"We’re witnessing a murder. Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner of The Washington Post, and Will Lewis, the publisher he appointed at the end of 2023, are embarking on the latest step of their plan to kill everything that makes the paper special." www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...

"Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism."--Carl Jung www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...

Why, yet thy scandal were not wip’d away

Governor Tim Walz: “I mean, is this a Fort Sumter? It’s a physical assault. It’s an armed force that’s assaulting, that’s killing my constituents, my citizens.” www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...

"Trump is taking the country on a path to tyranny. The first obligation for each of us is to see it and name it. The next is to figure out what to do about it." www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

"The United States, once the world’s exemplary liberal democracy, is now a hybrid state combining a fascist leader and a liberal Constitution; but no, it has not fallen to fascism. And it will not." www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

"Apparently, the federal boot heel is now colorblind, one of the Trump administration’s more notable anti-DEI achievements." www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026...

"The message the Trump administration is sending is not subtle: ICE is doing the work of God. The brutal and sometimes lethal tactics being used by...ICE agents are divinely sanctioned. Come join this holy campaign. Leni Riefenstahl would have approved." www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

“In normal liberal democracy terms, the United States is in bad shape,” the international-relations scholar Nicholas Grossman wrote recently. But, he went on, considering that the country is struggling against an attempted authoritarian takeover, “we’re doing pretty well.”

"Early in 2025, scholars were horrified by how forcefully Trump appeared to be speeding through the process of establishing authoritarian rule—faster than almost any contemporary dictator. It turns out that there might be a reason other rulers moved more slowly" www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

"For Trump, foreign policy is a game of checkers...played one move at a time. The notion of reputational damage is alien to someone whose image was long ago tarnished beyond repair by grifting, lying, bullying, and double-dealing." www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

"Americans are entering the most dangerous world they have known since World War II, one that will make the Cold War look like child’s play and the post–Cold War world like paradise." www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

"Donald Trump now genuinely lives in a different reality, one in which neither grammar nor history nor the normal rules of human interaction now affect him. Also, he really is maniacally, unhealthily obsessive about the Nobel Prize." www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

"A person can support trans civil rights with their whole heart and favor open competition for children yet also wonder whether athletes should compete in their birth category..for fear that a meaningful number of women may be harmed by transgender inclusion." www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026...

"It’s hard to imagine a starker violation of academic freedom than forbidding students to read one of the most famous texts in all of Western philosophy. 'Your decision to bar a philosophy professor from teaching Plato is unprecedented,' Peterson protested." www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

"For Natives, it is enraging that, now that being Indian finally has significant, remunerative opportunities attached to it, imposters have swooped in to take what is—by blood, history, and suffering—rightfully ours." www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

"The White House, after months of struggle, believes that it has found its footing again. Trump, though never restrained, is now pure id, acting on impulse and goaded on by advisers who see an opportunity to further expand executive power." www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...

"Trump’s clumsy legal intimidation of Powell mirrors tactics used by regimes such as those of Argentina, Russia, Turkey, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe. This is not a list of the most prosperous economies in the modern world." www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

"The ICE agent who killed Good is Trump’s second-term Kyle Rittenhouse." www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...

Before you dig into the news about how Trump is pursuing a politically motivated "investigation" into Fed Chair Jerome Powell for choosing to remain independent in his role, read this opener from The Atlantic on Hitler's initial takeover. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

"Will no one rid me of this troublesome central banker?"

Uncanny is right

Re-upped from July. Once again, those who ignore history are destined to repeat it.

"Luther informed Hitler in no uncertain terms that the Reichsbank was not part of his revolution. It was an independent fiscal entity with an international board of directors." (The parallels here to Trump vs Powell are uncanny--almost too on-the-nose, really.) www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

This piece by the incomparable Alexandra Petri is brilliant and hilarious. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

"Administration officials’ indifference to facts, to due process, to the dignity of the deceased, and to basic human decency is remarkable." www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

"President Donald Trump and his advisers have thrown out numerous justifications for seizing the Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro and his wife and bringing them to New York for trial. None of them makes sense." www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

"Books were restorative, bringers of joy as well as knowledge....Though book collecting is often a solitary activity, I came to see that gathering so many voices and far-flung volumes into a unified collection is 'a way to heal the world one book at a time.”'" www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

An important and instructive article by Jeffrey Goldberg. Read it to recall how you felt watching the January 6th assault on the Capitol, and to rise up from the stupor of the shock-overload we've all been living with this past year, beginning with Trump's pardoning of all the convicted rioters.

"Even when weighed against this stunning record of degeneracy, the pardoning by Trump of his cop-beating foot soldiers represents the lowest moment of this presidency so far, because it was an act not only of naked despotism but also of outlandish hypocrisy." www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

"Newsom has thought deeply about the history and future of the Democratic Party. He has referred to himself as a 'Sargent Shriver Democrat,' after the architect of the War on Poverty and the founding director of the Peace Corps." www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...

www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202... The triumph of indecency

Donald Trump wants you to forget this ever happened. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

“'We do need Greenland, absolutely'”--Donald Trump to @michaelscherer.bsky.social this morning, before the president's morning round of golf. www.theatlantic.com/national-sec...

"Over Trump’s first year in power, the price of cocaine in the United States has dropped steeply, the one price Trump has reduced." www.theatlantic.com/internationa...

"A platitude is a placebo for the mind; an aphorism is a wake-up call." www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

"Literature doesn’t make you a better citizen or a more successful person. A passion for reading can even make life more difficult." www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

"The veneer of civilization is always thin, even at Costco, as one is reminded before major holidays, or in the vicinity of the samples." www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/...

"On Sunday, J. D. Vance was presented with the simplest moral test: denounce commentators who traffic in medieval blood libels, who deny the Holocaust, and who endlessly harp on evil Jewish cabals." He failed. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

"Donald Trump’s appetite for flattery appears as insatiable as the supply of bootlickers among his followers appears inexhaustible." www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

For 20 minutes, Americans watched Donald Trump address the nation, “drenched in pure panic as he tried to bully an entire nation into admitting he’s doing a great job,” @radiofreetom.bsky.social argues: theatln.tc/Du4KkLTo

"One of the minor annoyances of being an incorrigible pervert is that you risk having your own bookshelf testify against you." www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

"I can only imagine America’s enemies in Moscow and Beijing and Tehran smiling with pleasure as they watched a president losing his bearings, berating his own people, and demanding that they absolve him of any blame when things get worse." www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

"Trump’s malignant narcissism is the most essential thing to understand about him. Heraclitus taught that character is destiny. In Trump’s case, his sociopathy is destiny." www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...

Grade inflation and the rise of AI are making it impossible for employers to evaluate recent graduates. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

"In moments when the country looks up for orientation, Trump does not steady the room. He destabilizes it. He does not merely break norms; he erodes the conditions that make shared meaning possible. " www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

"This National Security Strategy is not really a strategy document. It is a suicide note. If the ideas within it are really used to shape policy, then U.S. influence in the world will rapidly disappear, and America’s ability to defend itself will diminish." www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

"If 'Trump Derangement Syndrome' is the tendency to become irrationally obsessed with Donald Trump and project that obsession onto everyone else, then somebody is indeed deranged, and it wasn’t Rob Reiner." www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/...

Lessons on happiness from a saint who advocated executing heretics by burning them alive. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

"Why does a night that should be Donald Trump’s greatest triumph feel so much like he revived the Honors from the Pet Sematary?" www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/...