Section: The Atlantic (USA)
Measles as Metaphor
Edmon De HaroIn two essays, “Illness as Metaphor” in 1978 and “AIDS and Its Metaphors” in 1988, the critic Susan Sontag observed that you can learn a lot about a society from the metaphors it uses to describe disease. She also suggested that disease itself can serve as a metaphor—a reflection of the society through which it travels. In other...
Why British Politicians Look Back at Glorious Defeats
For a country with a rich history of victories, Britain has a curious tendency to celebrate the defeats.Boris Johnson, the runaway favorite to succeed Theresa May as prime minister, sparked controversy this week following a pledge to take the United Kingdom out of the European Union by October 31 “do or die.” Rory Stewart, one of more than a...
The Making of a Russian Spy
TALLINN, Estonia—Deniss Metsavas was visiting his relatives in Russia in the summer of 2007 when the incident occurred.While out with his cousin at a nightclub in Smolensk, Metsavas struck up a conversation with an attractive woman he hadn’t met before. They hit it off and spent the night flirting and dancing before retiring to a sauna in...
The Near-Future Shock of Years and Years
There’s a moment about 15 minutes into the first episode of Years and Years that made me gasp at its audacity, its prescience, its visual horror. The new six-part series from the British writer Russell T. Davies (Doctor Who, A Very English Scandal) charts the life of the Lyons family over the course of 15 years, starting in 2019 and ending...
Donald Trump Is Annihilating Truth
Like many writers I know, I’ve had a passion for words for almost as long as I can remember. I’ve admired those who use words well, who have shaped my imagination and given voice to things I wanted to express but didn’t feel like I adequately could. That is why they have to be protected against assault and degradation.At an...
They Cheered Russian Rule. Now Some Have Buyer’s Remorse.
Support for this article was provided by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.SIMFEROPOL, Crimea—One morning in February 2014, the 2 million inhabitants of Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula that was Ukraine’s premier seaside destination, woke to find a new set of flags flying in their streets. Overnight, Russian special forces...
Vanished: How Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 Disappeared
1. The DisappearanceAt 12:42 a.m. on the quiet, moonlit night of March 8, 2014, a Boeing 777-200ER operated by Malaysia Airlines took off from Kuala Lumpur and turned toward Beijing, climbing to its assigned cruising altitude of 35,000 feet. The designator for Malaysia Airlines is MH. The flight number was 370. Fariq Hamid, the first officer, was...
The Atlantic Politics & Policy Daily: There’s No Such Thing as a Bilateral Spat
We’re trying something new: a once-a-week national-security-focused edition of The Atlantic’s signature politics newsletter. Comments or questions? Send us an email anytime. Were you forwarded this email? Sign yourself up here. The Top Story(ISNA / Handout / Reuters)Response and ResponsibilityAfter weeks of heat between Washington and...
Trump’s Efforts at Election Tampering Are Growing Bolder
“I’m actually a very honest guy,” Donald Trump told George Stephanopoulos in an interview aired Monday. And while that claim holds no water in general, Trump was jarringly honest on one topic: his willingness to welcome foreign interference in the 2020 election.“It’s not an interference, they have information—I think I’d take...
Trump Didn’t Learn Anything From 2016
By this point, no one should be more alert to the danger of accepting campaign help from a foreign power than President Donald Trump. Special Counsel Robert Mueller looked hard at whether top Trump campaign officials, including the president’s eldest son, broke the law when they met with a Russian lawyer promising dirt on Hillary Clinton....
