CATEGORIES

The Demise of the "IBM Way"

The companys peculiar culture fueled its success, and eventually its fall from industry dominance.

Zombie History Stalks Ukraine

In a haunted novel, memories of a brutal past transform bodies as well as psyches.

The Bizarro Buddy Comedy of Please Don't Destroy

How SNUs video sketches spoof the rituals of male bonding

THIS IS WHO WE ARE

In the last spring of the Obama administration, Michelle Obama was delivering her final commencement address as first lady, at City College of New York.

THE PSYCHIC TOLL

There were times, during the first two years of the Biden presidency, when I came close to forgetting about it all: the taunts and the provocations; the incitements and the resentments; the disorchestrated reasoning; the verbal incontinence; the press conferences fueled by megalomania, vengeance, and a soupçon of hydroxychloroquine. I forgot, almost, that we'd had a man in the White House who governed by tweet.

THE LEFT CAN'T AFFORD TO GO MAD

The Trump years had a radicalizing effect on the American right. But, let's be honest, they also sent many on the left completely around the bend. Some liberals, particularly upper-middle-class white ones, cracked up because other people couldn't see what was obvious to them: that Trump was a bad candidate and an even worse president.

TRUMP WILL STOKE A GENDER PANIC

After decades of gains in public acceptance, the LGBTQ community is confronting a climate in which political leaders are once again calling them weirdos and predators.

CIVIL RIGHTS UNDONE

In late 2020, even as the instigators of insurrection were marshaling their followers to travel to Washington, D.C., another kind of coup-a quieter onewas in the works. On December 21, in one of his departing acts as attorney general, Bill Barr submitted a proposed rule change to the White House. The change would eliminate the venerable standard used by the Justice Department to handle discrimination cases, known as \"disparate impact.\"

A WAR ON BLUE AMERICA

During his term in the White House, Donald Trump governed as a wartime president with blue America, rather than any foreign country, as the adversary. He sought to use national authority to achieve factional ends to impose the priorities of red America onto Democratic-leaning states and cities. The agenda Trump has laid out for a second term makes clear that those bruising and divisive efforts were only preliminary skirmishes.

TRUMP WILL SUPPRESS AMERICAN HISTORY

This past fall, in a small southern foundry, Robert E. Lee's face was placed on a furnace that reached a temperature of more than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. As the heat mounted, a haunting orange-red glow appeared across Lee's severed visage, and the cracks that split his bronze cheeks began to look like streams of dark tears beneath his eyes.

THE TRUTH WON'T MATTER

\"I have a gut,\" Donald Trump announced in 2018, \"and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else's brain can ever tell me.\" The president's gut would go on to inform him that climate change is partisan propaganda; that COVID-19 might be cured through the injection of bleach; that any election that fails to produce a Trump victory must be rigged.

EXTREMISTS EMBOLDENED

Until the very end of his presidency, Donald Trump's cultivation of the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and other violent far-right groups was usually implicit. He counted on their political support but stopped short of asking them to do anything.

A MAGA JUDICIARY

Thanks to Donald Trump's presidential term, the conservative legal movement has been able to realize some of its wildest dreams: overturning the constitutional right to an abortion, ending affirmative action in college admissions, and potentially making most state-level firearm restrictions presumptively unconstitutional.

CHINA WILL GET STRONGER

After four years of Joe Biden, China's leaders would likely be relieved to have Donald Trump back in the White House.

The Revenge Presidency

For all its marvelous creativity, the human imagination often fails when turned to the future. It is blunted, perhaps, by a craving for the familiar.

IS JOURNALISM READY?

The relationship between Donald Trump and the news media has always been a little disingenuous, like a pair of fighters trading insults and throwing air punches at a weigh-in. The hostility is real, but the performance benefits both sides.

WOMEN WILL BE TARGETS

Strange as this might be to say of the only American president found legally liable for sexual abuse, the only leader of the free world accused of dangling a TV gig in front of a porn performer seemingly as an enticement for sex, the only commander in chief to publicly denigrate the sexual attractiveness of both Heidi Klum (\"no longer a 10\") and Angelina Jolie (\"not a great beauty\"), I don't believe Donald Trump hates women. Not by default, anyway. \"When it comes to the women who are not only dutifully but lovingly catering to his desires,\" the philosopher Kate Manne wrote in her 2017 book, Down Girl, \"what's to hate?\"

TRUMP WILL GET AWAY WITH IT

If Donald Trump regains the presidency, he will once again become the chief law-enforcement officer of the United States. There may be no American leader less suited to \"take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,\" as the Constitution directs the president. But that authority comes with the office, including command of the Justice Department and the FBI.

THE SPECTER OF FAMILY SEPARATION

Almost as soon as Donald Trump took office in 2017, agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement were dispatched across the country to round up as many undocumented foreigners as possible, and the travel ban put into limbo the livelihoods of thousands of people from majority-Muslim countries who had won the hard-fought right to be here-refugees, tech entrepreneurs, and university professors among them.

LOYALISTS, LAPDOGS, AND CRONIES

When Donald Trump first took office, he put a premium on what he called \"central casting\" hires-people with impressive résumés who matched his image of an ideal administration official. Yes, he brought along his share of Steve Bannons and Michael Flynns. But there was also James Mattis, the decorated four-star general who took over the Defense Department, and Gary Cohn, the Goldman Sachs chief operating officer who was appointed head of the National Economic Council, and Rex Tillerson, who left one of the world's most profitable international conglomerates to become secretary of state.

Kennedy and the Lost Cause

In his 1956 book, Profiles in Courage, the future president promoted the southern mythology of Reconstruction. One Massachusetts grandmother wasn't having it.

The Black Roots of American Education

How freedpeople and their advocates persuaded the nation to embrace public schooling for all

A Traitor to the Traitors

The Confederate general James Longstreet became a champion of Reconstruction. Why?

The Men Who Started the War

John Brown and the Secret Six-the abolitionists who funded the raid on Harpers Ferryconfronted a question as old as America: When is violence justified?

The Years of Jubilee

In 1871, the choir of the struggling Fisk University engaged in a gambit to save the school: It decided to go on a singing tour of America. The choir achieved more than its members could have imagined.

The Annotated Frederick Douglass

In 1866, the famous abolitionist laid out his vision for radically reshaping America in the pages of The Atlantic.

The Archive of Emancipation

In the papers of the Freedmen's Bureau, I found the hopes and disappointments of a people on the cusp of freedom-including my own family's.

The Atlantic and Reconstruction

What we got wrong in 1901

The Revolution Never Ended

The federal government abandoned Reconstruction in 1877, but Black people didn't give up on the moment's promise.

The Questions That Most Need Asking

“Reconstruction,” by Frederick Douglass, appeared in the December 1866 issue of this magazine. It was the most important article that The Atlantic published in the immediate postwar era. It was also, for its time, unusually concise, coming in at a mere 2,703 words.