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/...

"The Pentagon’s top watchdog has concluded that the information Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared in the chat could have put the mission, U.S. personnel, and national security at risk had it fallen into the wrong hands." www.theatlantic.com/national-sec...

"Formal power and personal incompetence." I'd like to write as pointedly well as Tom Nichols. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

Early-career journalists: @theatlantic.com's amazing fellowship program will be back starting in 2026! Apply now!! www.theatlantic.com/careers#open...

"The dramatic arc of the work teaches us to resist any totalizing doctrine promising a utopian future." www.theatlantic.com/culture/2025...

"Journalists obviously shouldn’t sleep with their sources, although luckily most of us are so hideous, the subject simply doesn’t arise." www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

"Hegseth is unqualified and incompetent, and he should have been fired months ago." www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

"This morning, I went whale watching, and the guide recommended that we 'keep our eyes on the horizon and look for blow.' (This is also a good way to find RFK Jr.)" www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

"If there was a single way to describe Trump’s institutional targets in the first year of his second term, it might be 'David Rubenstein’s Rolodex.' What had long been Rubenstein’s instrument of immense power and influence is now a liability." www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...

"There are costs to performatively deploying members of the military—one of which is the risk of endangering them." www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

"Whatever the reason, Witkoff is prolonging the conflict. He is not promoting peace....If this were a normal American administration, he would be fired immediately. But nothing about this negotiation, or this administration, is normal at all." www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

Sen. Mark Kelly: “I’m not backing down. I’m not shutting up. If somebody in my situation was to do that, what is the message that sends to not only service members but government employees?How about to just U.S. citizens about what our First Amendment rights are?” www.theatlantic.com/national-sec...

"In a more sensible and serious world (and, yes, I know this is not the one we live in right now), Hegseth would be fired—and Kelly would take Hegseth’s job as secretary of defense." www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

"Trump's demand to punish anybody who merely endorses the Constitution vindicates the charge that he is the document’s greatest enemy." www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

2/ so many gutting moment but this was among the first, from one of the world’s leading scientists on vaccines and immunology:

"Kennedy is a 'liar' and a 'terrible human being,' Paul Offit told me. 'If he has data showing he’s right, then fucking publish it. He can’t, because he doesn’t have those data.'" www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

"The Trump era, at its core, is the product of the replacement of thinking with propaganda. Trump demands a kind of mindless loyalty because he’s not only impulsive, inconsistent, and petty, but also a compulsive liar." www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

1/ This is a devastatingly good article on RFK Jr by @michaelscherer.bsky.social. Even if you’re someone, like me, who has followed this arc and his devastating impact on public health, it’s a must read. Gift link: www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

"Kennedy is a 'liar' and a 'terrible human being,' Paul Offit told me. 'If he has data showing he’s right, then fucking publish it. He can’t, because he doesn’t have those data.'" www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

"Such a movement might begin with Plato, but it will inevitably lead to Nick Fuentes." www.theatlantic.com/books/2025/1...

This part from a new profile on RFK Jr. tells you everything you need to know about him. And a reminder that Cassidy voted to confirm Kennedy. Full Story: bit.ly/49DjOnu

"He suggested that he regretted agreeing to talk with me, and compared our relationship to the fable of the scorpion who asks the frog for help crossing a river, only to sting and kill the frog after it does." www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

“'Will I see dinosaurs?' Kennedy told me he asked the person offering him the LSD. 'I had a deep interest in paleontology,' he explained to me. That was perhaps the first time this particular reason has ever been given for deciding to take psychedelics." www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

"Kennedy is a 'liar' and a 'terrible human being,' Paul Offit told me. 'If he has data showing he’s right, then fucking publish it. He can’t, because he doesn’t have those data.'" www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

Over many interviews, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told Michael Scherer about how he plans to remake America’s public-health system. Can he lead the scientific establishment he’s spent much of his life crusading against? Read more in our new cover story:

This story alone may have completely justified my annual subscription

Thirty years ago, we launched theatlantic.com—before the New York Times or the Washington Post had websites. And, yes, we really did use **HTML for Dummies** to learn coding and we looked into having monks digitize our archive.www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/...re

"Trump has proved himself time and again to be entirely self-seeking, totally amoral, cruel by nature, and impossibly fragile. And the rewards he’s gained in the process have emboldened others to be just as unabashedly themselves as he is." www.theatlantic.com/culture/2025...

"A set piece in which the bad guy, under suspicion of misogynistic conduct and consorting with a trafficker of teenage girls, launches a sexist attack on an inquisitive female journalist would be too ham-handed even for the writers at the Hallmark Channel." www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

Josh really doesn't get enough credit as a digital journalism pioneer — and as an entrepreneur who built something meaningful and lasting.

"All of the best parts everyone would have loved were cut by my psychotic editor... I’m not worried about him reading these words, because a low-class butcher like that doesn’t possess enough humanity to subscribe to The Atlantic" www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

"Moral clarity is perishable and—at least in practice— subjective. Many of the protesters who assaulted police officers in the summer of 2020, for example, did so with the same ethical certitude as those who stormed the Capitol in January 2021." www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

"If you fear your country is slipping toward authoritarianism, isn’t sacrificing your late-night Subway snack the least you should do?" www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...

“'Trump’s Superman mythology just had 100 pounds of kryptonite shoved down its throat.'” www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...

"McGuane also reminded me that Hemingway was, to put it politely, a complicated personality, a domineering figure prone to brawling, affairs, and cask-strength egoism. 'Until Bill Belichick came along, I can’t think of anybody more disagreeable.'" www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...

This story is *really* that good www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

I've been an editor for more than three decades. Of the thousands of pieces I've worked on during that time, this one is among the most astonishing. Please read. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

An excerpt from the forthcoming novel by George Packer, our American Orwell. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

I've been an editor for more than three decades. Of the thousands of pieces I've worked on during that time, this one is among the most astonishing. Please read. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

"A curtain of darkness is settling over our nation. And it’s getting ever harder to avoid connecting the authoritarian dots." www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc...

"For the right, now in power, the abandonment of the American idea is license to build an authoritarian regime. The left, having spent decades proving that the idea is a sham, can hardly protest its dismantling." www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...