The Atlantic

To read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school, Rose Horowitch wrote in the November 2024 issue. I’m an English teacher at a private college-preparatory school, and much of “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books” sou

For museums and their public, Impressionism is the Goldilocks movement: not too old or too new, not too challenging or too sappy; just right. Renaissance art may baffle with arcane religious symbolism, contemporary art may baffle on purpose, but put

Just after college, I went to teach English as a Peace Corps volunteer in a small village school in West Africa. To help relieve the loneliness, I packed a shortwave radio, a Sony Walkman, and, among other books, a paperback copy of Thomas Mann’s ver

Nick Cave, one of the most physically expressive figures in rock and roll, was looking at me with suspicion. His eyebrows climbed the considerable expanse of his forehead; his slender frame tensed defensively in his pin-striped suit. I think he thoug

Photographs by Jeff Brown Until a couple of years ago, Lucy Calkins was, to many American teachers and parents, a minor deity. Thousands of U.S. schools used her curriculum, called Units of Study, to teach children to read and write. Two decades ago,

Photographs by Justin Chung Updated at 8:50 p.m. E.T. on November 18, 2024 Jimmy O. Yang had been trying to make it as an actor for years—cobbling together bit parts in network sitcoms, auditioning for nameless roles such as “Chinese Teenager #1”—whe

Illustrations by Matt Rota This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. On a sunny morning in October 2023, a 90-year-old woman in a blue blazer walked slowly toward the main courthouse in Shizuoka, a city

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. Every coherent society has a social ideal—an image of what the superior person looks like. In America, from the late 19th century until sometime in the 1950s, t

Photographs by Owen Harvey When the London-based photographer Owen Harvey visited Los Angeles in June 2023, lowriding was illegal. A hobby popular with Mexican Americans since the 1940s, lowriding is the practice of modifying a car so that it can cru

I have been staring at this silver dish of fried chicken for what feels like hours but what really, actually, has been days. Twenty-three days, to be exact, over the course of the three-month Dead Forever run at the all-new, all-American pleasure pal

The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is often assumed to be impossible to solve, a matter of two national movements with irreconcilable aspirations for one tiny piece of land. It has felt like this for nearly a century, and perhaps never mo

Among the pedestaled titans of Western music, George Frideric Handel was the first composer whose work not only quickly became celebrated in his own time but has been heralded ever since. Before Handel, no real “repertoire” of enduring music had exis