The Minimal Requirements for a Society Free From Fear
Liberalism’s deepest grounding is the belief that cruelty is an absolute evil.
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Illustration by Adam Maida / The Atlantic What Is Zionism?
To understand what the word means today, you have to go back to the beginning of the story.
Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: GPO / Getty; Hulton-Deutsch Collection / Corbis / Getty; Universal History Archive / Universal Images Group / Getty. The Bible Belongs in the Classroom
Everywhere you look in American history, you will find the language, stories, and concepts from the Old and New Testaments.
Elizabeth Conley / Houston Chronicle / Getty; Maskot / Getty Why AI Is Incorrigibly Didactic
The rise of machine writing is a great opportunity for literature.
Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: clu / Getty. The Truth Is Still Out There
Why Americans remain convinced that the government is hiding an alien conspiracy
Painting by Aryo Toh Djojo The Era of Rational Discourse Is Over
For Jürgen Habermas, who died in March, the essence of democracy was thoughtful back-and-forth argument.
Steve Pyke / Getty ‘Intensely Southern and Only Faintly Jewish’
Nicholas Lemann recalls an unusual and sometimes unsettling family history—his own.
Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Nicholas Lemann; The New York Public Library. The Literary Ecosystem Is Dying
In a sense, the decline of book reviews, like the decline of newspapers themselves, is a story about disaggregation.
Illustration by The Atlantic Texas Sends Plato Back to His Cave
Even in ancient Greece, people worried about philosophy’s subversive effect on tender minds.
Thea Photography / Alamy Reading Is a Vice
Being a reader means cultivating a relationship with the world that, by most standards, can seem pointless and counterproductive.
Illustration by Jackson Gibbs
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