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14 hours ago

Without snow in the mountains, the places that depend on the West’s rivers will hurt for water. RJ Sangosti / The Denver Post / Getty If you are reading this on the East Coast, congratulations on the warmer weather you’re finally getting this week. It was cold and snowy for a while there. Here

Today’s Atlantic Trivia: Name That College Town

15 hours ago

Test your knowledge—and read our latest stories for a little extra help. Illustration by Sophy Hollington If you put any stock in the ability of IQ tests to assess intelligence, we humans have spent the past century steadily getting smarter. (And if you don’t put any stock in them, well, we hum

The Latest Ploy to Help Republicans Win Elections

15 hours ago

The SAVE Act, which would require that voters prove they are citizens, is a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times / Getty This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover ne

The End of Reagan-Era Republicanism

16 hours ago

Mona Charen on how Trump transformed the conservative movement and what the right got wrong. Plus: Signs of life from America’s guardrails and John Maynard Keynes’s “My Early Beliefs.” Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts On this week’s episode of T

The Worst-Case Future for White-Collar Workers

The well-off have no experience with the job market that might be coming. The Atlantic. Source: Dreamstime. This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. White-collar workers are getting nervous, with good reason. Sure, 98 percent of college grad

Europe and Canada Are Like the Kids in an Ugly Divorce

Europe and Canada seek “strategic balance” between Washington and Beijing but often just get caught in the middle. Suzanne Plunkett / WPA Pool / Getty Sign up for our newsletter about national security here. The urge to visit Beijing has gotten stronger lately among allies of the United St

The Harvard of the South … Of the West?

Elite universities are taking the concept of a satellite campus to its logical extreme. Illustration by The Atlantic Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, is the sort of highly selective institution that jockeys for the unofficial title of Harvard of the South. Recently, the university’s chancel

Hegseth’s Firing Campaign Reaches Down Into the Ranks

The ouster of the spokesperson Dave Butler, a colonel, shows that the defense secretary’s culling is far from over. Kevin Wolf / AP Sign up for our newsletter about national security here. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, in a Pentagon meeting last year, passed a note to Army Secretary Dan

Do Not Be Cynical About Jesse Jackson

He was never the caricature his critics wanted him to be. Jean Louis Atlan / Getty When I was growing up in Washington, D.C., in the 1990s, many businesses proudly kept in their windows signs from Jesse Jackson’s 1984 and ’88 presidential runs. He was a revered figure, someone people in D.C. we

Censorship Comes for Stephen Colbert

The latest dustup between the talk-show host and CBS should be concerning for people of any political leaning. Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Samuel Corum / Sipa USA / Reuters. This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day,

AI Agents Are Taking America by Storm

The post-chatbot era has begun. Illustration by Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic Americans are living in parallel AI universes. For much of the country, AI has come to mean ChatGPT, Google’s AI overviews, and the slop that now clogs social-media feeds. Meanwhile, tech hobbyists are becoming radic

An Olympic Trend That Defies Tradition

At Milan Cortina, every major sport category but ice hockey features men and women competing together. Owen Crandall / ISMF Olympic skimo is a spectacle. Appearing at the Games for the first time, skimo, short for ski mountaineering, grew from a long tradition of scaling mountains on skis—somet

The Republicans Made Peace With Science

The Trump administration’s hostility to science is real, but it isn’t matched by the rest of the GOP’s. Illustration by Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic Which political party provides more federal funding for science? Given climate-denial rhetoric, attacks on expertise, the size of government, an

Europe Has Received the Message

Without America to rely on, the EU is gearing up to be a global power in its own right. Tobias Schwarz / AFP / Getty The European Union is finally on its way to becoming a power in its own right. That’s not because its member countries have suddenly stopped squabbling or its bureaucratic inerti

American Kids Used to Eat Everything

Children in the 19th century happily consumed wild plants and organ meats. What happened? John Chillingworth / Hulton Archive / Getty The most striking passages in Picky, a forthcoming book by the historian Helen Zoe Veit, describe the way famous 19th-century American figures ate as children. I

The Commons: The Unfinished Revolution

Readers respond to our November 2025 issue. Joe McKendry The Unfinished Revolution The November 2025 issue examined the founding of the United States and brought the nation’s history to bear on its present—and its future. I look forward to the cover of each issue of The Atlantic as much

The Ghosts of Toni Morrison

In her novels, she located the missing stories of Black America. Jill Krementz “I don’t like erasures,” the novelist Toni Morrison told a Princeton audience in 2017. She had been asked what she thought about Confederate statues, then being torn down throughout the South. Leave them up, she said

No, It’s Not Back to Business as Usual

Marco Rubio was more civil than J. D. Vance had been, but the message to longtime allies was the same. Alex Brandon / AFP / Getty Sign up for our newsletter about national security here. Just like last year, I watched the most important American speech at the Munich Security Conference in

Marco Rubio’s Impressive Speech

The secretary of state sought not only to reassure but to rally Europeans. Alex Brandon / AFP / Getty Updated at 12:40 p.m. ET on February 17, 2026 As Cabinet members snarl at representatives and senators, and social media fills with semiliterate trolling and insults by public officials, w

A Different Kind of Leading Man

Robert Duvall could carry a film thunderously, yet also stand out in the subtlest of roles. Steve Double / Camera Press / Redux Robert Duvall didn’t speak a word in his first film performance. When he was cast as Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird, he was but an up-and-coming theater actor, an

A No-Name Director to Everyone but His 38 Million Fans

The debut film from one of YouTube’s most popular creators is a box-office hit, thanks to his subscribers. Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Alberto E. Rodriguez / Getty. At the box office earlier this month, four out of the five top-grossing movies were not from big companies. There was So

The Founders Would Have Opposed ‘Nationalizing’ Elections

The writers of the Constitution sought an approach that balanced control between the states and the federal government. Illustration by Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic* President Trump earlier this month repeated his call for the Republican Party to “nationalize” voting in the United States. “We

How Many Wolves Is Enough?

Now that thousands live in the United States, some people would like to kill more of them. Jason Connolly / AFP / Getty Updated at 10:02 a.m. ET on February 16, 2026 The wolves arrived in May of last year, just days after Paul Roen had driven his cattle back up to their summer pasture in N

Is Anything Morally Obvious Anymore?

The public reaction to the violence in Minneapolis suggests that we have held on to our sense of universal truths. Illustration by Paul Spella / The Atlantic; Sources: Getty. The Trump administration has backed down in Minnesota. Last week, Tom Homan, the border czar, announced that the surge o

The Disappointment of Young Trump Voters