The Atlantic

Many modern daters seem to have the same complaint: water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink.

Watching Musk can feel a bit like staring into the sun—uncomfortable and unpleasant, given that the new documentary is almost four hours long and is filled with distressing footage of the richest man in the world.

In the popular imagination, religious faith and a thriving sex life don’t tend to go together.

Among the many reckonings sparked after the rapper Macklemore was booted from Ed Sheeran’s tour earlier this month, one of the more amusing ones has been about taste.

When U.S. forces launched air strikes against the Houthis in March 2025, Michael Waltz, then the national security adviser, celebrated in a Signal text chat with other senior Trump-administration officials (and the editor in chief of this magazine) by pos…

Ever since Jacob Coxon, a researcher at Anthropic, announced on X that he was resigning because “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” Americans have become preoccupied with the apocalypse.

The campaign-style ad starts with grainy video footage of President Trump, followed by a clearer look at his red-bathed profile, as his voice promises: “Together we will defeat communism, socialism, and Marxism in America.”

State visits are a normal and necessary part of diplomacy.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture.

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

In February 2024, according to a former staff member who told the story to The New York Times, Representative Mary Peltola, an Alaska Democrat running for the Senate, pushed an aide.

Before this week, I’d never watched an episode of Fauda, the Israeli-made, Netflix-distributed counterterrorism thriller.

Every parent can empathize with the wrenching, humiliating experience of trying to do what’s best while only making things worse.

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts Since he left Google in 2023, Geoffrey Hinton, a Nobel laureate commonly recognized as the “Godfather of AI,” is perhaps best known for his dire warnings about the technology he…

Nearly seven months in, the war in Iran seems nowhere close to a conclusion.

The 747 slowly wheeled to a stop last night on the tarmac of Joint Base Andrews, just outside Washington.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture.

AI is everywhere in China.

Food is like dance: a language, but not one you’d want to use in an emergency.

Donald Trump offered perhaps the clearest summation yet of his worldview in an otherwise discursive address to the United Nations General Assembly yesterday.

When CNN’s Kaitlan Collins approached President Trump with a question about the Iran war at the United Nations General Assembly yesterday, the president scolded her for being there at all.

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube In this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with his reaction to the shooting at the Sons of Jacob Synagogue in Ontario on Yom Kippur.

Many enthusiastic readers have a personal canon—a unique collection of books they return to for pleasure, edification, or escape.

“My love is not for places or for lands.

Once Upon a Time in the Middle East, a movie that premiered in China last month and is coming to the United States in October, is about a Chinese chef who moves to the Middle East to find work, only to become a savior for the locals amid the chaos of an A…

Since before he could even talk, I’ve been worrying about where to send my son to school.

When Annie Dillard decided to write what would become her 1974 nonfiction book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, she noted in her journal that she saw in her material the potential for two distinct works: one that was a close observation of the natural world, and…

In late June 2021, the ghost of summertime future visited the Pacific Northwest.

Of all the outside advisers urging President Trump to seize control of federal elections this fall, the attorney Peter Ticktin can claim the deepest ties; the two men went to military school together as teenagers.

Good news!

If you were a Russian intelligence operative trying to penetrate the American president’s inner circle, you could hardly have done much better than Umar Kremlev did last May.

Eighteen months ago, David Ellison was mostly known as an ATM for Hollywood producers seeking to pad out budgets for dad-core flicks such as Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, and Transformers: Rise of the Beasts.

Of all the outrages and betrayals that Donald Trump has had perpetrated against him—by ungrateful subordinates, by obstreperous prosecutors, by treacherous journalists—perhaps his saddest falling-out is with a simple word.

If a dating app had existed in the 1950s, you might have expected it to look like Upward.

The ICE officer who shot a Venezuelan man last weekend in Austin, Texas, was a recent hire who was not wearing his body camera, three officials at the Department of Homeland Security with knowledge of the incident told me.

© Paula Czaeczine / Bird Photographer of the Year Acrobat of the Skies.

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts It’s a big week on the global stage.

On October 13 of last year, Hamas released its last living Israeli hostages—20 Jews in various states of disrepair.

In 1917, as Canadian troops fought at Vimy Ridge in northern France, Lieutenant Leslie Miller collected acorns from the battlefield and carried them home to Ontario.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture.

In the spring of 2023, a young Black man stepped onto a subway car in Manhattan.

Javier Torres / AFP / Getty An aerial view of patches of blooming wildflowers in the Atacama Desert near Copiapó, Chile, seen on September 18, 2026 Javier Torres / AFP / Getty People look at a carpet of flowers blooming in the Atacama Desert on September…

J.

Illustrations by Hélène Blanc When I was 20 years old, I started to sense a hole inside me.

When Christina Kattula, a 31-year-old yoga teacher in Michigan, was ready to start a family in 2024, she hoped for a son.

Donald Trump has reacted to terrifying calls for regulation from inside the AI industry with predictable skepticism—insisting, questionably, that the solution requires nothing more than having a “High IQ” president, and further asserting, even more questi…

Ghostbusters is a movie about friendship and slime and the specific melting point of giant marshmallows—which makes it easy to forget that it’s also a movie about regulation.

Timothy Paustian has tried everything to stop his students from writing essays with AI.

Photographs by Christopher Gregory-Rivera The message from U.S.

During the 2003 Iraq War, then–Major General David Petraeus famously said to the journalist and historian Rick Atkinson, “Tell me how this ends.”