A Secretive Hedge Fund Is Gutting Newsrooms
Inside Alden Global Capital
November 2021
In This Issue
The men killing America’s newspapers, how Slack upended the workplace, and the new meth. Plus how Facebook is a hostile foreign power, the engineers’ daughter, the collapse of music genres, Dostoyevsky, W. G. Sebald, nasty return logistics, and more.
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A Peer-Reviewed Portrait of Suffering
James and Lindsay Sulzer have spent their careers developing technologies to help people recover from disease or injury. Their daughter’s freak accident changed their work—and lives—forever.
Slackers of the World, Unite!
Why employees love the software, and bosses don’t
‘I Don’t Know That I Would Even Call It Meth Anymore’
Different chemically than it was a decade ago, the drug is creating a wave of severe mental illness and worsening America’s homelessness problem.
W. G. Sebald Ransacked Jewish Lives for His Fictions
Why did he lie about his sources?
Dispatches
Danielle Del Plato The Largest Autocracy on Earth
Facebook is acting like a hostile foreign power; it’s time we treated it that way.
Jason Fulford and Tamara Shopsin The Nasty Logistics of Returning Your Too-Small Pants
What happens to the stuff you order online after you send it back?
Ryan Christopher Jones Climbing the Economic Ladder in Fresno, California
One family’s journey into the middle class
Culture & Critics
Illustration by Gabriela Pesqueira. Source: Universal History Archive / Getty Why Did Dostoyevsky Write Crime and Punishment?
He had no choice.
Illustration by Paul Spella; source images: Roman Nerud / Alamy; Oleh Slobodeniuk / Getty; Bettmann / Getty Jonathan Franzen’s Best Book Yet
At last he’s put aside the pyrotechnics and gone all in on his great theme: the American family.
Illustration by Rodrigo Corral. Sources: Hugh Sitton / Getty; Been There YB / Shutterstock Human History Gets a Rewrite
A brilliant new account upends bedrock assumptions about 30,000 years of change.
Kelsey Dake Spotify Has Made All Music Into Background Music
Is the collapse of genre boundaries and the erosion of fervent musical loyalties a good thing?
Departments
Katie Martin / The Atlantic An Acquaintance Remembers Bobby McIlvaine
Readers respond to our September 2021 issue and more.
Tim Lahan An Ode to Being Yelled At
Everyone, now and then, needs a good and thorough denouncing.
Poetry
Gabriela Pesqueira / The Atlantic
