All posts tagged: American history

Trump Hasn’t Killed Political Accountability

Trump Hasn’t Killed Political Accountability

Published by skeptic

On September 22, when federal prosecutors accused Senator Robert Menendez of taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes, Representative Andy Kim, a fellow New Jersey Democrat, asked one of his neighbors what he thought of the charges. “That’s Jersey,” the man replied. The neighbor’s shrug spoke volumes about not only a state with a sordid history of political corruption but also a country that seemed to have grown inured to scandal. In nearby New York, George Santos had settled into his Republican House seat despite having been indicted on more than a dozen counts of fraud and having acknowledged that the story he’d used to woo voters was almost entirely fiction. Criminal indictments have done nothing to dent Republican support for Donald Trump, who is currently the front-runner for both the GOP nomination and the presidency next year. It turns out, however, that the supposedly cynical citizens of New Jersey did care that their senior senator was allegedly on the take. In the days after the indictment was unsealed, multiple polls found that Menendez’s …

Catch Up on a Year of Culture

Catch Up on a Year of Culture

Published by skeptic

A roundup of some Atlantic writing that guided our readers through the year in film, TV, and sold-out stadium tours Matt Chase / The Atlantic December 10, 2023, 8 AM ET This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Culture has a way of defining a year for even the under-rock dwellers among us: A good movie, TV show, book, or album can shape our conversations, our experiences, and even the way we think. Today’s newsletter rounds up some of the culture writing that guided our readers through a year of controversial awards shows, deepfakes, and—it must be said—Che Diaz. First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic: Your Culture Cheat Sheet Barbie Is Everything. Ken Is Everything Else. By Megan Garber The biggest blockbuster of the year was Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, and in this essay, Garber goes beneath the film’s shiny surface to explore its …

Couples Are Embracing Joint Custody. American Policy Isn’t.

Couples Are Embracing Joint Custody. American Policy Isn’t.

Published by skeptic

For most of American history, when parents separated, their kids almost always ended up living with just one of them. But recent studies have confirmed a new era: Joint physical custody, in which a child resides with each parent a significant portion of the time, has become dramatically more common in the U.S. The trend was first documented in Wisconsin, where court data revealed that the percentage of divorces leading to equal joint custody—in which time with each parent is split 50–50—rose from just 2 percent in 1980 to 35 percent in 2010. Even among never-married Wisconsin couples who came to court to establish child support—a group in which the prevalence of shared custody is, perhaps unsurprisingly, low—shared arrangements doubled from 2003 to 2013. And a 2022 study found that, nationally, the share of divorces resulting in joint custody jumped from 13 percent before 1985 to 34 percent in the early 2010s. (We don’t have the data to assess custody arrangements among never-married couples nationwide.) Although the increase is steepest among high-income couples, it’s happening …

The Trump Prosecutions Are Cause to Celebrate the Rule of Law

The Trump Prosecutions Are Cause to Celebrate the Rule of Law

Published by skeptic

There has never been a graver test of America’s rule of law than the prosecutions of Donald Trump. He “stands alone in American history for his alleged crimes,” as Jack Smith put it in a recent court filing. No president has ever schemed for months to retain power after losing an election—and over the repeated advice of his advisers and lawyers—nor taken and concealed classified documents for many months following his return to civilian life. No behavior could more urgently call for criminal sanctions, in order to protect values essential to national survival. Notwithstanding what is at issue, the actions now under way to hold Trump to account are viewed by many with uncertainty, about both their wisdom and their chances of success. Respected people have expressed foreboding that Trump probably cannot be convicted, and that any actual prosecution may well damage the justice system, or otherwise have bad consequences. And the delay of two and a half years in bringing charges following January 6 has contributed to the sense of unease, raising further doubts …

How Trump Will Try to Punish Blue America

How Trump Will Try to Punish Blue America

Published by skeptic

During his term in the White House, Donald Trump governed as a wartime president—with blue America, rather than any foreign country, as the adversary. He sought to use national authority to achieve factional ends—to impose the priorities of red America onto Democratic-leaning states and cities. The agenda Trump has laid out for a second term makes clear that those bruising and divisive efforts were only preliminary skirmishes. Explore the January/February 2024 Issue Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. View More Presidents always pursue policies that reflect the priorities of the voters and regions that supported them. But Trump moved in especially aggressive ways to exert control over, or punish, the jurisdictions that resisted him. His 2017 tax bill, otherwise a windfall for taxpayers in the upper brackets, capped the federal deductibility of state and local taxes, a costly shift for wealthy residents of liberal states such as New York and California. He moved, with mixed success, to deny federal law-enforcement grants to so-called sanctuary cities that didn’t fully …

Let Them Cook – The Atlantic

Let Them Cook – The Atlantic

Published by skeptic

The Joy of Cooking, one of the most popular cookbooks in American history, entered kitchens in 1931 with a simple premise: Anyone can learn to make a meal. The Depression had disrupted the food supply, leaving a generation of new homemakers doubting their ability to furnish healthy, varied dishes from sparse pantries. The book’s popularity lay in author Irma Rombauer’s approachable, if I can do this, you can too tone, an attitude that would help change how everyday Americans made dinner. Nearly a century later, another generation of young cooks has faced another global catastrophe, and emerged with their own relationship to cooking. While the coronavirus pandemic sent millions of Americans away from restaurants and into their kitchens, its culinary impact was formative for Gen Z, many of whom were in their teens or early 20s when it began. Whether stuck in their parents’ homes or on their own, these young people embraced cooking as an act of independence and, as one researcher told me, coping. On TikTok, cooking tutorials have hundreds of millions of …

Trump Will Suppress American History

Trump Will Suppress American History

Published by skeptic

This past fall, in a small southern foundry, Robert E. Lee’s face was placed on a furnace that reached a temperature of more than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. As the heat mounted, a haunting orange-red glow appeared across Lee’s severed visage, and the cracks that split his bronze cheeks began to look like streams of dark tears beneath his eyes. Lee’s face was once part of a larger statue of the Confederate general that stood in Charlottesville, Virginia, and was at the center of protests and counterprotests during the infamous “Unite the Right” rally there in 2017. The city had taken the statue down in 2021 and given it to a local Black-history museum. Once melted, the statue’s bronze would be repurposed into a new work of public art. Explore the January/February 2024 Issue Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. View More As I contemplated Lee’s metal face glowing like a small sun in the dark universe of the workshop, I thought of the statement issued by former President …

The Atlantic releases How to Keep Time podcast

The Atlantic releases How to Keep Time podcast

Published by skeptic

December 4, 2023, 2:13 PM ET The Atlantic is today launching the fifth season of its popular How To podcast series with How to Keep Time, an exploration of our relationship with time and how to reclaim it. For the new season, The Atlantic’s Becca Rashid returns as co-host (and producer), now joined by Atlantic contributing writer Ian Bogost. How to Keep Time follows the show’s past seasons, which have explored such related topics as how to build a happy life (with Arthur C. Brooks), how to talk to people (with Julie Beck), and how to start over (with Olga Khazan). Over the course of six episodes, in How to Keep Time, Becca and Ian will look into fundamental questions around our relationship with time, including why we can feel like there’s never enough time in a day; what cultural myths get in the way of using time to build connections; why so many of us are compelled to record time and document our lives; and even how an understanding of theoretical physics can inform …

The Atlantic’s Jan/Feb issue: Next Trump presidency

The Atlantic’s Jan/Feb issue: Next Trump presidency

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Featuring two dozen Atlantic writers on how a second term could shatter norms with the courts, education, the military, foreign policy, immigration, abortion rights, science, gender December 4, 2023, 7:59 AM ET The next Trump presidency will be worse. A special issue of The Atlantic, launching today, warns of the grave and extreme consequences if former President Trump were to win in 2024––building an overwhelming case, across two dozen essays by Atlantic writers, that both Trump and Trumpism pose an existential threat to America and to the ideas that animate it. With each writer focusing on their subject area of expertise, the issue argues that assuming a second term would mirror the first is a mistake: The threats to democracy will be greater, as will the danger of authoritarianism and corruption. A second Trump presidency, the opening essay states, would mark the turn onto a dark path, one of those rips between “before” and “after” that a society can never reverse. The Atlantic has made covering persistent threats to democracy its top editorial priority. Editor …

The Specter of Trump’s Family-Separation Policy

The Specter of Trump’s Family-Separation Policy

Published by skeptic

Almost as soon as Donald Trump took office in 2017, agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement were dispatched across the country to round up as many undocumented foreigners as possible, and the travel ban put into limbo the livelihoods of thousands of people from majority-Muslim countries who had won the hard-fought right to be here—refugees, tech entrepreneurs, and university professors among them. The administration drew up plans for erecting a border wall, as well as an approach to stripping away the due-process rights of noncitizens so they could be expelled faster. These changes to American immigration policy took place in the amount of time that it would take the average new hire to figure out how to use the office printer. Explore the January/February 2024 Issue Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. View More Within days of Trump’s election, his key immigration adviser, Stephen Miller, was already gathering a group of loyal bureaucrats to start drafting executive orders. Civil servants who were veterans of the George W. Bush …