Ross Anderson (Atlantic foreign affairs)+

The Flawed Logic of Trump’s Airplane Escape

The president cleverly evaded a serious threat, but he shouldn’t have kept it a secret. One of the more charming moments in the deliriously charming 1964 Beatles movie, A Hard Day’s Night, has the boys in the band trying to evade screaming fans and the paparazzi. They duck in alleys, they dodge …

Mark Zuckerberg’s Convenient Truth

The Meta CEO has a new message now that his company is losing the AI race. At this stage in the AI race, if one of your chatbots hasn’t escaped the lab and run amok, people start to wonder whether you’re even serious. Last month, OpenAI and then Anthropic disclosed that their models had hacked other …

It May Be Time to Panic About AI

Bots are starting to conspire with one another. Can they be reeled back in? The crisis began quietly, on September 12, 2024. That was the day OpenAI announced a new sort of bot, known as a “reasoning model,” that was trained to complete challenging tasks that took long periods of time—the very sorts …

Photos: The Total Solar Eclipse of 2026

In western Europe, millions of people looked into the sky, hoping to witness today’s total solar eclipse as the moon’s shadow swept over them, briefly turning day into night.

AOC Knows a Lemon When She Sees One

Francesca Hong’s surprise loss in Wisconsin is a blessing to the Democratic Party. Last night, Francesca Hong lost the race to be the Democratic candidate for governor of Wisconsin. This is great news for American democracy. Sorry if that seems harsh—she certainly ran an energetic campaign and came …

Nobody Knows What Ultra-Processed Food Is

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is taking on the fuzziest category in food science. You might know a tomato when you see one, but for the federal government, identifying one is harder. Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable? In 1893, this question went all the way to the Supreme Court, which decided that, for tax …

A Silver Lining in Afghanistan

Five years after the U.S. withdrawal, al-Qaeda remains weak and the Taliban has become an unexpected partner. Five years ago, the United States was completing its chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan when the terrorist group known as the Islamic State Khorasan Province carried out one last murderous …

Where Has All the Testosterone Gone?

Levels of the hormone have dropped in the past half century—but no one knows exactly why. The Trump administration seems to harbor a hulking obsession with testosterone. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. once claimed that the president’s testosterone levels are unusually high for a man of his …

Trump’s New Strategy of Nothing

But how long can the impulsive, reactive president show restraint? President Trump has been repeatedly stymied in his efforts to bring the Iran war to a close. Resuming a limited bombing campaign didn’t get it done. Neither did making apocalyptic threats to wipe out Iran’s entire civilization. Every …

Trump Doubles Down

The president has spent the past week re-litigating old conflicts. Over the past few days, the president has continued his crusade against one of the supposed vandals of the Lincoln Memorial’s Reflecting Pool. In a lengthy post on Truth Social on Sunday, he alleged that “a National Park Service …

Shopping Is Impossible

It’s never been more exhausting to buy stuff. For several months, I had been on the hunt for new T-shirts. I vaguely had a vision of what they should look like: not so different from my current T-shirts, except in some way elevated and, more urgent, free of stains or holes. Perhaps they could come …

What Do Sex and Gender Even Mean Now?

The history of a semantic mess––and a way out of it In her first argument as a lawyer before the Supreme Court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg famously quoted the abolitionist Sarah Grimké, who said, “I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.” At some …

The Atlantic Festival announces interview with Colin Kaepernick and exclusive preview of Netflix’s East of Eden, with Florence Pugh, Zoe Kazan, and Bela Bajaria

New speakers include: Senator Mark Kelly, Padma Lakshmi, Joe Kahn, Gina Raimondo, Ben McKenzie, Malcolm Gladwell, Richard Linklater The Atlantic Festival, back for the second year in New York City from September 17 to 19, is announcing new speakers including the legendary quarterback, …

A Deeply Layered Novel About Masculinity

Chang-rae Lee’s new novel examines a young man’s attempt to be tough—and its far-reaching consequences. Tangled themes of violence and masculinity run like buried cables through Chang-rae Lee’s work. One of contemporary American literature’s major chroniclers of manhood, he’s been writing for three …

Spain Is Ready for an Extraordinary Run of Eclipses

Tomorrow’s eclipse will be the country’s first in a century. Next year’s will be even more dramatic. Normal days in Spain can suddenly turn otherworldly. On a trip to Málaga in April, for instance, during Semana Santa, my friends and I happened upon a midnight procession of about 50 men in hoods who …

Are Men to Blame for the Birth-Rate Collapse?

Whether dads do their fair share of the housework appears to have no effect on fertility. Society is running out of babies, and no one can agree on why. Most people around the world, including Americans, live in a country where overall fertility is below what demographers call the “replacement …

Disunion

A short story February 2045 I took longer than some people to start calling it the war. And by some people, I mainly mean my husband, Asher. “This is it, Natalie,” he said to me that first Friday, back in June 2036, after watching the news coverage from Oklahoma City for three hours straight. siege: …

Marlon James Returns to Realism, and to Jamaica

In his new novel, gay men struggle to escape violence in Kingston. The Jamaican writer Marlon James won international fame with A Brief History of Seven Killings, which was awarded the Booker Prize in 2015. That title misled—the book describes dozens of killings, not just seven, and it is by no means …

The Man Who Refused to Sit on the Sidelines

Kevin Dowdell, a lieutenant in an elite FDNY rescue unit, taught his sons to take action. When he disappeared on 9/11, they went to Ground Zero to search for him. To a firefighter who is inside one, a fire creates as much darkness as heat. Flames start bright but throw off smoke that can swathe …

The Key to Understanding the Traditionalists

Readers respond to our May 2026 issue. History Is Running Backwards Explore the September 2026 Issue Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. View More “History Is Running Backwards” is a provocative article. But I think David Brooks errs in framing traditionalism and modernity …

The Democrats Can’t Just Laugh Off ‘Woke 1’

Republicans have no incentive to let them forget past excesses. On Sunday, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made two striking remarks that seem related. First, she barely demurred when ABC News asked whether she aspired to run for president. “I haven’t ruled out the possibility,” she …

Hindsight Is 2024

Some institutions jumped onto the MAGA bandwagon after the 2024 election, but it hasn’t taken long for those decisions to look shortsighted. When Donald Trump returned to the White House in 2025, he was nursing grudges and claiming a mandate. The institutions he saw as his enemies—in politics, …

Photos: European Rivers Fall to Record Lows

While Europe braces for yet another heat wave, prolonged drought conditions have dropped inland waterways to record-setting low levels, exposing long-submerged shipwrecks and affecting navigation.

Never Trump, Still a Republican

Why Jeff Flake still believes the spell over his party will break Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts Jeff Flake is something of a maverick in today’s Republican Party. He was an early and consistent critic of President Trump. In December 2015, when …

In Defense of Flock

Police cameras can help make the criminal-justice system both fairer and less punitive—if we let them. Crime in San Francisco, Jarico Anderson announced last year, “is over with.” Anderson, who raps under the stage name Dreamllife Rizzy, would know—he’s a convicted felon. Lately, though, he says …

If Only This Could Last Forever

Summer is the worst season of all, and also the most beautiful. Summer always overstays its welcome by about a month. After the Fourth of July, which has its charms, nothing but a stretch of relentless heat lies ahead, reaching toward Labor Day, and I begin to yearn for fall. So does the grand, …

The Atlantic’s September Cover: Tyler Austin Harper’s “Confessions of a Token Black Professor”

For The Atlantic’s September cover story, staff writer Tyler Austin Harper writes about how he came to lose faith in academia, chronicling his recent career as a professor and his decision to leave his tenure-track position after five years at Bates College in Maine. “I saw clearly now what should …

The 108-Degree Eviction

Living outside is a more dreadful prospect during a heat wave. On any other day when the high was forecast to be 108 degrees, Susie Tyson would not have left her Las Vegas apartment. The stroke she’d had at 30 made her sensitive to the heat, she found; at 67, going out during Nevada’s hottest months …

Why I Quit the Tenure Track

The insufferable hypocrisy of elite academia As you cross the Androscoggin River into Lewiston, you pass on your left the waterfalls that once set the mills to humming. On your right, affixed to a pockmarked brick mill—now defunct, it had spun tens of thousands of bedspreads a week—a 30-foot-wide …

The Man in Charge of Immigration Data Just Resigned

The Department of Homeland Security has stopped releasing timely, reliable statistics on immigration enforcement. Marc Rosenblum, the top statistician at the Department of Homeland Security for more than a decade, resigned in frustration in late July. Three years ago, he established the Office of …