“Writing a play,” Tom Stoppard told an interviewer in 1977, “is like smashing that ashtray, filming it in slow motion,...

ESA / Hubble & NASA, G. Duchêne Day 2 of the 2025 Space Telescope Advent Calendar: a stellar nursery. Reflection...

In The Atlantic’s first issue, published 168 years ago in Boston, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote about an information overload at...

Just after my daughter turned 2, her day care initiated her into a rite of passage: picture day. I was...

The Department of Homeland Security launched a $200 million advertising campaign this past spring that urged migrants to “self-deport,” dangling...

Throughout the 2000s, the music charts were rife with references to Rogaine. Jay-Z invoked the hair-restoration drug as a synonym...

Administering an exam used to be straightforward: All a college professor needed was an open room and a stack of...

One of the many delights of America is that its geography is also a vocabulary. If I say “Portland, Oregon,”...

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day,...

I have much extolled here the value of new knowledge. Let us now hear a counterargument: Some months after Yale...

At necessary moments in my life, Tom Stoppard, the preeminent British playwright who died last Saturday, has popped up like...

Presidents have always sent people to lead the Pentagon who respect the institutions and personnel of the armed forces, not...

ESA / Webb, NASA & CSA, M. Villenave et al.A Cosmic Butterfly. In August, the James Webb Space Telescope provided...

By Donald Trump’s account, his campaign of lethal maritime strikes is an attempt to extinguish powerful drug cartels, not a...

Living in China is getting cheaper. Because rents in my neighborhood in central Beijing are dropping, my wife and I...