American life

Boarding a crowded plane with a small child feels like entering a game show where each contestant has been given a different set of rules: Everyone walks away feeling cheated. Nonparents feel robbed of the peaceful trip they paid for.…
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Though it feels reductionist to compare Elon Musk and Donald Trump, the Musk era at Twitter has some eerie parallels to the Trump White House. There’s a ton of confusion; lots of firings; people shredding documents; outlandish,…
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In 1961, at the height of the civil-rights era, President John F. Kennedy signed an executive order designed to improve access to opportunity for Black Americans. Government contractors were compelled to “take affirmative action to ensure…
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In August, the author Salman Rushdie was stabbed in the neck. The novelist has spent decades living under the threat of a hit put out by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989. The religious directive was a response to Rushdie’s novel The…
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I was raised in a very specific American faith. This American faith is not patriotism, not a love of this country—though it contains some of that. Nor is it Christianity—though it contains some of that too. It is the belief that Church and…
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In 1970, a 17-year-old named Lars Tragardh left Sweden for America, trading in the collectivism of his home country for rugged individualism. Or so he thought.His disillusionment began while he was applying for college financial aid. He…
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Within the past 15 years, social media has insinuated itself into American life more deeply than food-delivery apps into our diets and microplastics into our bloodstreams. Look at stories about conflict, and it’s often lurking in the…
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Yesterday, an ex-president who had tried to overturn a democratic election by violence returned to Washington, D.C., to call for law and order. Again and again, the speech reversed reality. The ex-president who had spread an actual big lie…
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Over the past three years, hard seltzer has been as close to a sure thing as anything else in American life. Sales of the beverages first took off during the White Claw Summer of 2019, but greatly benefited from the early pandemic, when…
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In the summer of 1860, the Harvard botanist Asa Gray published in The Atlantic a sympathetic, though tentative, defense of Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species,” which was then provoking anxiety among theologians and scientists alike.“The…
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