The Atlantic

In 1892, the French sculptor Camille Claudel applied to France’s Ministry of Fine Arts for a block of marble. As was customary, the ministry sent an inspector to decide whether her planned work was worth the state’s support. Her plaster model, showin

IBM is one of the oldest technology companies in the world, with a raft of innovations to its credit, including mainframe computing, computer-programming languages, and AI-powered tools. But ask an ordinary person under the age of 40 what exactly IBM

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024. The president of the United States cannot control the trajectory of a hurricane, but he can—we learned in 2019—force the N

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. Political partisans are always dreaming of final victories. Each election raises the hope of realignment—a convergence of issues and demographics and personalit

The Ukrainian writer Tanja Maljartschuk’s novel Forgottenness broods upon what I’d call zombie history. There are other terms for inherited memory of catastrophic events experienced by one’s forebears, such as intergenerational transmission of trauma

The video that ushered Saturday Night Live into the digital era barely made it to television, and when it did, it was largely ignored. It’s a heartfelt conversation between two friends (played by Andy Samberg and Will Forte) about a recent tragic los

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024. This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. In the last spring of the Obama

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024. There were times, during the first two years of the Biden presidency, when I came close to forgetting about it all: the ta

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024. If Donald Trump wins the next election, he will attempt to turn the men and women of the United States armed forces into p

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024. In late 2020, even as the instigators of insurrection were marshaling their followers to travel to Washington, D.C., anoth

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024. “We pledge to you that we will root out the Communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical-left thugs that live like verm

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024. The Trump years had a radicalizing effect on the American right. But, let’s be honest, they also sent many on the left com

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024. During his term in the White House, Donald Trump governed as a wartime president—with blue America, rather than any foreig

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024. This past fall, in a small southern foundry, Robert E. Lee’s face was placed on a furnace that reached a temperature of mo

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024. “I have a gut,” Donald Trump announced in 2018, “and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tel

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024. The year 2022 was a triumphant one for the anti-abortion movement. After half a century, the Supreme Court did what had on

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024. Thanks to Donald Trump’s presidential term, the conservative legal movement has been able to realize some of its wildest d

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024. Until the very end of his presidency, Donald Trump’s cultivation of the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and other violent fa

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024. After four years of Joe Biden, China’s leaders would likely be relieved to have Donald Trump back in the White House. Comp

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024. In the annals of government ethics, the year 2017 exists in a bygone era. That September, Donald Trump’s secretary of heal

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024. Strange as this might be to say of the only American president found legally liable for sexual abuse, the only leader of t

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024. The relationship between Donald Trump and the news media has always been a little disingenuous, like a pair of fighters tr

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024. On the last Saturday before Donald Trump took office, in January 2017, I watched the controlled chaos of a hackathon unfol

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024. If Donald Trump regains the presidency, he will once again become the chief law-enforcement officer of the United States.

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024. When Donald Trump first took office, he put a premium on what he called “central casting” hires—people with impressive rés

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024. Almost as soon as Donald Trump took office in 2017, agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement were dispatched across

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024. “I don’t give a shit about NATO.” Thus did former President Donald Trump once express his feelings about America’s oldest

In the November 2023 issue, Jeffrey Goldberg considered what a general ought to do when the commander in chief undermines the Constitution. I am a lifelong Republican voter. The Lafayette Square incident described in Jeffrey Goldberg’s article convin

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024. For all its marvelous creativity, the human imagination often fails when turned to the future. It is blunted, perhaps, by

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024. Like many reporters, I’ve been operating in Casaubon mode for much of the past eight years, searching for the key to Donal

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024. After decades of gains in public acceptance, the LGBTQ community is confronting a climate in which political leaders are o