Shan Wang | The Atlantic

These Photographs Are Not What They Seem

2025-10-18T08:00:00-04:00

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.

One of my favorite moments of elementary-school science class was “microscope day,” a version of show-and-tell where kids brought in everyday objects to marvel at under the lens. I raided my family’s kitchen—salts, sugars, spices, chilies, peppercorns—while many others cut off tufts of aggrieved siblings’ hair. Someone brought a wriggling worm. Someone else simply picked from his nose in front of the microscope when it was his turn (our teacher let this proceed). Absolutely nothing looked like what we expected. The naked eye, I first learned on those days, was only one way of seeing the world.

My colleague Alan Taylor, who looks at hundreds, sometimes thousands, of photos a day to compile the photo essays you may already know and love, recently published a selection from the Nikon Small World 2025 photomicrography competition that took me all the way back to science class. These photographs show geometry and color; they are not what they seem.

Before clicking through to see the answers in the image captions, try guessing what each of the photos below is depicting:

Mishal Abdulaziz Alryhan, Al-Ahsa, Saudi Arabia

Zhang You, Kunming, Yunnan, China

Gregory B. Murray, Pritchard, British Columbia, Canada

Dr. David Maitland, St. Andrews, Fife, United Kingdom

See more photos from the competition here.

Still Curious?

Other Diversions

P.S.

Courtesy of Norma Johnson

I recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. “I took this photo in 2011 of Tipsoo Lake, while hiking in Mt. Rainier National Park in Washington state,” Norma Johnson, from Northampton, Massachusetts, writes. “It still evokes the feelings I had when I came upon this small alpine lake … a true gem of nature. My hiking days are over (I am 90+) but the memory of that day is mine forever!”

I’ll continue to feature your responses in the coming weeks.

— Isabel Fattal

Who’s Afraid of Being Middlebrow?

2025-07-10T13:11:37-04:00

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.

Virginia Woolf said she would take matters into her own hands. The year was 1932, seven years past the positive critical reception for Mrs. Dalloway. In a review of her latest book of essays on English literature, The Second Common Reader, Woolf’s contemporary J. B. Priestley had called her work the product of “terrifically sensitive, cultured, invalidish ladies with private means.” Put another way: pretentious.

Literary fisticuffs ensued, between Priestley and Harold Nicolson, another writer in Woolf’s orbit. Were those who favored only what they deemed “highbrow” just fusty gatekeepers, as Priestley had argued? Were “lowbrow” texts—serialized stories, pulp fiction, tabloids—nothing more than money grabs for the masses? The BBC invited the two to give dueling addresses on the radio. By that point, Woolf was seething. “The Battle of the Brows troubles, I am told, the evening air,” she wrote in a letter she intended to send to the New Statesman and Nation (which had already been an outlet for her ire against another male critic). “May I take this opportunity to express my opinion and at the same time draw attention to certain aspects of the question which seem to me to have been unfortunately overlooked?”

Firstly, Woolf declared, being highbrow is the best. She was unabashed in her preferences: The highbrow “is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea. That is why I have always been so proud to be called highbrow. That is why, if I could be more of a highbrow I would.” She went on to cite some of her highbrow idols—Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Lord Byron, Charlotte Brontë, Jane Austen—before affirming that being named among them was “of course beyond the wildest dreams of my imagination.”

As for the highbrow’s opposite, the lowbrow, she felt the two camps existed in happy mutualism:

You have only to stroll along the Strand on a wet winter’s night and watch the crowds lining up to get into the movies. These lowbrows are waiting, after the day’s work, in the rain, sometimes for hours, to get into the cheap seats and sit in hot theatres in order to see what their lives look like. Since they are lowbrows, engaged magnificently and adventurously in riding full tilt from one end of life to the other in pursuit of a living, they cannot see themselves doing it. Yet nothing interests them more. Nothing matters to them more. It is one of the prime necessities of life to them—to be shown what life looks like. And the highbrows, of course, are the only people who can show them.

Hers was one prominent opinion among many. The early 20th century was a tumultuous time in England, as the gap between the economically comfortable, educated elites and the toiling populace widened during an era of exploding mass communication. Radio broadcasting for the public brought programming such as the Priestley-Nicolson debates to millions of people (the BBC formed in the fall of 1922). Book clubs encouraged more buying of books—and began to shape personal tastes as well as political affiliations. That highbrow automatically meant good art while lowbrow meant bad art was not a given. For Woolf, and other writers who were pushing formal boundaries of literature, the stakes of taste transformation were high.

Suspicion toward the highbrow consumer predated critics such as Priestley. “The more literature one scorned, the better highbrow one was,” an anonymous ex-reviewer admitted in The Atlantic in 1918. “I was at perfect liberty to denounce the literary product of the day—for a highbrow is not supposed to be very enthusiastic about his contemporaries. And certainly no one expected me to like the things in the magazines.”

But in the battle of the brows, the most unconscionable kind to be was the dreaded middlebrow, according to Woolf: Both the highbrow and the lowbrow know their likes and dislikes, but the middlebrow “is the man, or woman, of middlebred intelligence who ambles and saunters now on this side of the hedge, now on that, in pursuit of no single object, neither art itself nor life itself.” The middlebrow is a dishonest consumer of art who prefers smoothed out depictions of life and molds their tastes to current fashions: “If any human being, man, woman, dog, cat or half-crushed worm dares call me ‘middlebrow,’” Woolf declared, “I will take my pen and stab him, dead.”

Take her withering assessment of a “middlebrow” writer’s book, which he sent her, unsolicited, after they met at a party: “And I read a page here, and I read a page there (I am breakfasting, as usual, in bed). And it is not well written; nor is it badly written.” Here, I couldn’t help but think of my colleague Ian Bogost’s review of the maybe-AI band Velvet Sundown’s album: “It’s not bad. It’s not good either. It’s more like nothing—not good or bad, aesthetically or morally.”

While Woolf’s definition of middlebrow is exclusively pejorative, the term has softened and stretched over time, referring to anything perceived as pedestrian and harmless: beer, Taylor Swift, joke-y pronunciations of the department store Target (that is, Tar-jay). Apparently, Woolf had second thoughts and never sent her letter; it was published in a posthumous collection of her work, The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. The Atlantic ran it in its July 1942 issue, with a glowing footnote that Woolf had “produced some of the most graceful and glittering prose of our time.”

If only Woolf could’ve seen that high-, low-, and middlebrow discourse continues to haunt today’s literary world, in many of the same ways it haunted her interwar one. In the beginning of the 21st century, for instance, Jonathan Franzen railed at the inclusion of his book The Corrections in Oprah Winfrey’s book club, setting off another battle of the literary brows, in which authors and critics sounded off about the marketing value of Oprah’s seal of approval as well as Franzen’s ungrateful (or virtuous) adherence to his own literary aesthetics. Whether Woolf’s fiery attack on the middlebrow offends or delights you, her letter reveals an undeniable truth: A pronouncement of taste is a declaration of war, and if you make one, be prepared for battle.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

The Egg Is a Miracle

2025-03-01T08:00:00-05:00

Consider the egg. What does it look like? What does it taste like? Where does it come from? Maybe you’re thinking tautologically: An egg is egg-shaped, tastes eggy, and comes from egg-laying hens. They make for great breakfasts and cost more than they used to at the grocery store.

That would be underselling things. The ubiquity of this hard-shelled organic vessel that so many of us fry, scramble, boil, poach, and crack into other foods is nothing short of a miracle. Eggs are “fragile, messy, spoilable ovals,” my colleague Annie Lowrey noted this week—yet they can also withstand, at least in one scientific experiment, 250 pounds if cushioned. They owe their taste to “a living, lively organic soil full of bacteria, fungi, protozoa, and nematodes,” one egg farmer told Corby Kummer in 2000. (“My own conclusion is that feed is the chief influence on flavor, followed by the condition of the ‘layers,’” Kummer writes.)

Christopher Columbus brought what we recognize today as the oval-laying chicken to the Americas in 1493. But most eggs in the bird world aren’t even, well, egg-shaped, Ed Yong reported in 2017. Today’s reading list encourages you to reconsider the humble egg.

On Eggs

It’s Weird That Eggs Were Ever Cheap

What were we thinking, buying so many of these fragile, messy, remarkable ovals?

By Annie Lowrey

A Better Egg (from 2000)

Now that doctors are letting us eat eggs again, farmers are working to make eggs taste like they used to.

By Corby Kummer

Why Are Bird Eggs Egg-Shaped? An Eggsplainer. (From 2017)

A new study points to a surprising reason for the varied shape of bird eggs—and shows that most eggs aren’t actually egg-shaped.

By Ed Yong

Still Curious?

Other Diversions

P.S.

Courtesy of Peter van Dorsten

We recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world.

Peter van Dorsten of Raleigh, North Carolina, writes: “I took these photos on an afternoon visit to Pacaya National Park in Guatemala. Upon reaching the top of the active volcano, we roasted marshmallows from the heat rising from the ground and I watched tourists climbing to get closer to the red hot rocks and steam emanating above us.”

The Wonder Reader will continue to feature your responses in the coming weeks. If you’d like to share, reply to this email with a photo and a short description so we can share your wonder with fellow readers in a future edition of this newsletter or on our website. Please include your name (initials are okay), age, and location. By doing so, you agree that The Atlantic has permission to publish your photo and publicly attribute the response to you, including your first name and last initial, age, and/or location that you share with your submission.

— Shan Wang

The Rise of the Troll

2024-11-14T15:30:25-05:00

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.

Trolls are not just pranksters on the margins. They are in replies, DMs, comments, and email inboxes, sharpening their knives for humiliation, baiting those with whom they disagree, and blurring the line between a joke and a threat.

The Atlantic has examined trolling as an internet behavior for decades. (First, a minute for definitions: Trolling is a centuries-old term for a common fishing technique that involves slowly dragging a line through the water to lure fish into taking the bait, which The Atlantic has also written about. That word is a possible etymological ancestor of trolling in the modern parlance.) In a 2006 story about the evolution of Wikipedia, the writer and historian Marshall Poe recounted the tactics of a prominent early user known as “The Cunctator” (Latin for “procrastinator” or “delayer”), who pushed for a no-hierarchy, no-constraints version of the site. “Cunc,” as he was known, spammed pages, left inflammatory comments, and, most notably, baited the Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger into a prolonged edit war. (Sanger left Wikipedia in 2002, later citing its takeover by “trolls.”)

Trolling is also a rhetorical strategy, and in that sense examples of it predate the internet. In a 2016 story titled “The First Troll,” my colleague James Parker highlighted trollish echoes in the work of Thomas De Quincey, an English writer best known for his 1821 addiction memoir, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. James noted how, early in his career, De Quincey would lavish praise on his literary idols William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but later turned on them, hurling insults about Wordsworth’s appearance and Coleridge’s own addictions; he stoked feuds with them until the end of his troubled life. “Never describe Wordsworth as equal in pride to Lucifer: no,” De Quincey wrote in an essay published during his trolling era. “But, if you have occasion to write a life of Lucifer, set down that by possibility, in respect to pride, he might be some type of Wordsworth.”

Today’s online actors make De Quincey and “Cunc” seem like noble satirists in service of a mission. The year before the 2016 U.S. election introduced the concept of “Russian trolls” into public consciousness, Peter Pomerantsev, a journalist and a fellow at the SNF Agora Institute, warned of a new information warfare, conducted not by “mere pranksters” but by organized, paid, government-backed troll farms. In The Atlantic’s November 2016 cover story, “War Goes Viral,” Emerson T. Brooking and P. W. Singer detailed how social media contributed to global political upheaval (remember the Brexit campaign, amplified by legions of paid trolls and bots?). Trolls have lent their support to all manner of policies and ideologies, and some have even ascended to power.

“I am pleased to announce that the Great Elon Musk, working in conjunction with American Patriot Vivek Ramaswamy, will lead the Department of Government Efficiency (‘DOGE’),” President-Elect Donald Trump, who has been called a “troll in chief,” wrote in a statement on Tuesday. Musk (an unrelenting, undeniable troll) and Ramaswamy (another public figure with troll tendencies) could influence the employment status of hundreds of thousands of government workers. The acronym of the proposed department even winks at a long-standing Musk favorite, the cryptocurrency DogeCoin, which itself started as a joke.

Trump’s top immigration adviser, Stephen Miller, expected to return to the White House as the deputy chief of staff for policy, is another seasoned troll. In a 2018 profile, our staff writer McKay Coppins observed that Miller “slides from authentic insight into impish goading and back again. It’s a compelling performance to watch—but after an hour and a half in his office, I realize I’m still straining to locate where the trolling ends and true belief begins.” When pressed by McKay, Miller claimed that he was not a fan of “provocation for its own sake” and said he believed in “constructive controversy—with the purpose of enlightenment.” Miller went on to help shape one of the cruelest policies of the first Trump administration, as Caitlin Dickerson reported in her 2022 investigation into forced family separations.

To label many of the powerful people in Trump’s orbit as trolls shouldn’t undersell the danger of their behavior. “Call it the trolligarchy—and have no doubt that its regime is inescapable,” my colleague Megan Garber wrote last month, after Musk appeared on a show on X hosted by Tucker Carlson (troll tendencies) to make a joke about Vice President Kamala Harris not being worth the effort of assassination. “Life under the trolligarchy requires constant acts of micro-translation,” Megan explains. “Did she mean it? Was he joking? Were they lying?” As trolling becomes both a path to power and a part of everyday life, exhaustion can set in. Fatigue begets numbness, a tuning-out. And then the trolls will really have won.

17 Atlantic Covers From Different Presidential Elections

2024-10-31T15:18:00-04:00

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.

This year’s presidential election is the 60th in the history of the United States. The Atlantic has for 42 of those election cycles published stories examining the fitness of candidates to serve, the inclinations of the voting public to vote, and the sturdiness of our democratic institutions to carry on. Our magazine’s covers in October and November of presidential-election years offer windows into the unique—or uniquely persistent—national anxieties of each electoral era.

One cover story from our archives imagined a hypothetical Inauguration Day on which, “for the first time in history, the Inaugural stand has been built on the West Front of the Capitol,” but by noon in D.C., “there is no new President—none of the candidates carried a majority of the electoral vote on November 4.” That was Laurence H. Tribe and Thomas M. Rollins writing in The Atlantic in October 1980, in a story titled “Deadlock” (to be clear, on the actual 1981 Inauguration Day, Ronald Reagan was sworn in, having defeated the incumbent Jimmy Carter in a landslide the previous November).

Voters on the margins have been a regular subject of study in The Atlantic. “Between campaigns Smith is open-minded on all matters affecting the body politic,” Meredith Nicholson wrote in an October 1920 essay outlining debates he, a Democrat, had been having with his friend Smith, a Republican, about whom to vote for in the upcoming presidential election. But “party loyalty is one of the most powerful factors in the operation of our democracy,” Nicholson noted. “If Smith, in his new mood of independence, votes for Mr. Cox, and I, not a little bitter that my party in these eight years has failed to meet my hopes for it, vote for Mr. Harding, which of us, I wonder, will best serve America?”

Politics is a consistent presence, but not all of our fall covers from those years exclusively concerned the election. November 1976, for instance, led with the culture critic Benjamin DeMott’s spirited exploration of the state of the American family. November 1964 contained a special supplement on … the country of Canada; the month before, however, The Atlantic made its second-ever presidential endorsement. These days, the months surrounding an election pose a particular challenge for our print team: The November issue of the magazine appears on newsstands after the election, but goes to the printers before it takes place.

In many election years, including the present one, we sought lessons from American history. Our November 1988 issue mounted a robust defense for the teaching of American history—history, not just civics lessons, or facts about American government. “The chances for democratic principles to survive such crises depend upon the number of citizens who remember how free societies have responded to crises in the past, how free societies have acted to defend themselves in, and emerge from, the bad times. Why have some societies fallen and others stood fast?” the historian Paul Gagnon wrote, in a cover story titled “Why Study History?”

So spend a moment today with history: Below is a selection of 17 Atlantic covers from election years spanning two centuries. If you’d like to read more, you can browse our entire collection of issues online here, dating back to November 1857.

November 2024

November 2020

November 2016

October 2012

November 2004

October 2004

November 2000

November 1992

November 1988

October 1980

November 1976

November 1968

November 1964

October 1964

November 1940

October 1920

October 1860

Looking for weekend reads? Sign up for The Wonder Reader, a Saturday newsletter in which our editors recommend stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight.

Explore all of our newsletters.

Solving a Century-Old Byline Mystery

2024-03-28T13:23:00-04:00

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.

“Do you like to know whom a book’s by?” E. M. Forster asks in a 1925 essay on the question of anonymity in literature and journalism. The practice is fine in fiction, he argues, but not in news writing. Forster, however, wasn’t in charge: His essay, which appeared in the November 1925 issue of The Atlantic, was followed by an article bylined “Anonymous.”

Though our magazine withheld bylines only in its first few years (not unusual for publications at the time), unnamed or unidentified writers remained a frequent sighting in our archives well into the 20th century. Some people were seemingly allowed to mask their identity so they could poke fun: In 1963, two women used a single pen name to publish a spirited takedown of holiday cards. In 1968, one Adam Smith™ (trademark symbol included) wrote fictional vignettes from his position as a “pseudonymous chronicler of the mystification and mores of Wall Street” and most certainly not as the political economist Adam Smith (born 1723). Others were granted anonymity under higher stakes: In 1965, Mrs. X shared her experience obtaining a safe but then-illegal abortion as a married middle-class mother of three children. In 1930, a deserter gave an unvarnished account of the front lines of World War I.

One byline in particular has long nagged at me: In our August 1913 issue, in which all other contributors are named, “Atlanticus” offers a 6,000-word postmortem on the failings that led to the April 1912 sinking of the Titanic. I’d never seen the byline before. Longtime Atlantic editors Scott Stossel and Cullen Murphy, who moonlight as our magazine’s informal historians, told me they’d never encountered it either.

The Atlantic

Atlanticus, who at the end of the essay briefly describes himself as “an officer on an Atlantic passenger steamer,” was furious over continued inaction on the part of transatlantic-ocean-liner companies, as well as government officials.

Since that fateful night of April, 1912, what have we done in the way of reform that will go toward averting another such disaster? Remember, the day of the unsinkable ship is not yet; but the majority of passenger vessels now in service on the Atlantic carry as many passengers as did the Titanic. … The criminal waste of money at present forced upon all the big transatlantic liner companies is proof positive that some foolish Jack-in-office has been given a loose rein.

Atlanticus also enthusiastically and repeatedly cited a May 1910 Atlantic essay titled “The Man on the Bridge,” written by Charles Terry Delaney. He deems Delaney a man who “evidently knew his ground,” and calls the essay “a startling article.” I know the 1910 essay well. It chillingly describes many of the conditions—overworked ship officers, improper safety protocols, cost-cutting, fog and icebergs—that ultimately doomed the Titanic, two years before the actual disaster. Allegations in “The Man on the Bridge” caused such a stir that the author wrote a follow-up in the August 1910 issue of The Atlantic, and The New York Times covered the ensuing controversy on August 3, 1910. Did Delaney and Atlanticus know each other? Both wrote with suspicious specificity and insider knowledge of the maritime industry. The Atlanticus byline appeared again in 1915, in an article about the brutal realities of the life of sailors.

Scott suggested as a final resort that I look through an old filing cabinet that was used to track payment information for Atlantic contributors before the internet era (now it is displayed mostly as an antique next to the desks of my colleagues who make podcasts). There I found, on a typewritten index card, the name of a writer and the titles of nine articles written from 1909 onward, for which The Atlantic paid variously $50 to $100. Two of those stories were “The Unlearned Lesson of the Titanic” and “The Man on the Bridge.” Delaney and Atlanticus appeared to be pen names for a British naval officer named Alexander G. McLellan.

McLellan wrote under his real name for us only twice: in a 1911 essay titled “A British View of American Naval Expenditure” and in a 1914 essay called “Wanted: An American Minister of Marine.” Other biographical details from his unsigned work clicked into place for me: The author was the chief officer of a British ship. He’d fought as a young man in the Boer War. The index card lists his final article for The Atlantic as “Radical’s Progress,” which mourns young soldiers buried at sea during World War I:

Day after day these burials went on. Later I refused to attend them. The finish came when one body stuck to the stretcher by reason of the blood having oozed through the wrappings and congealed. The body had to be pried adrift before it would slide of its own weight into the sea. I cannot tell you any more just yet. I sicken as I write. The stupidity of it all!

That essay was published anonymously in February of 1916.

“The Man on the Bridge” drew heat (“If true, the allegations made should result in immediate action … If not capable of substantiation the article should never have been printed,” one reviewer argued), though the Titanic disaster provided the author with a measure of vindication. We can’t know for sure why McLellan and his editor chose to publish important work under so many different names. Perhaps we can chalk up the decision to the looser practices of that era. Or perhaps the outrage following “The Man on the Bridge” drove the author to go anonymous for “The Unlearned Lessons of the Titanic.” But the identity of Atlanticus is now known, and his accounts have been tested by history.

Henry Kissinger’s Real Legacy

2023-11-30T13:25:18-05:00

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present, surface delightful treasures, and examine the American idea. (Did someone forward you this newsletter? Sign up here.)

To read about Henry Kissinger’s legacy is to confront the place of an undeniably influential figure in a difficult—and bloody—global history.

“How many of his eulogists will grapple with his full record in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Bangladesh, Chile, Argentina, East Timor, Cyprus, and elsewhere?” Gary J. Bass wrote in The Atlantic yesterday upon the news of Kissinger’s death at 100. “The uncomfortable question is why much of American polite society was so willing to dote on him, rather than honestly confronting what he did.”

The following is a guide to our writing about Kissinger, from 1969, when he first joined the Nixon administration, to the present day, including two pieces by Kissinger himself on the rise of artificial intelligence.

In His Own Words:
Conversations with, and writing by, Kissinger

The Lessons of Henry Kissinger, by Jeffrey Goldberg (December 2016)

World Chaos and World Order: Conversations With Henry Kissinger, by Jeffrey Goldberg (November 10, 2016)

A Conversation With Henry Kissinger, by David Samuels (April 2007)

The Kissinger Transcripts, by James Warren (June 2005)

How the Enlightenment Ends, by Henry Kissinger (June 2018)

The Metamorphosis, by Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Daniel Huttenlocher (August 2019)

1969–1976: Our Reporting on Kissinger
From the Nixon administration to the Ford administration

Prof. Bismarck Goes to Washington: Kissinger on the Job, by Nora Beloff (December 1969)

Kissinger and Nixon in the White House, by Seymour Hersh (May 1982)

The Price of Power, by Seymour Hersh (December 1982)

Who’s Running the Country?, by Joseph Kraft (April 1974)=

Kissinger’s Paper Peace: How Not to Handle the Middle East, by George W. Ball (February 1976)

Assessing Kissinger’s Legacy

Party of One: Judging Kissinger, by Thomas Griffith (July 1976)

The Craft and Craftiness of Henry Kissinger, by Philip Geyelin (February 1980)

Kissinger, Metternich, and Realism, by Robert D. Kaplan (June 1999)

Living With a Nuclear Iran, by Robert D. Kaplan (September 2010)

In Defense of Henry Kissinger, by Robert D. Kaplan (May 2013)

The Flaw in Kissinger’s Grand Strategy, by Husain Haqqani (November 14, 2016)

Henry Kissinger Will Not Apologize, by Graciela Mochkofsky (November 15, 2016)

Kissinger: The View From Vietnam, by Viet Thanh Nguyen (November 27, 2016)

Cooperation With Russia Is Possible, by Kathryn Stoner (November 22, 2016)

What Joe Biden Could Learn From Henry Kissinger, by Martin Indyk (October 22, 2021)

What Do You Know About 1491?

2023-10-09T08:45:16-04:00

In elementary school, I learned a rhyme about Christopher Columbus sailing the ocean blue in 1492. High school expanded that understanding to a still-simple narrative: Very few people lived in the undeveloped Americas, and the invading Europeans brought a disease that wiped out the few who did.

Then, in college, I read the science journalist Charles C. Mann’s March 2002 Atlantic cover story, “1491,” which lays out a systematic challenge to every aspect of the lesson that I, and so many other kids, were taught in school.

Could the pre-16th-century population of the Americas have rivaled that of Europe? Had waves of lethal diseases wiped out far more people than was previously known? What if the people who lived in the Western Hemisphere were, as Mann writes, “so successful at imposing their will on the landscape that in 1492 Columbus set foot in a hemisphere thoroughly dominated by humankind?”

Mann and I spoke ahead of today’s holiday. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Shan Wang: Take us back to when the ideas in your 2002 article were completely new to most people.

Charles C. Mann: It started 10 years before the article was published, around the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s landing. I came across a display of new work at a Smith College library, where they had an edition of the Annals of the Association of American Geographers [as it was called then] journal. The cover was something like The Americas Before Columbus: What Was It Like? And I thought, Oh, that’s a good question.

A couple of articles in there told me two things that I had no idea were the case. One was that a substantial number of scholars believed there were just a boatload of people in the Americas at the time of Columbus. The second was that there had been a terrible depopulation due to disease.

A few years later, I was at an archaeological panel about how there was much more in the Amazon than we’d previously thought. Even places I’d always thought of as “virgin wilderness” were actually full of people.

I thought, Someone should write about this. I didn’t think it was me; it just seemed way out of my expertise. This was before the internet, so I would go to bookstores periodically and describe a book like this, and the staff would say, Oh, that sounds like a good idea; I’ve never heard of it. I finally thought, I’ll take a stab at it. Ultimately, the reaction was much larger and much more positive than expected.

When I wrote “1491,” there were far fewer Indigenous voices being spotlighted. By no means is it just me writing about this. Ned Blackhawk, for instance, published a history of Europeans in the Americas from the Indigenous perspective, called The Rediscovery of America, just this year.

Wang: Knowing all that you know now, I’m asking you in the year 2023: How many people actually lived in the Western Hemisphere before 1492?

Mann: The general scholarly critical mass—not necessarily consensus—is behind about 40 million to 60 million. I should also note that that number keeps creeping up. And I personally wouldn’t be surprised if, 20 or 30 years from now, the consensus-type number were 60 million to 80 million. Researchers keep finding new evidence of more populations in areas they didn’t think were populated—in the Amazonian Tierra Firme, for instance.

Wang: I was struck by the politicization of the population numbers in your piece. There were so-called high-number scholars and low-number scholars. All of them were accused of having political reasons for wanting a population number to be lower or higher. Have you seen your own work being taken the wrong way?

Mann: One thing I think has been taken wrong—and I should say I’ve been very lucky; this is really just one little annoyance—is, if you say viruses and bacteria played such a huge role in history, that’s excusing imperialism. (I’ve often joked that if I were writing Guns, Germs, and Steel, it would be called Germs, Germs, and Germs.) But, as I wrote, if Europeans found areas already emptied by disease, with relatively few survivors, and then went in and took all this stuff of people who were just whammed by disease—that’s terrible! That’s not me letting them off the hook morally.

Wang: I wonder what would’ve happened if we had published “1491” today.

Mann: I can give a small example. When I wrote the book that sprang from the article, it was translated into Spanish. Recently, some in the Spanish MAGA world, for lack of a better term, got really upset, calling me anti-Spanish. But neither the article nor the book is really about Spain. Then some Catalan nationalists started embracing the book, saying, This book is great; it tells what the Spaniards were really like. It was seized upon for culture-war purposes.

Wang: That a lot of “virgin wilderness” was actually carefully tamed by humans was also somewhat controversial when you first published the piece. Do you find that perceptions about that have shifted?

Mann: Particularly in the United States and Northern Europe, the idea of “wilderness” is such a powerful, Christian idea—a lost Edenic paradise that we screwed up. That idea of wilderness erases Indigenous people and Indigenous history. Many environmentalists have come to terms with that now. There’s a lot of interest in Indigenous land management, including to help us adjust to climate change, premised on the idea that there were many people here who had a ton of knowledge about the land, and who did manipulate it.

Wang: Our conversation will be publishing on Monday, and I …

Mann: You want to ask me what I think about Columbus Day.

My personal opinion is that there are holidays you celebrate—July 4, yay, the U.S. was born!—and holidays you observe: Memorial Day, for instance. The fact is that when Columbus landed, that inaugurated a series of enormous changes that rippled all over the world. So if the day were about the implications of those changes, then it would seem to me that Columbus Day could work. The weird thing is that Columbus Day was intended to be a celebration of Italian Americans, and Columbus was a terrible Italian American. Now, if we wanted to celebrate Indigenous People’s Day, I personally think we could be doing a better job. There are a ton of Indigenous notables. If you ask me to pick someone from the Americas side of the encounter: There’s this Taíno leader, Guacanagaríx, who attempted to negotiate peace and was incredibly generous. We could be putting this day in his name.

Related:

Courtesy of 20th Century Studios

Read. As the weather cools down, transport yourself to another place with a final pick from our summer reading list.

Watch. The Creator is worth catching on a big screen this weekend.

Listen. Could Ozempic derail the body-positivity movement? Host Hanna Rosin and science writer Olga Khazan discuss on the Radio Atlantic podcast.

Play our daily crossword.

Did someone forward you this email? Sign up here.

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

19 Ways to Understand This Heat

2023-07-13T12:22:24-04:00

Updated at 10:53 p.m. on September 5, 2023

Below is a list of ideas, arguments, and practical tips from Atlantic stories to help you navigate this heat.

Hydrate smarter. Here are some dos and don’ts.
There’s no single too-hot-to-be-outside temperature. Trying to set one might mislead more than it would help.
The denser the city, the less greenery? Not necessarily.
Look into a white roof.
What if we called it heat season, not just summer?
Beware the “wet bulb”.
The heat gap between rich and poor might be the most daunting issue of this century.
Other countries have had more effective sunscreens for years.
When is a heat wave “unusual”? The climate is changing too rapidly for a baseline measure.
Fahrenheit might just beat Celsius when describing extreme heat.
What’s made the southwestern U.S. livable so far? Precious refuges: air-conditioned buildings, public pools, and more.
Smart thermostats may not actually reduce energy usage. That doesn’t mean they’re useless.
Don’t discount hyperlocal efforts. A group in Portland, Oregon, for instance, replaces unused pavement with green space.
Climate change has clearly supercharged wildfires.
But the link between global warming and hurricanes is pretty complicated.
There are serious consequences to a skipped spring.
Allergy season is getting longer; allergy sufferers, more numerous.
“Chief heat officers” are a thing now.
“The challenge of adapting is not unlike the challenge of fighting the human urge to succumb to nostalgia.”

Play a Game of (Atlantic-Themed) Trivia for the Fourth

2023-07-04T07:30:00-04:00

Today we’re offering a brief history lesson (and a brief themed diversion). But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

What Should the Fourth of July Be?

With the Fourth of July comes all the complexities of collective observance—patriotism, fireworks, picnics, apathy, resistance. The holiday has always been one of dualities. It has also always been political.

After 1776, the day was celebrated throughout the Revolutionary War. “The trend in the early republic would be for July Fourth, and other celebrations modeled on the Fourth, to spread nationalism and, at the same time, to provide venues for divisive political expression,” the historian David Waldstreicher wrote in 2019—the year then-President Trump ordered a military parade, complete with tanks, to observe the day.

After the Civil War, Black Americans in the South transformed the date into a celebration of emancipation, according to the historians Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts, complete with martial displays, dedicated performances, and food and drink. “The Fourth became an almost exclusively African American holiday in the states of the former Confederacy—until white Southerners, after violently reasserting their dominance of the region, snuffed these black commemorations out,” they explained in 2018.

In the decades after the Civil War, the Fourth gradually lost its civic character and was marked in many cases by drunken, raucous affairs, rife with gunfire, injury, illness, and death, our deputy editor Yoni Appelbaum wrote in 2011. The public-health solution in New England? Massive public spectacles—bonfires—in lieu of smaller gatherings. Today, that tradition lives on in the form of public fireworks displays.

Whether you’re waiting for fireworks, working, traveling, or resting at home today, join us for another time-honored tradition: a game of trivia. Below are five clues drawn from The Atlantic’s archives.

“A husband and wife may be divorced and go out of the presence and beyond the reach of each other,” this president observed in his first inaugural address, “but the different parts of our country can not do this. They can not but remain face to face, and intercourse, either amicable or hostile, must continue between them.”
Assessing this film in 1996, Roger Ebert called it “in the tradition of silly summer fun, and on that level I kind of liked it.” Our staff writer Megan Garber wrote that it was, “in the era before cowboy diplomacy and the isolationist impulses that sprang from it, a comically blithe rendering of American exceptionalism.” (Bonus points if you can name the director.)
The first newspaper printing of the Declaration of Independence contains a crucial typo that has led to a fundamental misunderstanding of what the document intended, the political theorist and scholar Danielle Allen has argued. This typo comes midway in the famous sentence that begins with “We hold these truths to be self-evident ….” Can you complete it?
This country gained independence from the United States on July 4, 1946, after almost half a century of American colonial rule. “In 1776, the United States sought to escape the rule of one empire. On its way out the door, its representatives proclaimed that just governments derive their powers from the consent of the governed. After 1898, the United States acquired an empire of its own. And between that latter outcome and the former words gaped an uncomfortable contradiction,” David Frum wrote in 2021. “That contradiction was no less apparent a century ago than it is today.”
This American author and abolitionist is perhaps best known for writing the anthem “Battle Hymn of the Republic” (a five-stanza poem that The Atlantic paid $5 to publish in February 1862), but she was also a noted pacifist and advocate for women’s rights. Her work for The Atlantic shows “the point of view of a woman before modern feminism—the point of view of someone who wants to pitch in but must do so from the confines of the home,” Spencer Kornhaber wrote. Her poem “The Flag,” for instance, goes:

My wine is not of the choicest, yet bears it an honest brand;

And the bread that I bid you lighten I break with no sparing hand;

But pause, ere you pass to taste it, one act must accomplished be:

Salute the flag in its virtue, before ye sit down with me.

Related:

In 1902, Bliss Perry contemplated the beginnings of American imperialism and the waning of patriotic spirit.
James Russell Lowell: An Ode for the Fourth of July, 1876

Evening Read

Bill Ingalls / NASA / Getty

Scientists Found Ripples in Space and Time. And You Have to Buy Groceries.

By Adam Frank

The whole universe is humming. Actually, the whole universe is Mongolian throat singing. Every star, every planet, every continent, every building, every person is vibrating along to the slow cosmic beat.

That’s the takeaway from [the recent] remarkable announcement that scientists have detected a “cosmic background” of ripples in the structure of space and time. If the result bears up as more data are gathered, it’s a discovery that promises to open new windows on everything from the evolution of galaxies to the origin of the universe.

Scientists had been awaiting such a discovery for decades. More than 100 years ago, Einstein introduced his radical general theory of relativity. For Einstein, space and time were a single entity, “space-time,” comprising a flexible fabric that could be stretched and compressed, bent and warped. In general relativity, matter makes space-time bend, and space-time, in turn, guides how unconstrained matter will move. Because space-time is flexible, you can make it wave. Just like snapping a bedsheet, if you move enough matter around fast enough, a wave of distorted space-time will ripple outward into the universe.

Read the full article.

Culture Break

Fan Ho / Blue Lotus Gallery Hong Kong

Read. Written on Water, a collection of essays first published in 1944 by the Shanghainese writer Eileen Chang, whose observant essays about day-to-day realities double as a manual for surviving history.

And if you want to pick up something new but only have short stretches of time, Morgan Ome recommends five essay and short-story collections that are easy to read at your own pace.

Watch. Crash Course in Romance, on Netflix, a drama series featuring an all-star cast of Korean actors that aptly depicts the pressures students face in hypercompetitive academic environments.

Play. Our new print crossword puzzle puts a fresh narrative spin on a classic, as our crossword-puzzles editor Caleb Madison explains. The deeper you go, the more difficult it becomes.

P.S.

Three American presidents notably died on Independence Day—John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Monroe—and one was born on this day. The novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, who throughout his life wrote frequently for The Atlantic, shares this birthday too. Hawthorne even did a fair bit of reporting: In this 1862 essay, for instance, he traveled from Massachusetts to Washington, D.C., to interview civil and military leaders during the Civil War.

— Shan

The Secret to a Good K-Drama

2023-03-10T17:25:00-05:00

Don’t write off popular Korean-language TV series as sappy melodrama. These shows will expand your conception of what storytelling can be. Read on for recommendations for your weekend.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

To describe the plot of Crash Landing on You to the uninitiated is to invite mockery. After a paragliding test from Seoul gone wrong, a South Korean heiress and entrepreneur crash lands, literally, onto a stunningly handsome North Korean army officer, who, despite being lawful and rigid, decides to hide her and help her return home. What follows are 16 episodes, totaling more than 20 hours, of a story so propulsive I could watch nothing else for weeks after.

Netflix first waved the show in my face in January 2020, but I was preoccupied with the self-imposed assignment of finishing all eight seasons of Game of Thrones, because I felt left out at the cultural watercooler. My mother, though, saw the light. Throughout the first year of the pandemic, she watched Yoon Se-ri and Captain Ri fall in love, hide and then unearth their respective familial traumas, and find friends and purpose, in and out of North and South Korea.

My mom had long known this world. For two decades, in between the demands of teaching, she would watch Dae Jang-geum (a 2003 drama that follows a girl who grows up to be the first female royal physician of the Joseon era) and savor the series Winter Sonata (a thoughtful 2002 romance about first love and second chances). As a disaffected teenager, I considered my mother’s devotion to Winter Sonata’s Bae Yong-joon embarrassingly out of tune, but she had been one of millions to join in the beginnings of the Hallyu wave. In 2021, Netflix, which has a bit of a stranglehold on the streaming market for new K-dramas, said it would spend about $500 million on Korean programming that year (and enabled the production of about 80 new Korean shows and films between 2015 and 2020).

To paraphrase my colleague and eminent critic of all things BTS, Lenika Cruz, first, you aren’t a fan. Then, you are. And so I am. K-dramas, in all of their multitudes, expanded the boundaries of what I thought good storytelling could be. Like their cousins the telenovela and the Indian serial, K-dramas (the term broadly refers to Korean-language TV series made in South Korea) are critically sidelined as melodrama, given their sensational plotlines. Of course there are low-quality duds, and some are ridiculously plotted, if still good fun (no judgment). Of course there are tropes (amnesia, rich-girl-poor-boy or vice versa, tragic illness, overlapping past lives). But the “drama” in K-drama misleads. K-dramas come in all genres—intimate dramas, yes, but also fantasies, histories, horror; multiple genres often swirl into one show. Crash Landing on You is a romantic drama, but it’s also part mystery and part satire that winks at K-drama tropes. And Little Women, nominally based on the Louisa May Alcott classic, is a visually jaw-dropping thriller about family, class, and morality in which three hustling sisters wind up at the center of a major conspiracy involving the wealthiest family in South Korea.

To me, a K-drama’s core tenets are its satisfying moral arcs—even for side characters—plot twists, and a preponderance of feeling. (Bonus: beautiful clothes.) The shows prize emotional clarity, whether the feelings are loving or ugly or just little: worry, pettiness, a first crush, the dancing insecurity of early friendships. There’s no value in repressing them, no shame in expressing them.

I watched Game of Thrones so I wouldn’t miss out. The same impulse drove me to start Crash Landing on You last fall, years after its release, because I wanted to join the growing universe of breathless viewers who had seen the light. As I watched at home, my partner, catching up on some emails, would turn over his shoulder to see the screen and ask me questions such as “So how did his dead brother’s watch end up in her possession?” and “Did the reluctant spy who found his conscience make it out with his family?”

Look over your shoulder. Come see the light. I know you’ll find a K-drama you’ll love. Here’s where to start (all of these are available on Netflix):

If you want a lengthy thriller to get lost in … Little Women (12 episodes)

If you want a snackable legal procedural with heart … Extraordinary Attorney Woo (16 episodes)

If you want to cry and cry and cry … Thirty-Nine (12 episodes)

If you want to be awash in nostalgia … Our Beloved Summer (16 episodes) and Twenty-Five Twenty-One (16 episodes)

If you want to breeze through something silly … Business Proposal (12 episodes)

If you want your zombies with a dash of historical political intrigue … Kingdom (12 episodes)

Related:

Today’s News

After an investigation prompted by the police shooting of Breonna Taylor, the U.S. Justice Department found that Louisville, Kentucky, police have engaged in a pattern of violating constitutional rights.
California officials are warning residents of a powerful storm later this week. About 16 million people across Central and Northern California are under flood watches.
In the budget he will release tomorrow, President Joe Biden is reportedly set to propose measures to reduce federal-budget deficits by $3 trillion over the next 10 years.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Emma Sarappo explores the value in decoding fairy tales.

Evening Read

Lauren Tamaki

The Freakish Powers of Miley Cyrus and Lana Del Rey

By James Parker

If you’re looking to the stars—and why wouldn’t you be?—you’ll know that Saturn has entered the sign of Pisces. It happened in early March: Shaggy old Saturn, god of constriction and mortality, lowered his iron haunches into the Piscean waters. He’ll be there until May 2025, an intractable lump in that wishy-washy element. Displacing it. Blocking it. Imposing his limits. Enough with the changeability, he says to dippy, fin-flashing Pisces. Enough with the half-assedness. Endless mutation is not possible. Now you’re going to face—and be stuck with—yourself.

This will be a challenge, one senses, for artists in general. And for pop stars in particular. Who sheds selves, and invents selves, faster than a pop star? Who defies time and gravity with more desperation? Something else was augured for March: the release of new albums by two of our most continually expanding and dramatically evolving celestial bodies. I’m talking about Miley Cyrus and Lana Del Rey. Two emanations of the holy city of Los Angeles; two distinct transits across the firmament.

Read the full article.

The Books Briefing: What to Read If You’re Looking for Something to Read

2020-07-17T08:00:00-04:00

Editor’s note: This week’s newsletter spotlights some of our favorite Books Briefing reading lists from the past few months. We’ll be back with a fresh newsletter next week.

Know other book lovers who might like this guide? Forward them this email.

What We’re Reading

(HERITAGE IMAGES / GETTY)

Your socially distanced summer-reading list (May 15, 2020)
“Books to bring on an airplane. Books to enjoy at the beach. The classic categories of warm-weather-reading recommendations don’t seem to apply to a summer spent mostly at home under the shadow of a pandemic. And yet, as a source of distraction and solace, books are more important than ever—especially when they can serve as portals to the outdoor adventures or social gatherings you might be missing.”

📚 Read more about these books here.

(GETTY)

If your attention span is shrinking, read poetry (April 3, 2020)
“If you feel you’re losing your ability to focus on a long book while confined indoors and surrounded by digital screens (as staying up-to-date on a global pandemic seems to command), try turning to poetry to nurse your shrinking attention span back to life.”

📚 Read the poems from our selection here.

Piles of French Novels, by Vincent van Gogh (VCG WILSON / CORBIS / GETTY)

Turning to fiction to cope with fear (March 13, 2020)
“As the coronavirus pandemic continues to spread, disrupting some of the most basic aspects of daily life, people around the world are facing the anxiety and uncertainty that come with an unseen and fast-moving threat. Readers and writers have often turned to literature to help make sense of such crises, whether in retrospect—as Daniel Defoe did with a novel about London’s 17th-century plague—or in a hypothetical future, as Emily St. John Mandel did in imagining how human life might go on after a disease devastates the globe.”

📚 Read more about these books here.

(NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY)

Processing racial trauma (June 5, 2020)
“Many remarkable narratives explore the affliction of racially oppressed people in granular detail. For instance, Saidiya Hartman’s written history of black women arriving in urban American cityscapes at the turn of the 20th century encapsulates marginalized people’s struggle to live. In her book, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, she centralizes the stories of that population of black drifters, marking all of the obstacles of their journeys, while underscoring the marvel of their existence.”

📚 Read more about these books here.

(ALVARO BARRIENTOS / AP)

Short stories to read (and reread) (January 24, 2020)
“In recent years, The Atlantic’s publication of short stories has only been occasional. But the magazine has harbored a love of literature since its very first issue—and thanks to our fiction initiative, you’ll soon see short stories on our site on a more regular basis.”

Comments, questions, typos? What’s on your summer reading list? Reply to this email to reach the Books Briefing team.

Did you get this newsletter from a friend? Sign yourself up.

The Atlantic Politics Daily: The Stories That Stuck With Us

2020-04-17T00:00:00-04:00

Our team has been reimagining another newsletter in our portfolio, The Atlantic Daily, over the last year, and it has become the definitive expression of The Atlantic in email form.

The politics newsletter you’re reading now will cease today.

Where possible, you’ll be subscribed to The Atlantic Daily automatically (with a clear and easy way to unsubscribe). You can also sign yourself up here anytime.

« TODAY IN POLITICS »

(ROMAN SAMBORSKYI / SHUTTERSTOCK / THE ATLANTIC)

For this final issue of the Politics Daily, I asked some colleagues to share with me the political stories from the past year that most stood out to them.

For me, Russell Berman’s story on one of the defining concerns of the Democratic 2020 campaign—electability—forever changed how I talk about politics with friends and family. And Peter Nicholas’s story on the isolation of Donald Trump helped me understand the president’s mentality more than any other story about the Trump administration written in the past year.

Without further ado, here’s what others recommended, just in time for your weekend reflection.

— Shan Wang

*****

(EDEL RODRIGUEZ)

Yara Bayoumy:
National security editor

This Adam Serwer story is a searing and unapologetic look at deeply troubling moments in America’s history. It gave voice to a thought that has been with me for the last few years I’ve been living in the U.S.: “Rather, the source of greatest danger has been those who would choose white purity over a diverse democracy.”

Russell Berman:
Staff writer

This cover story by Vann R. Newkirk II about how government policy has allowed whites to steal farmland from black families across the South is a perfect combination of beautiful, textured writing and deep reporting that illuminates how a profound historical wrong lingers painfully in the present day.

Saahil Desai:
Associate editor

Not all socialists are Brooklyn hipsters. Last year, in the blissful Before Times, Elaine Godfrey wrote this revealing piece about a cadre of socialists in central Iowa. They’re not just a bunch of Bernie superfans.

(MARK PECKMEZIAN)

Uri Friedman:
Staff writer

John Hendrickson’s exploration of Joe Biden’s stutter, and his own, was an article so novel in its conception and so powerfully rendered in its execution that it doesn’t just stay with you long after you’ve read it but also changes the way you think about the subject and the world around you.

Mike Giglio:
Staff writer

Kathy Gilsinan’s interview with a general who once commanded 20,000 troops in Afghanistan gives life to the people keeping the country running behind the scenes during the pandemic. It should help all of us think about service in a different way.

Kathy Gilsinan:
Staff writer

Remember North Korea? The country still has nukes. Uri Friedman points out that Trump has a real diplomatic legacy to his name: He has normalized meeting with the world’s most notorious dictator, Kim Jong Un.

(ALEXANDRA ROSE HOWLAND)

Elaine Godfrey:
Staff writer

I don’t often read about religion; I tend to feel intimidated by the unfamiliar rules and rituals and the unapproachable way some of the stories are written. But it was impossible not to get sucked in to Emma Green’s story about vulnerable Iraqi Christians in the time of ISIS.

Emma Green:
Staff writer

The biggest political question of the past four years has been, How on earth did we get here? This story reconstructs the origins of the partisan food fights we see today—and makes a convincing case that Newt Gingrich should be banned from public zoos.

Adam Harris:
Staff writer

The group Future Now was inspired by Trump, but its lone goal was not to defeat him. This story from Russell Berman is a fascinating examination of a progressive group obsessed with flipping state legislatures.

John Hendrickson:
Politics editor

Peter Nicholas’s and Elaina Plott’s pitch-perfect profile of the former White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney illustrated not just the quirky man in the role, but the revolving-door nature of the job, as a whole, in the Trump era.

(JEREMY RAFF / THE ATLANTIC)

Nora Kelly Lee:
Politics editor

At the height of the family-separations crisis, Jeremy Raff interviewed a young pediatrician evaluating sick babies and children inside a Border Patrol warehouse. What she found—respiratory infection, malnutrition, signs of psychological trauma—was devastating, and Jeremy relayed her story with empathy and poignancy.

Peter Nicholas:
White House reporter

Not only did my colleague Isaac Dovere scoop the nation with his report that our now presumptive Democratic presidential nominee was entering the race, he delivered the news about Biden in an eloquent and memorable fashion.

Christian Paz:
Politics fellow

McKay Coppins brilliantly documented Mitt Romney’s evolution into the Republican Party’s new moral conscience. This story also launched a hunt for the senator’s secret Twitter account—and was a signaler of Romney’s historic impeachment vote earlier this year.

Kaila Philo:
Politics fellow

This piece by our analyst Ron Brownstein about how red and blue America are experiencing different pandemics perfectly nails large political patterns within our new COVID-19 reality. Nothing says “the more things change, the more they stay the same” to me than a partisan pandemic.

Today’s newsletter was brought to you by The Atlantic’s national security and politics teams. It was edited by Shan Wang, who oversees newsletters.

Your support makes our journalism possible. Subscribe here.

The Atlantic Politics Daily: How COVID-19 Exacerbates Trump's Biggest 2020 Vulnerability

2020-04-16T00:00:00-04:00

Editor’s Note: We’re making some changes to our newsletter lineup, and we wanted you to be the first to know what we’re doing and why.

Our team has been reimagining another newsletter in our portfolio, The Atlantic Daily, over the last year, and it has become the definitive expression of The Atlantic in email form. The politics newsletter you’re reading now will cease on Friday, April 17.

Where possible, you’ll be subscribed to The Atlantic Daily automatically (with a clear and easy way to unsubscribe). You can also sign yourself up here anytime.

Writing about politics has been at the heart of The Atlantic’s mission since the founding of the magazine in 1857, and we’re as committed as we’ve ever been to telling the most ambitious, imaginative, and clarifying stories in journalism. Today, the two major political stories of our age—the 2020 U.S. presidential election and the coronavirus pandemic—are playing out in tandem, and inseparably. They are a prominent and relentless focus of The Atlantic Daily and the body of journalistic work it represents.

As always, you can reach our team by replying to this newsletter, or sending a note directly to our team here.

It’s Thursday, April 16. In today’s newsletter: New analysis on how the COVID-19 outbreak is spreading in the largest metropolitan centers versus less densely populated areas. Plus: The internet is still bad.

« TODAY IN POLITICS »

(The Atlantic)

The Red and Blue America of a Pandemic

The coronavirus pandemic still raging across the U.S. could exacerbate a major Trump-reelection vulnerability: his weakness with urban and suburban voters. Ron Brownstein writes:

The question for Trump this fall will be whether he can offset that weakness by matching or building on his dominant advantage in exurban, small-town, and rural communities. In Wisconsin this week, the GOP lost ground with those voters too, but by and large, polling still shows Trump holding a strong position among them. And because most rural communities are facing fewer cases of the disease so far, they may be much more receptive than big-city leaders and voters to Trump’s calls to reopen the economy as quickly as possible.

These political, public-health, and economic trends all point toward the same possibility: Just as the disease is unfolding very differently in larger and smaller places, the gap between voter preferences there in the presidential race could reach astronomical, and possibly unprecedented, heights.

Read the rest.

« THE CORONAVIRUS READER »

(Adam Maida)

+ Everybody loves the internet now, Kaitlyn Tiffany writes. But “after a few weeks of faith in the possibility of online utopia, the cracks are starting to show”:

As traditional public life has shut down for much of the population, we’re moving online to stay connected to people we miss, and to raise money for people who need it, and to coordinate all kinds of collective action that can no longer happen in physical places. Since stay-at-home orders began in the United States, use of online platforms has ballooned to the point of absurdity: In a recent blog post, the Zoom CEO, Eric Yuan, said that the service’s number of daily meeting participants had gone from 10 million in December to 200 million in March.

+ Few figures tell you anything useful about how the coronavirus has spread through the U.S. Here’s one that does:

There is clearly some group of Americans who have the coronavirus but who don’t show up in official figures. Now, using a statistic that has just become reliable, we can estimate the size of that group—and peek at the rest of the iceberg.

According to The Atlantic’s COVID Tracking Project, nearly one in five people who get tested for the coronavirus in the United States is found to have it. In other words, the country has a test-positivity rate of nearly 20 percent.

+ Life right now feels very odd. And it will feel odd for months—and even years—to come, Juliet Kayyem writes:

Most of the decisions that matter aren’t in the hands of presidents or governors; American society as a whole needs a plan for what comes next. The coronavirus is revolutionary not just because of the suffering it has caused, but because it—like other diseases, from the bubonic plague to malaria to HIV—has the power to shape social norms for years to come. Those norms change with surprising speed. For most people, the prospect of sitting at home for months was almost unthinkable at the beginning of March.

You can keep up with The Atlantic’s most crucial coronavirus coverage here.

Today’s newsletter was written by Kaila Philo, a Politics fellow. It was edited by Shan Wang, who oversees newsletters.

You can reply directly to this newsletter with questions or comments, or send a note to politicsdaily@theatlantic.com.

Your support makes our journalism possible. Subscribe here.

The Atlantic Politics Daily: How Democrats Won an Improbable Victory in Wisconsin

2020-04-14T00:00:00-04:00

It’s Monday, April 14. In today’s newsletter: The Democrats’ improbable victory in the Wisconsin judicial election. Plus: The pandemic isn’t Pearl Harbor or 9/11. It isn’t a hurricane or a wildfire.

« TODAY IN POLITICS »

(MORRY GASH / AP)

In Wisconsin, Democrats somehow score a decisive victory.

The conditions for last week’s election in Wisconsin were stunning. After weeks of Democratic leaders (ultimately unsuccessfully) trying to postpone the election, after Bernie Sanders dropped out of the presidential race, leaving Joe Biden the presumptive Democratic nominee, after in-person voting concluded on Tuesday amid the COVID-19 outbreak and with drastically scaled-back polling sites, Democrats got a similarly stunning political win.

Russell Berman, who’s been following this election closely, writes of today’s results:

The far more consequential race was the judicial election, and Judge Jill Karofsky’s defeat of incumbent Justice Daniel Kelly gave Democrats an important victory—delayed by nearly a week as a deluge of absentee ballots was counted—in what was essentially a trial run for the November election in the closely divided swing state.

But the bigger mystery was how it had happened at all.

In the days leading up to last Tuesday’s vote, Democrats had done all they could to call off in-person balloting in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, either by switching to an all-mail election or by postponing the vote until June. Republicans had rebuffed them at every turn, insisting that the election go on as scheduled, even if it meant voters would have to risk their health—and violate a statewide stay-at-home directive—to cast a ballot at the few polling places that had enough workers to staff them. (In Milwaukee, the state’s largest city, just five out of 180 polling places were open.) When Democratic Governor Tony Evers issued a last-minute order to postpone the election, Republicans persuaded conservatives on both the Wisconsin Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court to block him.

Read the rest.

« THE CORONAVIRUS READER »

(Joan Wong)

What happens as this pandemic spring turns into summer? Ed Yong explores the various paths the U.S. can take:

As I wrote last month, the only viable endgame is to play whack-a-mole with the coronavirus, suppressing it until a vaccine can be produced. With luck, that will take 18 to 24 months. During that time, new outbreaks will probably arise. Much about that period is unclear, but the dozens of experts whom I have interviewed agree that life as most people knew it cannot fully return. “I think people haven’t understood that this isn’t about the next couple of weeks,” said Michael Osterholm, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota. “This is about the next two years.”

The pandemic is not a hurricane or a wildfire. It is not comparable to Pearl Harbor or 9/11. Such disasters are confined in time and space. The SARS-CoV-2 virus will linger through the year and across the world. “Everyone wants to know when this will end,” said Devi Sridhar, a public-health expert at the University of Edinburgh. “That’s not the right question. The right question is: How do we continue?”

Read Ed’s full story.

(CDC / GETTY / THE ATLANTIC)

New data from 29 states confirm the extent of the racial disparities of those dying of COVID-19, Ibram X. Kendi writes:

Over the past two weeks, each answer led to new questions. Should states be collecting racial data? Yes. Do those data show racial disparities? They do. And that led to the question Americans have been arguing over since the beginning of the republic: Why do racial disparities exist? Why are black people generally being infected and dying at higher rates than other racial groups? This is the question of the hour. And too many Americans are answering this new question in the old, familiar way. They are blaming poverty, but refusing to recognize how racism distinguishes black poverty from white poverty, and makes black poverty more vulnerable to a lethal contagion …

Without question, African Americans suffer disproportionately from chronic diseases such as hypertension, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, lung disease, obesity, and asthma, which make it harder for them to survive COVID-19. But if Cassidy were looking at science, then he’d also be asking: Why are African American suffering more from these chronic diseases? Why are African Americans more likely to be obese than Latinos and whites?

Read the full argument and explore the data here.

« EVENING READ »

(Illustration: Oliver Munday; Kampus / Shutterstock)

The Atlantic’s May Cover Story

Before COVID-19 sent families across the U.S. into lockdown, our senior editor Kate Julian began reporting a story for the latest issue of our magazine about children’s declining mental health, focusing on anxiety. What she learned was alarming but also weirdly hopeful—and very relevant to this moment. The kids are not all right, but:

The good news is that new forms of treatment for children’s anxiety disorders are emerging—and, as we’ll see, that treatment can forestall a host of later problems. Even so, there is a problem with much of the anxiety about children’s anxiety, and it brings us closer to the heart of the matter. Anxiety disorders are well worth preventing, but anxiety itself is not something to be warded off. It is a universal and necessary response to stress and uncertainty. I heard repeatedly from therapists and researchers while reporting this piece that anxiety is uncomfortable but, as with most discomfort, we can learn to tolerate it.

Yet we are doing the opposite: Far too often, we insulate our children from distress and discomfort entirely. And children who don’t learn to cope with distress face a rough path to adulthood. A growing number of middle- and high-school students appear to be avoiding school due to anxiety or depression; some have stopped attending entirely. As a symptom of deteriorating mental health, experts say, “school refusal” is the equivalent of a four-alarm fire, both because it signals profound distress and because it can lead to so-called failure to launch—seen in the rising share of young adults who don’t work or attend school and who are dependent on their parents.

Read the full story here.

You can keep up with The Atlantic’s most crucial coronavirus coverage here.

Today’s newsletter was written by Kaila Philo, a Politics fellow. It was edited by Shan Wang, who oversees newsletters.

You can reply directly to this newsletter with questions or comments, or send a note to politicsdaily@theatlantic.com.

Your support makes our journalism possible. Subscribe here.

The Atlantic Politics Daily: Which Version of the Pandemic Will You Experience?

2020-04-10T00:00:00-04:00

It’s Friday, April 10. In today’s newsletter: After the pandemic, two Americas. Plus: Why the U.S. is running out of masks.

« TODAY IN POLITICS »

(Getty / The Atlantic)

Tale of Two Pandemics

Some will emerge from this crisis disrupted and shaken, but ultimately stable. Others will come out of it with much more lasting scars.

Which of these two pandemics any given American will experience will be determined by a morbid mix of a sort of demographic predestination—shaped strongly by inequality—and purely random chance, Joe Pinsker reports:

Two important predictors of an American’s well-being right now, other than whether that person has COVID-19, are the answers they and others in their household would give to two questions: Are you still able to work? And if so, can you work without risking exposure to the virus?

For a rapidly growing portion of the country, the answer to the first question is no. Three weeks ago, some 3.3 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits in a single week, a record-breaking total that was nearly five times as large as the previous recorded high. The following week, the number of new claims was twice as high—6.9 million. Still another 6.6 million claims were filed last week, bringing the recent three-week total to nearly 17 million—an enormous figure that likely still understates how many Americans are actually out of work right now.

Read Joe’s full story.

« SNAPSHOT »

(CRISTINA QUICLER / AFP VIA GETTY)

The most important holiday on the Christian calendar feels foreign and unfamiliar this year, Emma Green writes. “But perhaps there’s theological insight to be gleaned from a painful Easter.”

« THE CORONAVIRUS READER »

Among the related questions displayed on Google’s search-results page for the word are “Is ‘normalcy’ a real word?” (HOSSEIN FATEMI / PANOS PICTURES / REDUX)

+ A recent uptick in Google searches for the term signals a longing for the usual state of affairs. Our resident linguist writes about how normalcy went from misnomer to safe word.

+ Attempting to translate your old social habits to Zoom or FaceTime is like going vegetarian and proceeding to glumly eat a diet of just tofurkey, Ashley Fetters argues. Stop trying to replicate the life you had, virtually.

+ Joe Biden’s minimalist version of the presidency could be a blessing in disguise, Nathan Schneider argues:

The imagination phase of the 2020 presidential campaign was interesting, but so too might be the ascent of Biden-esque minimalism. It might be just what American politics needs. It might even be good for the imagination of the American left.

+ The United States’ secretive medical stockpile was prepped for a bombing, not a pandemic. We’re running out of masks.

You can keep up with The Atlantic’s most crucial coronavirus coverage here.

Today’s newsletter was written by Kaila Philo, a Politics fellow. It was edited by Shan Wang, who oversees newsletters.

You can reply directly to this newsletter with questions or comments, or send a note to politicsdaily@theatlantic.com.

Your support makes our journalism possible. Subscribe here.

The Atlantic Politics Daily: Trump’s Miracle Drug

2020-04-06T00:00:00-04:00

It’s Monday, April 6. In today’s newsletter: What is actually known about hydroxychloroquine, the drug the president is fixated on recommending for COVID-19. Plus: The pandemic seems to be hitting people of color the hardest.

« TODAY IN POLITICS »

(The Atlantic)

Trump’s Miracle Drug

President Trump has tweeted some very questionable information about the coronavirus, most recently hyping “HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE & AZITHROMYCIN,” as a potential treatment for COVID-19. Our staff writer James Hamblin cautions:

While some very early evidence has shown that hydroxychloroquine may influence the course of COVID-19, Trump is overriding his top medical adviser and minimizing serious risks by encouraging Americans to try the drug right now. This brazen dispensation of medical advice from the president is dangerous in ways beyond the potential harm of the drug itself.

What is known about hydroxychloroquine, then?

It is unclear how hydroxychloroquine would work to treat COVID-19, but the drug is one of many now being urgently studied for the treatment of the disease. The drugs being tested include those that could block viral replication, such as remdesivir, and others that may target the way the virus binds to human cells. Still other drugs aim to modulate a person’s immune response, among them a class of drugs known as IL-6 inhibitors. Hydroxychloroquine has the theoretical potential to affect the virus itself or the immune response. In addition to treating malaria, hydroxychloroquine is importantin the treatment of autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and lupus. In those specific conditions, the drug effectively serves to subdue an overactive immune response.

Read Jim’s full story.

« THE CORONAVIRUS READER »

(Carolyn Kaster / AP)

In this photograph, Joel Albert, of Potomac, Maryland, plays his drums under a canopy of cherry blossoms at the end of March. Our senior editor Alan Taylor has put together this essay of images of warmer days and beautiful flowers returning to the Northern Hemisphere, for all of those who can’t be outside to see them.

« THE CORONAVIRUS READER »

(MIM.GIRL / SHUTTERSTOCK / THE ATLANTIC)

+ The pandemic seems to be hitting people of color the hardest, Ibram X. Kendi notes based on his reading of data from hot spots. And “in the end, though, no group of Americans may be more vulnerable to COVID-19 than the incarcerated and the homeless,” he writes. It’s time to pay more attention to these pandemic disparities.

+ What’s going on with Bill de Blasio? The New York mayor seems irritated by the need to fight the coronavirus, Alexander Nazaryan writes: “Aware that his progressive ambitions have been frustrated, de Blasio has complained that legions of enemies—conservatives, capitalists, newspaper headline writers—are arrayed against his vision for the city.”

+ The president belatedly acknowledged how dire a threat COVID-19 is, but many of his enablers in right-wing media refuse to take his cue, Peter Beinart writes: “Even when he reluctantly accepts a scientific consensus, some of the biggest conservative megaphones in America still won’t.”

+ Conor Friedersdorf has a few suggestions for fantasy sports programming that can safely entertain a television audience during the pandemic. Hall-of-Famers H-O-R-S-E? Tennis-Icon Ping-Pong?

You can keep up with The Atlantic’s most crucial coronavirus coverage here.

Today’s newsletter was written by Kaila Philo, a Politics fellow. It was edited by Shan Wang, who oversees newsletters.

You can reply directly to this newsletter with questions or comments, or send a note to politicsdaily@theatlantic.com.

Your support makes our journalism possible. Subscribe here.

The Atlantic Politics Daily: Where Are the Billionaires?

2020-03-19T00:00:00-04:00

It’s Thursday, March 19. Tulsi Gabbard drops out. Congress rushes to finalize a $1 trillion rescue package to help families and shore up the U.S. economy.

In today’s newsletter: Where are the billionaires now? Plus: Catching up with a congresswoman during the pandemic.

« TODAY IN POLITICS »

(DIA DIPASUPIL / SPENCER PLATT / ANADOLU AGENCY / VCG / GETTY / THE ATLANTIC)

Remember when Michael Bloomberg spent about $500 million running for president?

As the new coronavirus pandemic craters the American economy, you, like Russell Berman, may be wondering: “If ever there were a time for billionaires, isn’t this it?”

Russell writes:

Both Gates and Bloomberg have, through their eponymous foundations, announced commitments totalling several hundred million dollars to combat the pandemic in the U.S. and abroad. But, as of today, neither is directly funding the purchase of crucial supplies.

Read the full story.

—Shan Wang

« EVENING READ »

(ERIN SCHAFF / THE NEW YORK TIMES / REDUX)

How a Congresswoman is Weathering the Coronavirus Outbreak

Representative Katie Porter of California has made a name for herself before. As a freshman member of Congress who flipped a red seat in Southern California, her tough questioning of administration officials and bankers has made her a rising liberal star.

Recently, Porter seized the moment during a House Oversight Committee hearing, pressing the CDC director to make COVID-19 testing free in the U.S.

Meanwhile, she’s a working mom dealing with California under tightening social-distancing measures, at home with her three kids. Our politics staff writer Elaine Godfrey caught up with her this week.

« THE CORONAVIRUS READER »

(ALEX HALADA / GETTY)

+ This is how we can still beat the coronavirus, two professors write. Firstly, “we need to test many, many people, even those without symptoms.” We’ll also need to invest in medical infrastructure. Here are the other significant measures that all need to fall into place, and fall into place now.

+ How will independent-minded Americans react when the first checkpoints go up to blunt the spread of coronavirus?

+ Why a Mormon tradition of stockpiling food taught our politics writer McKay Coppins about pandemic preparedness.

+ What do today’s pandemic and the 1918 influenza crisis share in common? A fragmented government and divided country.

You can keep up with all of The Atlantic’s most essential coronavirus coverage here.

Today’s newsletter was written by Saahil Desai, an editor on the Politics desk, and Christian Paz, a Politics fellow. It was edited by Shan Wang, who oversees newsletters.

You can reply directly to this newsletter with questions or comments, or send a note to politicsdaily@theatlantic.com.

Your support makes our journalism possible. Subscribe here.

The Atlantic Politics Daily: A Mid-Apocalyptic Democratic Primary Night

2020-03-18T02:00:00-04:00

It’s Wednesday, March 18. In today’s newsletter: What do Biden’s past presidential runs tell us about this one? Plus: The coronavirus warning signs that the country missed.

« TODAY IN POLITICS »

Joe Biden in the Dirksen Senate Office Building after announcing his candidacy for president in Wilmington, Delaware, on June 9, 1987. (MARK REINSTEIN / MEDIAPUNCH / IPX)

A Primary Night in the Middle of the Apocalypse

Another Tuesday, another big win for Joe Biden. The former vice president wiped out Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont in Florida, Illinois, and Arizona yesterday, all but ensuring that he’ll capture the Democratic nomination. But, as my colleague Russell Berman writes, with the coronavirus pandemic bringing the country to a collective halt, the primary itself has turned into a second-tier story.

Nothing brought home the gravity of the coronavirus pandemic quite so clearly—or fuzzily—as the pixelated visage that appeared on American television screens to claim a series of Democratic primary victories tonight.

Former Vice President Joe Biden was speaking from his home in Wilmington, Delaware, but he might as well have been in a bunker. Biden’s campaign had set up a podium and a pair of American flags, but the man poised to face President Donald Trump as the Democratic nominee had seemingly been reduced to what felt like a blurry video on a dial-up modem.

Biden’s winning big these days, but his two previous runs for the presidency were spectacular failures. Both times around, he didn’t even win a single state:

Biden has long been such an old shoe in American life that it’s hard to remember he was once just a middle-aged, middle-of-the-road third-term senator from the small state of Delaware, struggling to become a household politician. As he started his 1988 campaign, he wrote, polls showed that just one in five voters nationally recognized his name, and in Cleveland in 1986, a local television reporter mistook him for Peter Ueberroth, the high-foreheaded Los Angeles businessman who led the 1984 Olympic Games.

Read my colleague Todd Purdum on how, for Joe Biden, third time’s a charm.

—Saahil Desai

« SNAPSHOT »

(Getty Images / Reuters / AP)

Millions of people are now living under varying degrees of lockdown in Italy, France, and the United States.

Our photo editor Alan Taylor compiled images of usually bustling public spaces that now stand empty.

See the new collection here.

« ARGUMENT OF THE DAY »

(DREW ANGERER / GETTY)

As far as the Bernie Sanders campaign is concerned, he’s still running for president.

But now, Joe Biden has amassed a seemingly insurmountable delegate lead—winning three states outright last night. The remaining primaries look hostile to Sanders (they’ll take place in states where Biden’s support runs deep, and the COVID-19 outbreak may further suppress turnout).

Now would be the time for Sanders to drop out yet keep his influence on the race, our Ideas staff writer Conor Friedersdorf argues.

“As Congress weighs emergency relief measures, Sanders could exert more influence focusing on policy in Washington, in his capacity as a sitting senator, than in debates with Biden, repeating calls for a democratic socialist future as the public is focused on the next year … or week.”

Read the rest.

« THE CORONAVIRUS READER »

(THE ATLANTIC)

As the U.S. federal government struggles with a proper response to the COVID-19 pandemic, our writers are analyzing the virus’s effect on society.

When the history of this virus is written, we’ll have to include the many, many warning signs the country missed. We were warned every year since at least 2014, our national security and global affairs staff writer Uri Friedman reports:

When the National Commission on the COVID-19 response materializes, it will differ from the 9/11 Commission in that it will conclude that “the system was blinking red” not just in the inner sanctum of the U.S. intelligence community but out in the open, as well. For years.

You can keep up with all of The Atlantic’s most essential coronavirus coverage here.

Today’s newsletter was written by Saahil Desai, an editor on the Politics desk, and Christian Paz, a Politics fellow. It was edited by Shan Wang, who oversees newsletters.

You can reply directly to this newsletter with questions or comments, or send a note to politicsdaily@theatlantic.com.

Your support makes our journalism possible. Subscribe here.

The Atlantic Politics Daily: How Much Does a Revolution Cost?

2020-02-26T00:00:00-05:00

It’s Wednesday, February 26. In today’s newsletter: A sixty trillion dollar man. Plus: What nonvoters want.

« TODAY IN POLITICS »

(Matt Rourke / AP)

He has a (very pricy) plan for that.

Perhaps for the first time on a debate stage, Bernie Sanders showed “the first sign of uneasiness,” and was thrust into “moments where he was not 100 percent sure of what his rebuttal was going to be,” one former presidential-campaign communications director told our analyst Ron Brownstein.

One potential weakness—still left relatively untouched by his challengers—is the cost of his ambitious agenda. The numbers aren’t quite adding up, Ron writes:

Until now, Sanders has responded to questions about his agenda’s cost by focusing only on his vision for Medicare for All, insisting that most Americans would spend less than they do now—even if their taxes are increased—because the plan would eliminate their insurance premiums, co-payments, and deductibles.

The document that Sanders handed [CNN moderator Chris] Cuomo on Monday represents his most complete attempt to explain how he would cover the bill for his entire agenda. But critics quickly noted that it falls well short of the full price tag for his plans—and almost certainly overstates the funds they would generate.

The numbers cited are truly eye-popping.

« IDEAS AND ARGUMENTS »

(Jonathan Ernst / Reuters)

1. “With a loyalist as acting director of national intelligence, the official line on issues like Russian election meddling could bend closer to the president’s.”

The president’s recent appointment of a replacement acting director of national intelligence, Richard Grenell, who now heads the same office that published the 2017 report on Russian meddling, raises a question, Mike Giglio writes: “Will Trump finally seek to muzzle his spies as he pushes to control the narrative in his reelection campaign?”

2. “The candidates’ attempts at moral clarity got muddled when conversation turned to the trade-offs inherent in actually conducting American statecraft.”

Democrats running to displace the current president in 2020 are eager to emphasize that they, unlike Trump, won’t be so cozy with autocrats, and will champion democratic forces around the world. But during the latest debate in South Carolina, that narrative crumbled, Uri Friedman writes.

3. “One of the many issues at stake in this year’s election is the future of the Court ... and the election will also help to determine the Court’s approach to the poor.”

What’s going on with the Supreme Court? Its empathy for the poor has gradually been replaced by hostility, the writer Adam Cohen argues, tracing the Court’s ruling on cases over the last half century.

4. “Boosting turnout won’t necessarily help the most progressive candidate.”

One of Sanders’s major selling points—that he’s uniquely positioned to improve voter turnout in the disaffected slice of the electorate—isn’t as clear a benefit as it might seem, the political scientist Yascha Mounk argues. Nonvoters are far less progressive than is commonly believed.

« EVENING READ »

(BETTMANN / GETTY / KATIE MARTIN / THE ATLANTIC)

Why America Radicalizes Brits

It seems that a little time across the proverbial pond changes people. Our London-based writer Tom McTague observes:

The idea of America has always been political: the wealth and opportunity as some see it, the injustice and individualism as others prefer. With Brexit this has only become more pronounced. The U.S. has been held up by one side of the argument as an opportunity to grasp, and by the other as the danger of what might become. To ardent leavers, it offers the hope of free trade without constitutional entanglement; to many remainers, it means subservience to a greater power, chlorinated chicken, and privatized health care.

R ead the rest.

Today’s newsletter was written by Shan Wang, who oversees newsletters.

You can reply directly to this newsletter with questions or comments, or send a note to politicsdaily@theatlantic.com.

Your support makes our journalism possible. Subscribe here.

The Atlantic Politics Daily: Will Iowa Always Get to Go First?

2020-01-24T08:00:00-05:00

It’s Friday, January 24. The CDC has confirmed another U.S. case of coronavirus. “Based on what’s known so far, the virus is dangerous,” James Hamblin writes, “but not unprecedentedly so.”

On Capitol Hill, the impeachment trial continues. Here’s David Graham on the latest news to emerge from that world.

In the rest of today’s newsletter: Eyes on Iowans, who get to vote first. Plus: Joe Rogan “feels the Bern,” and Tulsi Gabbard really wants more attention.

« TODAY IN POLITICS »

(CHARLIE NEIBERGALL / AP)

Early Voting Privileges

The bloated field of Democrats who mounted presidential runs this cycle was the most racially diverse ever. But looking at the frontrunners these days, after months of culling, you’d never know it.

The highest-polling candidate of color, political newbie Andrew Yang, is trailing far, far behind the all-white heavyweights. Deval Patrick, the former Massachusetts governor, is averaging … 0 percent in the national polls.

As my colleague Ron Brownstein writes, the unbearable whiteness of the 2020 field has some Democrats pointing fingers at the two states that vote first: Iowa (85 percent white) and New Hampshire (90 percent white).

Could the two early states actually be on the cusp of losing their privileged position? If the eventual Democratic nominee loses to President Trump, expect a reckoning, Ron argues.

If Democrats lose again, almost every accepted belief in the party about how to contest elections could be rattled—including about relying on a primary calendar that gives primacy to two mostly white states on behalf of a party that is becoming only more diverse.

Read the rest.

—Saahil Desai

« SNAPSHOT »

(Michelle Rohn)

The über-popular podcast host Joe Rogan gave a sort of unofficial endorsement to Bernie Sanders this week, leading the Vermont senator to tout this support on Twitter.

But considering Rogan’s track record of making misogynistic comments and dabbling in conspiracy theories, Sanders’s showcasing of Rogan’s endorsement ignited a wildfire of controversy.

“Few men in America are as popular among American men as Joe Rogan,” Devin Gordon writes. His August 2019 story tries to understand the enormous wave Rogan has been riding:

The bedrock issue, though, is Rogan’s courting of a middle-bro audience that the cultural elite hold in particular contempt—guys who get barbed-wire tattoos and fill their fridge with Monster energy drinks and preordered their tickets to see Hobbs & Shaw … He shares their passions and enthusiasms at a moment when the public dialogue has branded them childish or problematic or a slippery slope to Trumpism.

Read the rest.

« IDEAS AND ARGUMENTS »

(MARY ALTAFFER / AP)

1. “Much of Tulsi Gabbard’s complaint reads less like a legal argument than a stump speech.”

A 2020 Democratic presidential contender is suing Hillary Clinton, arguing that the former Secretary of State had maliciously called Gabbard a “Russian asset” in an act of defamation.

But the suit is flimsy and reads more like a rallying cry for relevance from a campaign stuck at a statistical zero, David Frum argues.

2. “By doing nothing to ensure that the process is fairly constructed to get at the truth, John Roberts is in fact taking a side.”

The Chief Justice has had opportunities to resolve impasses over facts and evidence in Trump’s impeachment trial, but has stayed out of the partisan mess. Still, Democrats should be prodding him to play a more active role, rather than letting Mitch McConnell and the Trump defense team manipulate the process, Kim Wehle argues.

3. “Equality premised on the power to end life is not true equality at all.”

Trump headlined the March for Life in Washington today, the first sitting president to make remarks at the event in the decades it’s been ongoing.

If you’re still thinking about the abortion-rights issue, read this argument from Erika Bachiochi:

Many Americans think of Roe v. Wade as the defining Supreme Court decision on the issue of abortion. But a 1992 high-court decision actually governs abortion law. That ruling rested on fateful assumptions about the relationship between abortion and women’s equality. But in so doing, it has served to enshrine social and professional inequalities, which mothers must fight against every day.

Read the rest.

« WEEKEND READ »

Marines arriving on a beach outside Beirut, Lebanon, on July 15, 1958 (BETTMANN / GETTY)

The Beginnings of American Intervention in the Middle East

“We are opening a Pandora’s Box,” Dwight Eisenhower warned when he ordered the first U.S. combat mission in the region. Little did he know how right he would be.

Uri Friedman writes:

The trajectory of U.S. involvement is one of American leaders gradually putting stock in their ability to achieve their objectives through discrete military action and then investing everything in costly military misadventures, to the point that we’ve come full circle: The American public and its leaders are profoundly ambivalent about even limited and critical missions, such as the campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

Read the rest.

Today’s newsletter was written by Saahil Desai and Christian Paz, a Politics fellow. It was edited by Shan Wang, who oversees newsletters.

You can reply directly to this newsletter with questions or comments, or send a note to politicsdaily@theatlantic.com.

Your support makes our journalism possible. Subscribe here.

The Atlantic Politics Daily: The Contractors Fighting America’s Wars

2020-01-17T12:00:00-05:00

It’s Friday, January 17. In today’s newsletter: The American war machine runs on contractors. Plus: Can Andrew Yang make the leap from “$1,000-a-month guy” to “Situation Room guy?”

« TODAY IN POLITICS »

(Mike Segar / Reuters)

The American war machine runs on contractors.

In 1991, at the time of the Persian Gulf war, one in 50 people fighting the war was an American civilian contractor; that proportion crept to one in 10 by 1996, during Bosnia, according to a 2002 New York Times story.

The latest figures from last fall show that that ratio is now nearly 1 to 1. And that’s just American contractors. Kathy Gilsinan tells their story.

Mike Jabbar never met his replacement. But when Nawres Hamid died in a rocket attack on a military base in Iraq after Christmas, Jabbar saw photos of the wreckage and recognized the American flag he himself had helped paint on the door of a room now mangled. That was his old room, on his old base. It could have been him.

“Imagine something like that happens, knowing that you were supposed to be there and you weren’t there, and the person that replaced you is gone,” Jabbar, who like Hamid served as a translator for the U.S. military, told me in an interview. “It absolutely feels horrible.”

Jabbar was one of the lucky ones. He left his home country of Iraq last fall, at age 23, for the United States, where he’s now a permanent resident living with a friend in North Carolina.

Read the rest.

« IDEAS AND ARGUMENTS »

(Saul Loeb / AFP via Getty)

1. “Bureaucrats are not viewed by most people as terribly sympathetic victims, but if you shoot these messengers, you end up wounding citizens.”

The Government Accountability Office released a decision on whether the Trump administration violated the law by freezing millions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine: “We conclude that OMB violated the ICA,” the report stated.

“In a reality-based world, this would at least be embarrassing for the president,” David Graham writes. That, of course, doesn’t appear to be the case.

+ Did President Trump unwittingly stumble into a foreign-policy … triumph? Read our London-based writer Tom McTague’s analysis.

2. “There’s only one deal, and that is the California deal.”

That’s Arnold Schwarzenegger, to our campaign reporter Edward-Isaac Dovere, when asked about the Green New Deal.

Listen to their full interview on the latest episode of Radio Atlantic.

3. “Twitter is both leaderless and influential, little used and widely reviled.”

When #NeverWarren began to trend, others using the hashtag to denounce the hashtag merely ended up contributing to its popularity. How the episode unfolded online is yet another example of how Twitter may be ruinous for the American left, Robinson Meyer writes.

4. “To fully escape his fringe status, Yang needs to make voters comfortable with the idea of him as commander in chief.”

Andrew Yang isn’t looking so fringe anymore. But how is his campaign plotting to push him from “$1,000-a-month guy” to “Situation Room guy?” Isaac reports from Burlington, Iowa:

The Yang doctrine, as he spelled it out for me, consists of a basic three-point test for military intervention: “first, a clear, vital national interest at stake or the ability to avert a humanitarian catastrophe. Second, a defined timeline for our troops to be there, so we can look them in the eye and say, ‘You will be brought home at this date.’ And No. 3 is that we have buy-in from our allies and partners.”

Read the rest.

« WEEKEND READ »

(David Kasnic)

The Effort to Rehabilitate Domestic Abusers

The “Duluth model” of rehabilitation for domestic batterers is based on the idea that abuse isn’t an individual problem—it’s a societal one, stemming from the patriarchy. Does it work?

Matt Wolfe reported on one man’s journey through the program:

Andrew Lisdahl was mad. His wife, Gretchen, had smoked a cigarette, a habit he detested. They fought, and Gretchen spent the night at a friend’s house. The next day, Andrew drank a bottle of tequila and hitched a ride to the stained-glass studio where Gretchen, an artist, gave lessons. When Andrew found her, he grabbed her left hand and tried to remove her wedding ring, but Gretchen fought him off. As Andrew stumbled away, he took Gretchen’s car keys and phone.

After work, Gretchen’s father drove her back home to retrieve her things. Inside, Andrew had been passed out on the couch, but he woke up and yelled at Gretchen, “Get the fuck out!” When she didn’t, he grabbed her by the hair, dragged her into the living room, threw her on the carpet, kicked her in the chest, and pinned her to the ground. As Gretchen’s father approached the house, Andrew let her go and she was able to escape.

Read the rest.

Today’s newsletter was written by Christian Paz, a Politics fellow. It was edited by Shan Wang, who oversees newsletters.

You can reply directly to this newsletter with questions or comments, or send a note to politicsdaily@theatlantic.com.

Your support makes our journalism possible. Subscribe here.

The Atlantic Politics Daily: Elizabeth Warren Doesn’t Talk About Her Republican Past

2020-01-10T09:00:00-05:00

It’s Friday, January 10. After a fruitless three-week standoff, Nancy Pelosi said she’d send the articles of impeachment to the Senate. Expect a trial sometime after the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.

In today’s newsletter: Elizabeth Warren’s political conversion. Plus: Is Eric Garcetti, Rhodes Scholar, mayor, and one-time 2020 hopeful, just “kicking himself” now?

« TODAY IN POLITICS »

(LEIF SKOOGFORS / CORBIS VIA GETTY)

She used to be a Republican—a staunch one.

Now she’s … Elizabeth Warren, one of the leading candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination. Russell Berman writes:

Hers is the story of a convert, not a zealot. The decision to become a Democrat was anything but a default choice; she came to it only after years of study that challenged her more conservative assumptions about how the economy and the government worked. And as Warren seeks to expand beyond her liberal base, that rarely mined part of her past could serve as a comfort to Democrats who worry about her electability, or as a point of connection with independents and moderate Republicans who may not know that, for a long time, she was actually one of them.

Russell spoke with her old friends, colleagues, political strategists, and mined Warren’s past interviews for this remarkable story. Could the candidate sway more undecided voters if she opened up about her own ideological evolution?

« SNAPSHOT »

(AFP / Getty)

A Ukrainian airliner—a Boeing 737-800 plane—crashed outside Tehran shortly after takeoff on Wednesday, killing everyone aboard. Alexis Madrigal writes:

Beyond and next to the tragedy, it felt as if reality had melted and balled up together in one news story. The U.S. strike on an Iranian general last week had tilted the world toward a new precipice. Boeing’s problems with a different model of 737 have been global-headline news. And, of course, Ukraine is also at the center of geopolitics (not to mention American campaigns).

Read the rest.

« IDEAS AND ARGUMENTS »

(LUCAS JACKSON / REUTERS)

1. “It’s no use seeking grand lessons about Williamson’s campaign.”

The odd-bird Democratic presidential candidate (who smells like rosewater) Marianne Williamson hasn’t been on a debate stage in months and hasn’t been able to claw her campaign out of the low single digits. Nevertheless, she persisted—until today.

+ Somewhat surprisingly, another fringe(ish) candidate did just make this month’s debate. Is the first billionaire in the 2020 race a Very Serious Candidate now?

2. “The Iranians … chose neither to fold nor to fight. They took a narrower path.”

Who won this round in the decades-old conflict between the U.S. and Iran? Tom Nichols argues that Iran made the smartest moves:

First, they satisfied the domestic need for immediate action. There was no way the Iranians could promise covert or proxy action as a response to the killing of someone as prominent as Soleimani. They had to demonstrate to loyal citizens that they would act, and to dissident citizens that they did not fear the Americans. The United States directed the killing of Soleimani, and so the missile strikes were directly and publicly attributable to Iran—as the Iranian regime intended them to be.

[Read the rest.]

« WEEKEND READ »

Former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti in 2019. (LUCY NICHOLSON / REUTERS)

The Other Other Rhodes-Scholar Mayor

Eric Garcetti, the mayor of Los Angeles, had decided the time wasn’t right for him to make a run for president. Now he’s watching another mayor, of a far smaller city, take a spin in the Democratic-primary spotlight. And this week, he endorsed Joe Biden.

Edward-Isaac Dovere recently spoke with the other, other mayor in a juice bar in Southern California (pardon the cliché):

Now Garcetti is telling me that Buttigieg’s unexpectedly strong showing in the polls so far is vindication of his own almost-candidacy. “It’s nice to have Pete be like my mayoral avatar, to show that the theory was correct and that there is, I think, a hunger for a new, outside-Washington mayoral leadership,” he said.

Which is a sort of self-flattering thing to say. In the meantime, Buttigieg—who responded to the Los Angeles mayor in Iowa by saying, “I’m happy to be known as the younger, gayer version of Eric Garcetti anytime”—was preparing to walk out onstage at the December presidential debate, while Garcetti was failing to be recognized by patrons at the juice bar.

“Garcetti must be kicking himself” is something I’ve heard a lot of Democratic observers say to one another.

Read the rest.

Today’s newsletter was written by Saahil Desai, an associate editor on our Politics team and Christian Paz, a Politics fellow. It was edited by Shan Wang, who oversees newsletters.

You can reply directly to this newsletter with questions or comments, or send a note to politicsdaily@theatlantic.com.

Your support makes our journalism possible. Subscribe here.

The Atlantic Politics Daily: The 2016 Campaign Cycle Is Still Going

2019-12-27T04:00:00-05:00

It’s Friday, December 27. In today’s newsletter: What we learned in the year that was. Plus: Why are American campaign cycles so interminable?

Like Congress, this newsletter team is taking a breather until the new year (though if there’s breaking news you need to know about, we’ll be back in your inboxes).

—Shan Wang

« THE DECADE IN POLITICS »

These are just a few of the most enduring images of the latter half of this decade.

From oil spills to volcanic eruptions, space milestones to major protest movements, scenes of the aftermath of war to scenes of the aftermath of natural disaster: See the full photo essay, selected by our photo editor Alan Taylor.

« ARGUMENTS AND IDEAS »

(Arsh Raziuddin / The Atlantic)

1. “No one can reasonably claim that the 2020 Democratic candidates or Trump started the campaign season we’re living through.”

Let’s put a few things into perspective. In Japan, campaigns last 12 days. In Australia, they last 33 to 68 days.

In America, campaign season is the one season that never ends—everyone is always campaigning, all the time, Molly Jong-Fast writes.

Only one of the 2020 Democrats ran in 2016, Bernie Sanders, and he announced after Hillary Clinton, likely without thinking he had a chance in hell. Trump wasn’t the first Republican to announce his candidacy for 2016—that’d be Ted Cruz, who told the world he would be president in March 2015. That was before Trump called his wife ugly and said his dad murdered JFK.

→ Read the rest.

(Jonathan Ernst / Reuters)

2. “It will end with about half of America triumphant, and the other half furious and fearful.”

That’s Ron Brownstein’s heads up on 2020.

The 2020 presidential election remains very much up for grabs, but one thing already seems clear: It will end with about half of America triumphant, and the other half furious and fearful.

Ron has this year-end analysis of the facts and figures that augur a contentious year to come:

Since 1968, one party has simultaneously controlled the White House, the House, and the Senate for only 14 years. The past four times a president went into a midterm election with unified control of government, most recently Trump in 2018, voters revoked it. Neither Democrats nor Republicans can truly be confident about the outcome of the presidential race in 2020, and while each party might be favored to hold the congressional chamber it now controls, neither advantage is impregnable.

→ Brace yourself and read this full analysis.

(Bruce Bisping / Getty)

3. “He is a decent stand-in for what you might call evangelicalism’s silent majority.”

That’s Emma Green on Leith Anderson, one of the most influential evangelical leaders in America. Before the recent uproar around Christianity Today’s viral editorial calling for President Donald Trump’s removal, Emma had sat down with Anderson in New York for a conversation about evangelicalism is headed today.

Leith Anderson: I feel a pressure to portray evangelicals in terms of faith and beliefs. There’s something like 2,000 verses in the Bible that talk about the poor and the widow and the orphan and the homeless and the hungry. To me, that transcends politics. That’s what we believe, and that’s what we’ve got to do.

Or immigrants. With all the teachings in the Bible about the way you treat the stranger and the immigrant, have we taken strong positions on immigration reform and Dreamers? Yeah, we have. But I don’t see it driven primarily by current political issues. I see it driven primarily by what the Bible says.

→ Read the rest of the interview.

« WEEKEND READ »

(Getty / New York Daily New Archive)

Don’t kid yourself; we’re still in the 2000s. Amanda Mull is here with a sharp end-of-decade rumination that’s also a whirlwind cultural tour of the last two decades.

The year 2001 was when many things broke. Financially, that was the year the American mortgage began showing signs of trouble. In the four years that followed, home-equity extraction in the country would more than double as people took out more loans. From 2001 to 2007, American mortgage debt would also double.

Culturally, the popularity of the first season of Survivor, which ended in the fall of 2000, pushed scores of reality shows into production the following year—and pushed American television off the reality-TV cliff, creating the initial conditions for how American fame would fundamentally change in the next 20 years. The first season of The Bachelor, for example, debuted in early 2002.

→ H ere’s why our collective sense of time has become so scrambled.

Today’s newsletter was written by Saahil Desai, an associate editor on our Politics team, and Shan Wang, who oversees newsletters. You can reply directly to this newsletter with questions or comments, or send a note to politicsdaily@theatlantic.com.

Your support makes our journalism possible. Subscribe here.

The Atlantic Politics Daily: What Separates the Left From the Left

2019-12-12T09:00:00-05:00

It’s Thursday, December 12. House Judiciary Committee members continued to spar over final tweaks to the articles of impeachment, moving closer to a final vote.

In today’s newsletter: To the left of the left. Plus, Anne Applebaum on the false romance of Russia.

« TODAY IN POLITICS »

(JOSE LUIS MAGANA / AP)

To the Left of the Left

The left knows it wants to kick President Donald Trump out of the White House come Election Day. Beyond that, agreement ends. My colleague Derek Thompson has argued that the ideological split within the Democratic Party is generational: Younger voters lean far to the left of their older counterparts.

These younger Americans—facing student debt and dreary prospects when it comes to home ownership—are driving a surge in socialism*. (The number of dues-paying members of the Democratic Socialists of America has increased more than ten-fold since 2016; my colleague Elaine Godfrey has a great profile of the flourishing DSA in Iowa.)

The food fight within the Democratic Party is playing out on all sorts of issues:

1. On impeachment: House Democrats are on the verge of impeaching Trump. It’s what progressives have wanted for a while, so are they thrilled about it? Not so much. Elaine took the temperature.

2. On health care: Support for Medicare for All is a clear dividing line. My colleague Olga Khazan offers this fascinating piece on how the ideas around single-payer somehow turned into a more mainstream Democratic rallying cry.

3. On soaking the rich: Most Democrats in the 2020 race want to raise taxes in the name of tamping down on inequality, but the party’s left-most candidates are taking it a step further by proposing radical overhauls of the tax code. Senator Elizabeth Warren’s signature wealth tax has turned into a campaign chant and even a Halloween costume.

4. On climate-change policy: The Green New Deal has become the go-to climate policy in certain corners of the left. While conservatives, and some Democrats, have denounced it as an incoherent wish list of socialist climate goals, my colleague Robinson Meyer argues that the ideas animating the GND have deeper American roots than some of its detractors would have you believe.

—Saahil Desai

« SNAPSHOT »

(Michael Owen Baker / AP)

Throughout the final month of 2019, our photo editor Alan Taylor is reviewing some of the major news events and moments from the past year.

In the photograph above, Jerry Rowe uses a garden hose to save his home on Beaufait Avenue in Granada Hills, California, during the wildfires that tore through large swaths of California in October.

See more photographs chosen by Alan here.

« IDEAS AND ARGUMENTS »

(Lloyd Mitchell / Reuters)

1. “The events in Jersey City are more complex than the exclusively structural theory of racism can accommodate.”

In the aftermath of Tuesday’s Jersey City shooting—which authorities are now investigating as domestic terrorism—Yascha Mounk writes:

In most important areas of American life, Jews now tend to face fewer disadvantages or forms of discrimination than members of many other ethnic or religious groups do. At the same time, they continue to attract the dedicated hatred of a small minority of the American population, and this does—especially if they can readily be identified as Jews—at times put them in serious physical danger.

This complexity defies how many powerful people—including a large number of left-leaning journalists and policy makers—perceive the world. For some, matters of racism or privilege are always and exclusively structural.

Read the rest.

2. “What are Jews? Members of a religious group? A race or an ethnicity? A nation? Some mixture of them all, or something else entirely?”

These have always been fraught questions—perhaps more so in the recent climate of fear for many American Jews.

A new executive order from the Trump administration purporting to focus on protecting Jews from anti-Semitic discrimination triggered more confusion and anxiety within the Jewish community.

The legal scholar David Schraub elucidates the bind:

Jews are being baited into taking a very dangerous position here—insisting that we must withdraw from the protection of antidiscrimination law, because it might obliquely confirm the anti-Semite’s suspicion that the Jew is different.

Read the rest of the argument.

« EVENING READ »

(JERRY COOKE / CORBIS VIA GETTY)

To Russia, With Love

Our staff writer Anne Applebaum sounds the alarm about a worrying tendency she’s seeing from American conservatives:

...[I]n the 21st century, we must also contend with a new phenomenon: right-wing intellectuals, now deeply critical of their own societies, who have begun paying court to right-wing dictators who dislike America. And their motives are curiously familiar.

Read the rest of the essay.

Today’s newsletter was written by Saahil Desai and edited by Shan Wang. You can reply directly to this newsletter with questions or comments, or send a note to politicsdaily@theatlantic.com.

Your support makes our journalism possible. Subscribe here.