Michael Cohen Is Ready to Talk Russia to Congress

President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen lied to Congress about issues central to the Russia investigation out of “blind loyalty” to his longtime boss. But now the man who once said he would take a bullet for Trump plans to correct the record before the House and Senate Intelligence Committees—perhaps giving lawmakers more insight than they’ve ever had...

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Many Families May Need Months to Recover From the Shutdown

Ever since the government shutdown ended last Friday, Yvette Hicks said her cable company, her electric company, the bank that processes her auto-loan payments, and her life-insurance company have been calling her “back to back to back.” They want to know when they’ll be paid. Hicks, a 40-year-old security guard working as a contractor for the federal government, had been...

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Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists Feels Like a Eulogy for Journalism

Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists, a new HBO documentary about two of the most celebrated newspapermen of the 20th century, has the passionate, thunderous, and occasionally weepy tone of a good barroom eulogy. Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill represent, various interviewees attest, the last of their kind: journalists writing for and about the working man, self-educated voices...

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How Do Plants Grow in Space?

Earlier this month, tiny green plants sprouted on the moon. The plants arrived as cotton seeds, tucked inside of Chang’e 4, a Chinese spacecraft that had landed, in a historic first, on the far side of the moon, the side that never turns toward Earth. The seeds came with the comforts of home: water, air, soil, and a heating system for warmth. Huddled together, the seedlings...

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The Generation of Grandparents Who Keep Their Grandchildren Afloat

My husband and I have been pretty good at saving money over the years, which means that we have enough of a cushion to start passing along some of it to our children and grandchildren while we’re alive, rather than leaving it behind as their inheritance. If we live another 20 years, give or take, as the actuarial tables say we might, our offspring in 2040 might have less need...

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There’s No Case for War With Venezuela

President Donald Trump has recently turned his attention, and the focus of the U.S. foreign-policy debate, toward the economic and political crisis in Venezuela, where two men are pushing rival claims to be the head of state. The opposition leader, Juan Guaidó, has the support of the United States. But despite mass protests, the Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro refuses to...

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Hollywood’s Secret History of Sexuality

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How a Ballot Initiative to Expand Medicaid in Utah May Be Denied

SALT LAKE CITY, Utah — In November, Utah’s voters defied their state legislature and moved to adopt Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion in the state. With strong majority support, Utahns passed Proposition 3, a ballot initiative that would expand Medicaid coverage to all poor and near-poor adults. Joining Idaho and Nebraska, Republican-led states that passed similar initiatives...

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The Environmental Issue Republicans Can’t Ignore

When Florida Governor Ron DeSantis declared on his inauguration day that water is “part and parcel of Florida’s DNA,” and vowed to fight the pollution and toxic algae that choked the state’s beaches and fresh waters last summer, his critics rolled their eyes to the Tallahassee heavens above. DeSantis had a poor environmental voting record in Congress. He’d helped found the...

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Teaching the Bible in Public Schools Is a Bad Idea—For Christians

Shortly after Fox & Friends aired a segment about proposed legislation to incorporate Bible classes into public schools on Monday morning, President Donald Trump cheered these efforts on Twitter. “Numerous states introducing Bible Literacy classes, giving students the option of studying the Bible. Starting to make a turn back? Great!” Trump wrote. The segment followed...

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The Atlantic Daily: Bad Apple

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City Hall to the White House: Can’t Get There From Here

If the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, can run for president in the already crowded 2020 Democratic field, why shouldn’t the mayors of New York and Los Angeles? After all, each city is bigger and more complicated than plenty of states. But there’s just one thing that Bill de Blasio, who’s not ruling out a race, and Eric Garcetti, who just did, ought to remember about the last...

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A Coast Guard Community Struggles to Put Food on the Table

Dixie Lambert has lived in the small fishing village of Cordova, Alaska, for 36 years. She knows almost everyone in the community—most of them U.S. Coast Guard employees and their families. During the 35-day shutdown, Lambert observed how many of these furloughed families struggled to make ends meet, so she began soliciting public donations at the local grocery store. The...

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The Atlantic Politics & Policy Daily: Stacey’s Moment

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When Water Dooms Life

The Atacama Desert in northern Chile is the driest place on Earth, a parched rockscape whose inner core supports zero animal or plant life. Only a few hearty species of lichen, algae, fungi, and bacteria can survive there—mostly by clinging to mineral and salt deposits that concentrate moisture for them. Still, it’s a precarious life, and these microbes often enter states...

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What Billionaires’ Fasting Diets Mean for the Rest of Us

Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, doesn’t eat for 22 hours of the day, and sometimes not at all. Over the weekend he tweeted that he’d been “playing with fasting for some time,” regularly eating all of his daily calories at dinner and occasionally going water-only for days on end. In many cases, severe and arbitrary food restriction might be called an eating disorder. And while...

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