What Will Become of American Civilization?
Conspiracism and hyper-partisanship in the nation’s fastest-growing city
July/August 2024
In This Issue
The Climate Issue: A vision of America's future, the glacier rescue project, saving koalas, and climate reparations. Plus Dr. Anthony Fauci, the art of the Harlem Renaissance, Lee Isaac Chung's Twisters, Kafka, lobbyists, Rachel Cusk, and more.
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A Wild Plan to Avert Catastrophic Sea-Level Rise
The collapse of Antarctica’s ice sheets would be disastrous. A group of scientists has an idea to save them.
The First Three Months
What I saw inside the government’s response to COVID-19
The Koala Paradox
Can Australia find a way to protect its most beloved animal?
The Harlem Renaissance Was Bigger Than Harlem
How Black artists made modernism their own
Dispatches
Illustration by Adam Maida What America Owes the Planet
Climate reparations would hold the globe’s biggest polluters—including the United States—responsible for their actions. They might also be the best hope those nations have for saving themselves.
Photograph by Mitch Epstein. Courtesy of Steidl Publishers / Yancey Richardson Gallery The Magic of Old-Growth Forests
Photographing some of the oldest—and largest—living organisms on the planet
Culture & Critics
Illustration by Ricardo Rey The Most Influential Climate-Disaster Thriller of All Time
Twister captivated America and sparked a subgenre. Its director thought it could never be remade. Can Twisters conjure the energy of the original?
Illustration by Gabriela Pesqueira Stop Trying to Understand Kafka
His parables aren’t supposed to make sense.
Illustration by Pablo Delcan The Real ‘Deep State’
Lobbying firms have disguised their influence so well that it’s often barely visible even to savvy Washington insiders.
Illustration by Iris Legendre Rachel Cusk’s Lonely Experiment
First she abandoned plot in her fiction; now characters must go.
Departments
Jeffrey Goldberg Editor's Note: In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World
Returning the planet to some sort of climate equilibrium is a universal interest.
The Atlantic The Commons: “I Will Never, Ever Go on a Cruise”
Readers respond to our May 2024 issue and more.
The Atlantic
Poetry
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