June 2023

The Atlantic

Since 1857, The Atlantic has shaped the national debate on politics, business, foreign affairs, and cultural trends.

The Atlantic22 min read
The Outer Limits of Liberalism
Illustrations by Vartika Sharma In October of 1858, John Stuart Mill and his wife, Harriet, were traveling near Avignon, France. She developed a cough, which seemed like just a minor inconvenience, until it got worse. Soon Harriet was racked with pai
The Atlantic11 min read
Writing In The Ruins
The German writer Jenny Erpenbeck cuts through dogma, fractures time, and preserves rubble.
The Atlantic2 min read
An Ode to Writing Odes
This wasn’t my idea. When my Atlantic editors, back in the sweet, untroubled summer of 2019, took me out to lunch and suggested that I start doing something regularly on the inside back page of the magazine, I said: “Sure thing. Why don’t we call it
The Atlantic3 min read
War and Consequences
In her book Gulag: A History, Anne Applebaum writes, “The more we are able to understand how different societies have transformed their neighbors and fellow citizens from people into objects, the more we know of the specific circumstances which led t
The Atlantic9 min read
Surrender to Steely Dan
How the insufferably perfectionist duo captured the hearts of a new generation of listeners
The Atlantic9 min read
Who Was Cleopatra’s Daughter?
Hovering in the background of ancient history’s headlines is King Juba II—writer, explorer, and ruler of Mauretania, the Roman satellite kingdom in North Africa, for almost 50 years until his death in the early 20s A.D. His skin color is debated (was
The Atlantic18 min read
My Night in the Sistine Chapel
Photographs by Alex Majoli This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here. At the Vatican Museums, the nightly ritual
The Atlantic5 min read
Call Of The Wild
Overheard in the men’s bathroom of a movie theater in Boston, after a screening of Creed III: The mental stuff. That’s where it’s at. The mind, the mind—it can bear you sweetly along on pulses of transparent super-energy, or it can rear up and bite y
The Atlantic24 min read
How Tom Hanks Became Tom Hanks
The actor—and now novelist—reflects on how he got here, and the other lives he might have lived instead.
The Atlantic30 min read
The Billion-Dollar Ponzi Scheme That Hooked Warren Buffett and the U.S. Treasury
How a small-town auto mechanic peddling a green-energy breakthrough pulled off a massive scam
The Atlantic24 min readWorld
The Counteroffensive
The future of the democratic world will be determined by whether the Ukrainian military can break a stalemate with Russia and drive the country backwards—perhaps even out of Crimea for good.
The Atlantic11 min readIntelligence (AI) & Semantics
Never Give Artificial Intelligence the Nuclear Codes
No technology since the atomic bomb has inspired the apocalyptic imagination like artificial intelligence. Ever since ChatGPT began exhibiting glints of logical reasoning in November, the internet has been awash in doomsday scenarios. Many are self-c
The Atlantic5 min readPolitical Ideologies
‘Trumpism Is the Last Gasp of a Dying Culture of White Supremacy’
America faces a type of extremist violence it does not know how to stop, Adrienne LaFrance wrote in the April 2023 issue. Adrienne LaFrance acknowledges that political violence can have a legitimate place in a democratic society, noting that “America

The Atlantic

More Issues From The Atlantic