The Atlantic

A year after the insurrection, I’m trying to imagine the death of American democracy. It’s somehow easier to picture the Earth blasted and bleached by global warming, or the human brain overtaken by the tyranny of artificial intelligence, than to for

In October of 1860, The Atlantic’s first editor, James Russell Lowell, wrote of Abraham Lincoln that he “had experience enough in public affairs to make him a statesman, and not enough to make him a politician.” Lowell, in his endorsement, was mainly

January 6 was practice. Donald Trump’s GOP is much better positioned to subvert the next election.

To support the Republican narrative that our elections are rife with misconduct, someone needs to take the fall.

Illustrations by Vanessa Saba A poster in the window of Cahoots Corner Cafe—great potatoes, good coffee—advertised a family event at the Oakdale, California, rodeo grounds. There would be food trucks, carnival games, live music, a raffle, and the opp

After January 6, Peter Meijer thought he could help lead the Republican Party away from an abyss. Now he laughs at his own naïveté.

In November, McKay Coppins wrote about Alden Global Capital, the secretive hedge fund gutting newsrooms and damaging democracy. I’m from Chicago originally and still a close reader of the Tribune. It’s astonishing how bad things have gotten for a onc

Cast into political exile, and into darkness by his failing eyesight, John Milton was determined to accomplish “things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.”

Hanya Yanagihara’s new novel tweaks American history and traces the disorienting consequences.

In January 1972, when I was a 13-year-old boy in Dublin, my father came home from work and told us to prepare for civil war. He was not a bloodthirsty zealot, nor was he given to hysterical outbursts. He was calm and rueful, but also grimly certain:

If I’m honest, a foal pulled chest-level close in the spring heat, his every-which-way coat reverberating in the wind, feels akin to what I imagine atonement might feel like, or total absolution. But what if, by some fluke in the heart, an inevitable

In 2010, things started going wrong at the steel plant in Warren, Ohio, a Rust Belt town that went on to cast its votes twice for Donald Trump. A cooling panel started leaking, and the furnace operator didn’t see the leak in time; the water hit molte

The rich philosophical tradition I fell in love with has been reduced to Fox News and voter suppression.

“Pretty good nose you got there! You do much fighting with that nose?” New Orleans, 1989. I’m standing on a balcony south of the Garden District, and a man—a stranger—is hailing me from the street. He looks like Paul Newman, if Paul Newman were an al