“The only thing I’m able to conclude after my trip here is that it’s incredibly difficult for a poor country to go about getting un-poor.”

They’re friends who once vied for the same jobs. Now, as editors of The New York Times and The Washington Post, they’re locked in a daily battle for Trump scoops.

An organ transplant recipient cycles across the country to meet the people who gave him his heart.

On the importance of skateboarding.

Local communities are taking the world’s largest polluters to court. And they’re using the legal strategy that got tobacco companies to pay up.

The author teaches a college class about what it means to be white in America, but interrogating that question as a black woman in the real world is much harder to do.

“The echoing horror of slavery cuts both ways. We are often afraid to say what we know is true. The South is disaster and it is also miracle.”

In 1965, Wheat was sentenced to death for armed robbery and murder. When his sentence was commuted, he decided to devote the rest of his life to helping people.

What is it like when a city abandons a neighborhood and the police vanish? Business owners describe a harrowing experience of calling for help and being left all alone.

There’s a tale about a boy in Waycross. Near a canal, he struck a match, lit a piece of newspaper, and tossed it into the water. But when the burning paper touched the surface, it didn’t go out. The water burst into flames.

“We are invited to listen, but never to truly join the narrative, for to speak as the slave would, to say that we are as happy for the Civil War as most Americans are for the Revolutionary War, is to rupture the narrative.”

When I was 27, I quit my job to travel and ski-bum, and by that point I had managed to save a small sum that could float me for a year. I called it my fuck-you money, because if I was ever in a situation I didn’t like—stuck in a job or with a boyfriend I wanted to leave—I could say fuck you and go. Living in ski towns is how I learned the dirtbag lifestyle, and to my surprise I took to it naturally and with enthusiasm.

I love combing through The Atlantic’s archives. There’s almost no better way of grasping the strangeness of the past than to flip through a general interest magazine from 1960. Here, we find Fred Hapgood grappling with what human intelligence meant in the light of new machines that could do something like thinking. Intelligence was being explored in a new way: by finding out what was duplicable about how our minds work. Hapgood's conclusion was that if you could automate a task, it would lose value to humans. What tremendous luck! Humans value that which only humans can do, he argued, regardless of the difficulty of the task. And that because computers were so good at sequential logic problems, we'd eventually end up only respecting emotional understanding, which remained (and remains) beyond the reach of AI.

-A. Madrigal

How did so many rich countries get it so wrong? How did others get it so right?

Why so many smart kids are cheating on tests.

Why do we hate decaf so much?

Men have become increasingly infertile, so much so that within a generation they may lose the ability to reproduce entirely.

The predatory trainer may have just taken down USA Gymnastics. How did he deceive so many for so long?

DNA evidence exonerated six convicted killers. So why do some of them recall the crime so clearly?

Why the U.S. Senate gets so little done.

Why so many black families are losing their property.

Why the second Indiana Jones was so dark.

So you’re surrounded by idiots. Guess who the real jerk is.

Why a cow being airlifted by a helicopter says so much about the Swiss economy.

The not-so-underground culture of neuroenhancing drug use, and where it’s headed.