Radio Atlantic

Nationwide, black Americans live three years less than white Americans. In places with a history of segregation, that life-expectancy gap can be as much as twenty years. Staff writer Olga Khazan joins Matt Thompson, Alex Wagner, and Vann Newkirk to share the story of Kiarra Boulware, a young black woman from Baltimore whose struggles shed a light on how people living only a few miles apart have su...

Two of the world’s most volatile heads of state—Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump—have moved in the span of a year from trading insults to trading fawning letters. Now, they're days away from the first meeting between a sitting U.S. president and a North Korean leader. Between Kim's nuclear ambitions and Trump's political pressures, the stakes of this exchange couldn’t be higher. Are we headed toward t...

A new generation of political activists have grown up more interested in provoking outrage from their fellow citizens than in winning them over. Among the most influential exemplars of the genre is Stephen Miller, a senior policy adviser to President Trump. What happens when the trolls run politics? What happens when they run the White House? Links - “Trump’s Right-Hand Troll” (McKay Coppins, May...

The decades-old dispute between Israelis and Palestinians seems to be at a new low these days. Two American-born writers – an Israeli author and a Muslim journalist – join editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg and global editor Kathy Gilsinan to grapple with the bleak state of affairs. Yossi Klein Halevi is the author of the new book Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor. Wajahat Ali recently traveled to...

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation has been the focus of headlines and cable news for a full year now. Despite his seemingly leak-proof team, speculation and anxiety swirl around the inquiry. What do we actually know about the investigation? How much deeper does the iceberg go? And where is it heading next? Links - "The Lingering Mysteries of a Trump-Russia Conspiracy" (Natasha Bertran...

This week's Radio Atlantic brings you the first episode of our new show Crazy/Genius, hosted by Atlantic staff writer (and past Radio Atlantic guest) Derek Thompson. In this episode, two guests debate whether Facebook is fixable, or whether its business model is designed to sell us lies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Some Americans who grew up identifying with Roseanne have found themselves alienated by Roseanne Barr’s outspoken devotion to President Trump. Many of Kanye West’s fans revolted after he tweeted out an image of himself wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat. Pop culture will probably always mirror the divides playing out in society. But when social divides are more massive than they’ve been in g...

“We are a president-obsessed nation, so much so that we undermine the very idea of our constitutional democracy,” writes John Dickerson in his May cover story in The Atlantic. “No one man—or woman—can possibly represent the varied, competing interests of 327 million citizens.” Have we heaped so much upon the president that the job has become impossible? Is Trump testing the office in valuable ways...

Long the crossroads of civilizations, Syria has now spent seven years as the proxy warzone of great powers. With over half a million dead and millions more displaced, the conflict is  now “arguably the world’s largest humanitarian disaster since World War II,” writes Andrew Tabler in The Atlantic. “The Syrian Civil War now threatens to morph into the Syria War—a regional conflagration which seems...

In her new book Futureface, Alex Wagner writes that “immigration raises into relief some of our most basic existential questions: Who am I? Where do I belong? And in that way, it’s inextricably tied to an exploration of American identity.” In the book, Alex explores her own American identity – daughter of a Burmese immigrant mother and a small-town Irish Catholic father – and asks how true the sto...

As Atlantic staff writer Robinson Meyer recently wrote, Facebook “is currently embroiled in the worst crisis of trust in its 14-year history.” This week, the company’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before the U.S. Congress for the first time. It’s not clear whether Congress will seek to exert more regulatory control over the company, even after revelations that as many as 87 million people unwitti...

“Trump gambled that Americans resent each other’s differences more than they cherish their shared democracy. So far that gamble has paid off,” writes David Frum in his new book Trumpocracy. Along with The Atlantic's Global Editor Kathy Gilsinan, David joins to explain how President Trump has undermined our most important institutions. What does democracy around the world look like when the leader...

In his last speech, known to history as “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” Martin Luther King Jr. began by remarking on the introduction he’d been given by his friend, Ralph Abernathy. “As I listened to ... his eloquent and generous introduction and then thought about myself,” King said modestly, “I wondered who he was talking about.” The facsimile of King that America would fashion after his assassi...

The family is where the forces that are driving Americans farther apart—political polarization, generational divides, class stratification, Facebook fights—literally hit home. Economic, ideological, and technological shifts pose uncertain consequences for what Daniel Patrick Moynihan called “the basic social unit of American life.” And not even a burgeoning industry of experts can tell parents wha...

“Politicians from both parties publicly worship the solemn dignity of entrepreneurship and small businesses. But by the numbers, America has become the land of the big and the home of the consolidated,” writes The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson. In a time when Americans have lost faith in their institutions, the nation seems to now look to corporations for positive action. Can big business be a force f...

Discarding the limits on a leader's time in office is a classic autocrat's move. So when Xi Jinping began to clear a path for an indefinite term as China's president, he dimmed many once-bright hopes that he would speed the nation's path toward a new era of openness and reform. For James Fallows,The Atlantic's national correspondent, it was a sad vindication of a warning he issued two years ago in...

Moviegoers across America are filling theaters to see, as The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer describes it, “a high-tech utopia that is a fictive manifestation of African potential unfettered by slavery and colonialism.” Wakanda, the setting of Marvel’s blockbuster film Black Panther, is suddenly everywhere, which means people the world over are seeing something that’s never had this widespread an audience...

After Rick Magnis, a Texas judge, reviewed the evidence in Benjamine Spencer’s case, he recommended a new trial for Spencer “on the grounds of actual innocence.” But Texas’s highest criminal court took the rare step of rejecting the judge’s ruling. Why? Because Spencer did not meet the state’s “Herculean” standard of unassailable proof, such as DNA, that would remove all doubts of his innocence. A...

In part one of our three-part series "No Way Out," Barbara Bradley Hagerty told the story of how Benjamine Spencer was convicted for the murder of Jeffrey Young, and how much of the evidence that led to that conviction has fallen apart under scrutiny. But if Spencer did not kill him, who else could have? And if the evidence does point to another assailant, is that enough to free Spencer? In this e...

In 1987, Jeffrey Young was robbed and killed, and his body was left on a street in the poor neighborhood of West Dallas. Benjamine Spencer was tried and convicted for the attack. Spencer was black, 22 years old, and recently married. Young was 33 and white, and his father was a senior executive for Ross Perot, one of the most prominent businessmen in Dallas. No physical evidence connected Spencer...

Conor Friedersdorf recently argued in The Atlantic that in this moment, when the truth is bitterly contested, fiction presents us an opportunity. It allows us to step into another person’s perspective and talk about gray areas without the problems of detailing an actual person’s private moments. But does blurring the lines between truth and fiction undermine the messy complexities of the real worl...

“Conventional wisdom suggests that the temptations of Washington, D.C., corrupt all the idealists, naïfs, and ingenues who settle there," Franklin Foer writes in his cover story for the March issue of The Atlantic. "But what if that formulation gets the causation backwards? What if it took an outsider to debase the capital and create the so-called swamp?” Before Paul Manafort led the campaign to p...

Once again, immigration is at the top of America's legislative agenda, as it has been, seemingly every generation, for much of the nation's history. But while many recent discussions of immigration have focused on unauthorized immigrants, some of the most contentious aspects of the current debate concern legal immigration: Who should the U.S. allow to be an American? Priscilla Alvarez, an editor o...

The 'retail apocalypse' is upon us, they say. In the United States, 2017 saw emptied malls, shuttered department stores, and once-iconic brands falling into bankruptcy. Yet retail spending continues to grow, in strange new directions that could have significant effects. What will shopping look like in the future? How will these changes reverberate throughout the country? Atlantic editor Gillian Wh...

As the anniversary of his inauguration nears, a new book filled with salacious claims about the Trump administration has become a bestseller. Faced with renewed questions about his mental and temperamental fitness for the office, President Trump has pushed back, declaring himself a “very stable genius” and attacking his critics. But no new claims or revelations, James Fallows wrote recently for Th...