Radio Atlantic

Ebola is ravaging the eastern region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in what may soon become the worst outbreak of the disease ever recorded. This particularly deadly strain is spreading amid a weakened global-health infrastructure, including the Trump administration’s cuts to USAID.    --- Get more from your favorite Atlantic voices when you subscribe. You’ll enjoy unlimit...

Opposition to data-center construction is the bipartisan issue of the moment—70 percent of Americans are against construction in their communities. Recently, New York passed the country’s first statewide data-center-construction moratorium. Maine was supposed to have been the first. For this week’s episode of Radio Atlantic, the reporter Ethan Brooks traveled to Maine to understand why one tiny to...

Nationwide attention and endorsements are flooding into Michigan as voters get ready to pick their Senate candidates Aug. 4. Why is everybody from President Trump to Bernie Sanders so interested? The path to win the Senate runs straight through this purple state, and that has Democrats battling over whether the progressive candidate Abdul El-Sayed or the more centrist U.S. Representative Haley Ste...

People may be reading now more than ever (emails, texts, social-media posts). But fewer and fewer people are reading actual books. The Atlantic’s staff writer Rose Horowitch, who wrote the August cover story, “The End of Reading Is Here,” explains what might be lost in a “postliterate” age—and it’s a lot more than books. - - - Get more from your favorite Atlantic voices when you subscribe. You’ll...

The fatal shootings of two men in Texas and Maine by immigration officers have put the Department of Homeland Security back under renewed scrutiny. Host Hanna Rosin is joined by Atlantic staff writer Nick Miroff to discuss the recent killings and what role traffic stops played in them.   --- Get more from your favorite Atlantic voices when you subscribe. You’ll enjoy unlimited access to...

Today’s episode is a dispatch from Georgia, where election skeptics run elections. Lately, the president has gone into an election frenzy, trying to spread the idea that elections are rife with fraud. He seems to be laying the groundwork for the argument that if Republicans lose the midterms, it can be only because someone cheated. The place to truly advance the idea that elections can’t be truste...

Though President Trump has said he would not enter any “forever wars,” America seems to find itself headed toward one. With the latest cease-fire “over,” is there a way out of the conflict with Iran?  Host Adam Harris is joined by Tom Nichols and Nancy Youssef, who cover the military and diplomacy for The Atlantic, to discuss the conflict that is beginning to feel more like a permanent condit...

This week saw the first fatal ICE shooting since Minnesota. In Houston, an ICE officer shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. It’s been six months since the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and the federal government hasn’t properly investigated either one. And it has stood in the way of state agents trying to find out what happened—failing, for example, to give state investigators access to...

The military has historically been a powerful force for integration in America—even as its top ranks have been slow to reflect the racial makeup of the country.  Host Adam Harris speaks with the Atlantic staff writer Clint Smith, who wrote in the July issue of the magazine about what it means that the gradual, visible racial progress in the military is being degraded as Black officers are pushed o...

The Florida Department of Education recently announced an alternative to the Advanced Placement history course that it described in a press release as “free from ideological bias or indoctrination.” For its new curriculum, Florida recommends one textbook: Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story, by Wilfred McClay. As American patriotism plummets, McClay partly blames history class,...

The drama around the algal bloom in the Reflecting Pool may seem like a shallow issue. But it’s part of a much broader pattern as President Trump tries to “beautify” Washington, D.C., and cement his legacy. Host Adam Harris talks to the Atlantic staff writer David Graham about Trump’s attempts to remake the city physically, culturally, and politically. Get more from your favorite Atlantic voices w...

In his classic book How Soccer Explains the World, the Atlantic staff writer Franklin Foer theorized that the sport was a mirror of the world, particularly in its shift from tribalism to interdependence. More than two decades after the book came out, the world is different in many ways, but he says the title still holds true.  Foer joins to discuss the World Cup. Who he’s excited to watch. How the...

The Supreme Court will soon decide whether the Trump administration’s executive order limiting who can be born an American is constitutional, and whether “all persons born or naturalized in the United States”—save for those who are here under unique circumstances, such as children of foreign dignitaries—are citizens of the union. This week on Radio Atlantic, Adam Harris is joined by Atlantic staff...

Throughout her career, Nancy Pelosi has known how to get things done: whipping up votes, negotiating bills, and, in what is probably her crowning achievement, pushing through the Affordable Care Act as speaker of the House. At the end of her current term, she plans to retire, after nearly 40 years in Congress. Hanna Rosin recently sat down with Pelosi at the Cascade PBS Ideas Festival, in Seattle,...

The MAGA movement has fully embraced masculinism, which The Atlantic’s staff writer Helen Lewis defines in her cover story this month as “a movement to fight back against the advances of feminism and reassert the primacy of men.” Democrats have a more complicated relationship with it. After the last presidential election, when Donald Trump made inroads with young men, even those of color, some Dem...

For most of his second term, Donald Trump has successfully conveyed the message that defiance is not an option. Republicans who ignored that message generally wound up out of office, so they largely toed the line. Lately, though, that seems to be changing.  Republicans recently pushed back against the president’s proposed “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” and the administration ultimately scrapped it. Tr...

Not long after U.S. commandos swiftly extracted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and flew him to the United States, Donald Trump set his sights on the next target: Cuba. Some administration officials seem interested in Cuba’s nickel and cobalt deposits. Secretary of State Marco Rubio shares the dream of many Cuban exiles for regime change on the island. Although, from the Cuban perspective, the...

Universities tried to be all things to all people. That model may not be working anymore. Adam Harris is joined by Ian Bogost, Atlantic contributing writer and a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, to discuss the state of higher education. On campuses across the country, students are graduating into a job market with questions on their mind. What kind of career is stable in 2026? Will...

There is an ongoing battle for House seats. And it’s playing out not so much in elections but in congressional maps. The Atlantic staff writers Russell Berman, who’s been covering the redistricting wars for the past several months, and Vann R. Newkirk II, who’s long followed the Voting Rights Act (and now its demise), explain how this new era of tit-for-tat gerrymandering is different than ever be...

The author Caro Claire Burke discusses her debut novel, Yesteryear, about a tradwife influencer suddenly transported back to 1855 and faced with the harsh realities of actual pioneer life. The book is a No. 1 New York Times best seller, and its film rights have already been sold and Anne Hathaway is attached to star.  Seen one way, the tradwife is just a social-media trend, sometimes soothing to w...

Alexander the Great. Julius Caesar. Napoleon Bonaparte. Donald Trump The Atlantic staff writers Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer reported this week on the president privately comparing himself to the three norm-defying, world-historical figures highlighted in the work of the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.  The president has also sought to make his mark across seemingly every ma...

Last week, The Atlantic published a story about how FBI Director Kash Patel’s colleagues are alarmed by what they describe as erratic behavior and excessive drinking. Sources told staff writer Sarah Fitzpatrick that, on multiple occasions, members of his security detail had trouble waking Patel because he was seemingly intoxicated.  Patel called the story a “lie” and earlier this week sued The Atl...

Whatever happens next in Hungary, Viktor Orbán’s stunning downfall contains obvious warnings for MAGA and Donald Trump: Propaganda has its limits. Concerns about affordability are real. True democracy can reassert itself in a single election. Reality can bend only so far. The Hungarian journalist Veronika Munk of the news outlet Denník N shares her view from the streets of Budapest. And the Atlant...

Last weekend, on Easter Sunday, President Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social: “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH!” On Tuesday, he posted again: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” Hours later—after ongoing talks, and condemnation by world leaders and American lawmakers from both parties—the United States ag...

The manosphere helped Donald Trump win the 2024 election. Now that he’s started a war with Iran and failed to keep some core campaign promises, the coalition cemented by podcast bros and Austin-area commentators is starting to crack. The Atlantic staff writer Elaine Godfrey has been tracking the political shifts among a small but influential group of manosphere podcasters.    Get more from your fa...