The Atlantic

When August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson opened at the Huntington Theatre in Boston in 1988, my mother, her friend Renée, and I sat in the audience, captivated by the struggles of a brother and sister at odds about the fate of a family heirloom, a piano

Edvard Munch, 1863–1944, was a zeitgeist conductor. Like Dostoyevsky before him, like Kafka after him, he was one of those somewhat hastily assembled humans—the skull plates not stapled down, the nerve endings dangling—who get chosen by the daemon of

In the moments before seeing an owl comes a feeling like intuition. I will not forget one night when I stood on a balcony in suburban Sydney, and every wakeful creature in the surrounding bushland abruptly froze. Even the frogs seemed to want to reno

Illustrations by Ricardo Tomás This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here. Over the past eight years or so, I’ve b

On a Monday morning in April, Sam Altman sat inside OpenAI’s San Francisco headquarters, telling me about a dangerous artificial intelligence that his company had built but would never release. His employees, he later said, often lose sleep worrying

Photographs by Yoshiyuki Matsumura This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here. This story starts, of all things, w

Illustrations by Nicolás Ortega This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here. In 2014, the actor B. J. Novak, best k

Photographs by Robert Smithson Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty was built by pushing 6,650 tons of earth and basalt into the Great Salt Lake, forming a spiral 1,500 feet long and 15 feet wide. As massive as the earthwork is, however, it defers to its s

Updated at 5:00 p.m. ET on August 9, 2023 This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here. This article is a collaborat

Updated at 1:58 p.m. ET on August 14, 2023 In 2008, when I was a writer for the blog Feministe, commenters began requesting warnings at the top of posts discussing distressing topics, most commonly sexual assault. Violence is, unfortunately and inevi

The nation legalized assisted suicide—and exposed the limits of liberalism, David Brooks wrote in the June 2023 issue. “The Canadian Way of Death” is a must-read for anyone dealing with prolonged suffering or observing it in loved ones. Rarely has in