Section: The Atlantic (USA)
The Atlantic Daily: The Next Day
What We’re FollowingMoore Loss: Alabama voters elected Doug Jones, a Democrat, as their next U.S. senator in a historic upset that followed a series of strategic mishaps by Republicans. The victory comes as a blow to President Trump, who failed to mobilize his supporters at both the primary and the general levels of the race. The Republican...
A Mafia State Within a Totalitarian Society
It is a skill, actually, to make someone feel as though they are drowning in words. If you’ve ever read a transcript of a Donald Trump interview, you know what the experience is like. Next-level incoherence is disorienting—and can be oddly powerful.The American-Russian journalist Masha Gessen has thought a lot about Trump’s rambling...
The Atlantic Politics & Policy Daily: You’re Pardoned
Today in 5 LinesPresident Trump pardoned a pair of turkeys as part of the annual Thanksgiving tradition. Asked about whether he supports Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, Trump told reporters voters shouldn’t support Moore’s “liberal” rival, adding that Moore denies the sexual-misconduct allegations against him. The Federal...
The Atlantic Politics & Policy Daily: You’re Pardoned
Today in 5 LinesPresident Trump pardoned a pair of turkeys as part of the annual Thanksgiving tradition. Asked about whether he supports Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, Trump told reporters voters shouldn’t support Moore’s “liberal” rival, adding that Moore denies the sexual-misconduct allegations against him. The Federal...
Can Russia ‘Help’ as Much as Trump Says It Can?
Donald Trump has a message for the “haters and fools”—those who pounced on him when he suggested, aboard Air Force One this past weekend, that he placed greater faith in Vladimir Putin’s denials about interfering in the 2016 U.S. election than in the conclusions of the “political hacks” in his own intelligence agencies.“Having a good...
For Trump, the Interpersonal Is Political
Man is a complex creature, and Donald Trump is no exception. The president is often willing to turn his ire on even his closest aides and allies, yet in other situations, he seems like he just wants to get along with everyone.During his trip to Asia, Trump’s comments about and with Vladimir Putin and Rodrigo Duterte produced predictable...
Taking Putin’s Word For It
When asked on Saturday about his conversation with Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific economic summit in Vietnam, President Donald Trump reported that the Russian president denied interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. That, of course, directly contradicts the conclusions of the U.S. intelligence community. “Every...
Gangsters of the Mediterranean
Among the wealthy sophisticates who came and went from their seaside villas on the Spanish island of Mallorca, there was something that didn’t quite fit about the Russian who lived in a neoclassical mansion on the Avenida Portals Vells. Tall and powerfully built, with a flattened nose and graying, short-cropped hair, he looked more like an...
Russian Money in Silicon Valley
A new trove of leaked documents, the so-called Paradise Papers, have revealed that Yuri Milner, a Russian businessman with extensive investments in Silicon Valley, used funds from two Kremlin-controlled—and now U.S.-sanctioned—banks to make large investments in Facebook and Twitter. Both stakes have been sold off, but Milner’s path to...
Why Sign-Language Gloves Don’t Help Deaf People
Along with jet packs and hover boards, a machine to translate from any language to any other is so appealing as a fantasy that people are willing to overlook clunky prototypes as long as they can retain the belief that the future promised by science fiction has, at last, arrived. One particularly clunky subspecies of the universal language...
