reilly has done, allegedly, to the women he has worked with throughout his two decades at the Fox News Channel:approaching an African American woman whose desk was near his, referring to her as “hot chocolate,” and grunting like a “wild boar”off … | Continue reading
After 21 years on the open market, it’s likely that Yahoo will soon no longer be a publicly traded company. On Tuesday, Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s CEO, issued a statement marking Yahoo’s “final quarter as an independent company” that accompanied what is set to be its last public quar … | Continue reading
On Tuesday at the tool company Snap-on’s headquarters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Donald Trump gave a speech and signed an executive order rolling out his “Buy American, Hire American” agenda. The most actionable thing he laid out on the “Hire American” side of the plan was about refo … | Continue reading
Today in 5 LinesPresident Trump signed a reauthorization of the Veterans Choice Act and announced that he will hold a press conference on veterans’ issues on April 27 at the White House. Trump also compared the New England Patriots’ Super Bowl victory to his winning the 2016 pres … | Continue reading
Eighteen days after a New York Times investigation revealed a slew of sexual-harassment settlements with the biggest star on the biggest cable news network in America, Bill O'Reilly is out at Fox News. In the last two weeks, up to 50 advertisers abandoned The O’Reilly Factor, eve … | Continue reading
On this day in 1775, patriots in Lexington and Concord fought the first battles of the American Revolution. Which means that the late hours of last night and the very early hours of this morning marked the anniversary of another memorable event in American history, recalled by At … | Continue reading
What’s Going On, one of the best-known portraits by Barkley L. Hendricks, arrived in 1974, three years after the Marvin Gaye album of the same name. At the time, Gaye’s record was well-regarded, but not yet universally recognized as a masterpiece of protest art. Hendricks saw in … | Continue reading
January 29, 1912, was a beautiful day in Antarctica. A group of British explorers, led by a 37-year-old Victor Campbell, were on a cheerful journey across what we now call the Nansen Ice Shelf and Priestley Glacier. It was a kind of summer sojourn around the continent: They would … | Continue reading