On Monday evening, Michael Flynn announced his resignation as national security adviser after reports that he had spoken with Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. about sanctions against Russia before Donald Trump was sworn in as president, and misled Vice President Mike Pence about w … | Continue reading
An abrupt resignation, like Michael Flynn’s announcement Monday night that he would leave his post as national security adviser, is a beginning masquerading as a conclusion. His departure resolves one straightforward question—Can Flynn survive, having admittedly misled the vice p … | Continue reading
Forgive me, dear readers: I have sinned against grammar and in thy sight, and, as I might have expected, you’ve caught me. I’m referring to the “Verbs” section of The Atlantic Daily newsletter, which includes a series of four links attached to four (hopefully) sonically pleasing … | Continue reading
Stop talking about the Logan Act.It was not the violation of this antique and ignored piece of anti-Jacobin legislation that has touched off the biggest foreign-policy scandal since Watergate.Nobody would care if an incoming national security adviser had confidential conversation … | Continue reading
In the first episode of the second season of UnREAL, Lifetime’s dark satire of The Bachelor, Rachel and Quinn, reality producers and reality’s puppeteers, are celebrating. They have just given their Bachelor-esque reality show, Everlasting, its first black Suitor—Darius Hill, an … | Continue reading
President Donald Trump’s controversial travel ban called for, among other things, the speedy completion of a “biometric entry-exit tracking system” for all travelers to the United States.If this sounds familiar, it’s because the idea has been debated in Washington for more than a … | Continue reading
Mike Flynn resigned Monday as President Trump’s national-security adviser, capping a tumultuous few weeks that began with revelations he had discussed U.S. sanctions on Russia with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the U.S., before Trump’s inauguration on January 20.The n … | Continue reading
There are two theories of the future of President Trump’s foreign policy and the National Security Council. In one, the good ship NSC, like a Nantucket whaler of old, has had a hard shakedown cruise, but is coming to. A couple of misfits have been tossed overboard, and the captai … | Continue reading
Gundegmaa Tumurbaatar glimpsed her son only for an instant as he was carried into the aging Soviet-built hospital where she works. It was one of the first fine days after the grueling Mongolian winter, and she had left Gunbileg, aged 3, and his older brother playing outside, tell … | Continue reading
Prominent figures on the right can insist on the importance of decency in American life, or they can enthusiastically support the current president as a national leader. But they cannot do both of those things while retaining any credibility.Last year, I wrote at length about the … | Continue reading
In high school, I was locked in a competition with another girl over who would prevail in the class rankings. Because in a given year there were only so many tests, and thus opportunities to inch ahead, most of our day-to-day warfare was psychological.I made fun of her for thing … | Continue reading
—Mike Flynn resigned last night as President Trump’s national-security adviser, capping a tumultuous few days in which the former Army general was revealed to have discussed—despite repeated denials—U.S. sanctions on Russia with Moscow’s envoy.—Disney severed ties with Felix Kjel … | Continue reading
Army ants are so vast in their legions, and so destructive in their appetites, that they have been billed as “nature’s Mongol’s hordes” and “the Huns and Tartars of the insect world.” The comparison in apt. But then again, neither Genghis Khan nor Atilla the Hun rode around with … | Continue reading
WASHINGTON, D.C.—A district court judge denied a request to halt the drilling of the Dakota Access pipeline on Monday. Construction of the 1,100-mile project will continue for now.The ruling adds another chapter to the convoluted legal history of the Dakota Access pipeline. The c … | Continue reading
The Senate confirmed Tom Price as secretary of health and human services at 2 a.m. on Friday. After a contentious confirmation process, the Trump administration and the Republican-controlled Congress had finally installed one of the leading generals in its war on Obamacare in the … | Continue reading
The percentage of students at Washington, D.C., public schools who graduate from high school in four years is at an all-time high. But at 69 percent, the district’s graduation rate is well below the national average, which is north of 80 percent.So in a move that mirrors a broade … | Continue reading
Michael Flynn has resigned as national security adviser following reports that he misled senior Trump administration officials, including Vice President Mike Pence, about the nature of talks he held with the Russian ambassador in December before he took office.Flynn submitted his … | Continue reading
What We’re FollowingThe North Korean Missile: On Saturday night North Korea launched a ballistic missile while President Trump hosted Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at Mar-a-Lago. As photos posted by members of the club on social media later revealed, Trump chose to handle th … | Continue reading
Today in 5 LinesDuring a joint news conference with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, President Trump praised the “outstanding” trade agreement between the two countries. White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said Trump is “evaluating the situation” following reports that … | Continue reading
The most enduring image for the Obama presidency may prove to be the photograph that Pete Souza took of the president and his aides during the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. There’s no one reason for that—the moment was historic, the tension is engraved on the fences of the pa … | Continue reading
It was a rough night for rock. Megadeath, the Grammy winner for Best Metal Performance, walked to the stage to the tune of “Master of the Puppets,” a song that’s actually by another band, Metallica. Before Metallica’s own performance, actress Laverne Cox introduced the band only … | Continue reading
One of the more bizarre spectacles of Donald Trump’s young presidency came on Saturday night, when he stood with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at a press conference called after North Korea launched a ballistic missile into the Sea of Japan. Trump let Abe speak first, standi … | Continue reading
North Korea’s launch of a ballistic missile this past weekend likely signals the beginning of the end of a four-month respite from its testing of ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons. It’s nothing to lose our heads about, not yet at least. Assertions that this test poses the fi … | Continue reading
A strange thing happened after the gory, divisive, much discussed seventh season premiere of The Walking Dead last October: For the first time in the show’s wildly successful history, people stopped watching. Despite airing on the cable channel AMC, it had consistently been one o … | Continue reading
In Sunday night’s episode of Homeland, Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) confronted a young American Muslim, Sekou (J. Mallory McCree), about a video he’d put online, violating the terms of the agreement she’d used to get him out of jail. Sekou had been set up by an FBI informant wh … | Continue reading
Did it say “RESIST” or “PERSIST,” the sparkly armband Katy Perry wore onstage at The Grammys last night? It wasn’t quite clear in the moment; intentionally or not, her sloganeering arm mostly stayed away from the camera. Social-media users scrutinizing screen caps of Perry eventu … | Continue reading
“War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.” This 19th-century quip, often attributed to the satirist Ambrose Bierce, deserves a 21st-century update: “Attacks against the U.S. are God’s way of teaching Americans how weaker enemies are stronger than they seem.”Osama bin Lad … | Continue reading
Every odd-numbered year since 2011, Republicans in the House have tried to kill the Election Assistance Commission—the tiny federal agency responsible for helping states improve their voting systems. None of their previous efforts made it very far, and with Barack Obama in the Wh … | Continue reading
Everything started to go wrong just after 5 a.m., when Sidd Bikkannavar scanned his passport, placed his hand on a fingerprint reader, and watched as the automated customs kiosk spat out a receipt with a black X drawn across it.It was January 31. Bikkannavar had just arrived at H … | Continue reading
It started as fiction. In a 2010 episode of Parks and Recreation, Leslie, creative and crafty and bursting with kindness for the people she loves, invented a way to do something American culture hadn’t traditionally been too good at doing: celebrating, in an official capacity, th … | Continue reading
Atlantic writer Ta-Nehisi Coates has always been curious. “When I was a kid, I pretty much was interested in the same things I'm interested in now: Why does the world look like the world looks?” he explains in this short animation. Coates describes struggling in school and being … | Continue reading
The winning entries of the 60th annual World Press Photo Contest have just been announced. The 2017 Photo of the Year was taken by photographer Burhan Ozbilici as the Russian ambassador to Turkey was assassinated right in front of him. This year, according to organizers, 80,408 … | Continue reading
Maybe the Oroville Dam was cursed from the start.In December 1964, three years into the massive barrier’s construction, a huge flood struck the northwest, killing dozens. The dam was nearly overtopped, which could have led to its failure even before it was completed. Instead, the … | Continue reading
Several weeks into the Trump presidency, one can divide the reaction among conservative commentators into three categories.At one extreme sit those conservatives who championed Trump during the campaign, and still do: Breitbart, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter, among ot … | Continue reading
(Editor’s note: Alana Semuels joined 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 replies from Semuels.)Hi Alana. Welcome to TAD and thank you for being here. I … | Continue reading
Donald Trump is a television and tabloids kind of guy.After all, broadcast and publishing platforms helped make him a star. Page Six crowned Trump the unofficial king of New York’s gossip pages in the 1980s and 1990s. The reality-TV craze of the 2000s ensured he remained a househ … | Continue reading
If you’ve ever wondered what the peak of capricious financial speculation looks like, a domain-names auction might be a good guess. Imagine, dear reader, sitting in a darkened Las Vegas hotel conference room with maybe a hundred people, watching numbers flash on a screen as bidde … | Continue reading
Once Bec Koop had finished passing out joints to every wedding guest who wanted one, she waited until the bride and groom were ready to join the reception and then made her announcement: “Okay, are you ready to light up for the first time with them as a married couple?”The newlyw … | Continue reading
Set aside Adele splitting her Grammy like Solomon; forget, for a moment, all the pre-ceremony analysis about the awards’ fraught history with race and taste and tradition. Based solely on the performances last night, viewers would need to be arguing about Adele vs. Beyoncé—it’s h … | Continue reading
A couple of weeks ago, an editor at the Guardian tweeted an image of a bald eagle staring at its reflection in a body of water. “This photo of an eagle taking a hard look at itself is not a metaphor for anything that's been in the news recently”, he wrote.This photo of an Eagle t … | Continue reading
For years, the cabinet underneath my bathroom sink was a graveyard of skin-care products, filled with the ghosts of face soaps, washes, toners, and scrubs past. Bottles of Neutrogena, Cetaphil, Proactiv, and Clean & Clear products were all laid to rest after my hopes that they wo … | Continue reading
It’s become a truism of the weeks-old presidency of Donald Trump: If you want to reach the chief executive, and if you don’t happen to have the kind of sway that might get you a White House meeting or a golf game at Mar-a-Lago … no worries: Simply advertise to him. Buy some ad ti … | Continue reading
As a hobby, the black musician Daryl Davis persuades members of the Ku Klux Klan to defect from the organization. Over the years, he has spoken with hundreds of white supremacists. And due to his work, a couple dozen people have left the organization, including at least two promi … | Continue reading
In a room filled with bean-bag chairs and crayon drawings at Philadelphia’s Monell Chemical Sciences Center, Nuala Bobowski doles out two shots of sugar water. One has the average concentration preferred by adults, the other a concentration preferred by kids. There’s a twinkle in … | Continue reading
Are American universities now spaces where democratic free expression is in decline, where insecurity, fear, and an obsessive, self-preening political correctness make open dialogue impossible? This was a view voiced by many at the start of the month, after the University of Cali … | Continue reading
—A hole in an emergency spillway in the Oroville Dam prompted the evacuation of about 188,000 people in California. The threat from the dam has subsided, but it’s unclear when residents can return home.—Michael Flynn is still President Trump’s national security adviser despite la … | Continue reading
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.Honestly, has there ever been a stupider nursery school aphorism? Words can be plenty hurtful, excruciating even. Just ask President Trump. As has become evident in his brief time on the political scene, the 45th … | Continue reading
By the end of the 2017 Grammys, viewers will likely be arguing about one or more of the following: Beyonce, the Bee Gees, Donald Trump. In the meantime, I’ll be updating this post with the winners, remarkable performances, and memorable moments of the night.A number of awards wer … | Continue reading