Section: The Atlantic (USA)
The Atlantic Daily: Baltimore Police, Trump and Guns, the Meaning of War
What We’re FollowingBaltimore’s Abuses: The U.S. Department of Justice released a troubling report on the city’s police department, detailing widespread constitutional violations, routine use of excessive force, and arrests made for no reason at all—all of which show a pattern of discrimination against black citizens. Here are...
The Time Is Ripe for Détente 2.0, Cont’d
In a letter to [email protected], Oana Lungescu, a spokesperson for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, responds to my essay advocating a “Detente 2.0” between the NATO alliance and Russia. Spokesperson Lungescu begins by countering a figure I cited: The United States does not “cover 72.2 percent of NATO’s budget.” This is a very...
The Rio Olympics: A Crib Sheet
The most decorated athlete in Olympics history took home his 20th gold medal on Tuesday night. For America’s Michael Phelps, this isn’t just the latest victory in an extraordinary run, it’s also sweet, sweet payback for his silver-medal finish to South Africa’s Chad le Clos at the 2012 Games, and a possibly definitive...
‘We Have No Idea What War Is’
Just days after I interviewed the legal scholar Rosa Brooks about her book on her time as a civilian advisor in President Barack Obama’s Pentagon, the United States bombed Libya again. This was the third such strike in the U.S. campaign against ISIS there, but this time, Reuters reported, U.S. officials said it “marked the start of a...
The Audacious Plan to Save This Man’s Life by Transplanting His Head
Like a little white Lazarus with red eyes, the paralyzed mouse was walking again.A few days earlier, the mouse had been sprawled on an operating table while two Chinese graduate students peered through a microscope and operated on its spine. With a tiny pair of scissors, they removed the top half of a fingernail-thin vertebra, exposing a gleaming...
The Time is Ripe for Détente, 2.0
On July 20, Donald Trump shocked the Western politico-military establishment when he told The New York Times that the United States would protect Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, the three formerly Soviet Baltic countries that joined NATO in 2004, from a Russian attack only if they have “fulfilled their obligations to us.” In one fell stroke,...
Trump Time Capsule #71: Someone’s Lying About the GOP Platform on Ukraine
Let’s take this in sequence, because each step matters.1. Two weeks ago at the GOP convention in Cleveland, the Republican platform was altered to remove any reference to arming Ukraine in its struggles against Russia (which seized Crimea from Ukraine two years ago).2. This was notable in its own right, as a departure from a bipartisan...
Trump Time Capsule #70: ‘An Unwitting Agent of the Russian Federation’
I first met Michael Morell more than 25 years ago, when he was a young economic analyst for the CIA and I had returned from several years in Japan. It was at an unclassified meeting about economic trends in Asia. (As a reporter working overseas, you routinely meet or interview analysts from various countries’ intelligence services. Usually...
Donald Trump Doesn’t Need an ‘Intervention’
Clearly things have gone off the rails when a presidential nominee needs an intervention. Apparently, “key Republicans close to Donald Trump’s orbit” think that the window for a general-election “pivot” is closing. NBC reported on Wednesday that Newt Gingrich, Reince Priebus, and Rudy Giuliani were plotting to stage an intervention for...
Is the Trump Campaign Collapsing?
The Donald Trump campaign is unraveling.The Republican nominee has spent the last week feuding with Gold Star parents, calling the election rigged, and lying about letters while threatening to skip debates. He has picked fights with firefighters, called out a baby for crying during an event, arguably blamed victims for sexual harassment, and...
