What is a bewildered citizen to make of the sanctions that President Obama levied on Russian officials and the Russian government on Thursday? The confusion starts with the news coverage. The Associated Press, for example, blares that “President Barack Obama has slapped harsh sanctions on the…

If Obama appears to have been outmaneuvered by Vladimir Putin, this only increases the fear that Trump will be completely outclassed. Photograph by MICHAEL KLIMENTYEV / AFP / Getty This week saw an apparition that has not been observed for at least eight years in Washington D.C.: bipartisanship.…

Theresa May has advocated leaving the ECHR in the past Getty Theresa May is planning on making the case to leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) a central aspect of her 2020 election campaign, according to reports. She would reportedly plan to transfer the rights from the…

ZHENGZHOU, China — A vast, boxy customs center acts as a busy island of commerce deep in central China. Government officers, in sharply pressed uniforms, race around a maze of wooden pallets piled high with boxes — counting, weighing, scanning and approving shipments. Unmarked trucks stretch for…

Image: That one video about the thing . 2016 was a fine year for gaming at launch, but over the course of the past 12 months various updates and bug fixes have made it even better. Here are some of the year’s finest patch notes. Can you tell which games they are from? Before we jump into the notes…

I remember seeing The Lonely Island’s “Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping” at the movie theater. Apparently, I was one of the few people who did. It was the weekend I officially moved to Berkeley, and the plan was to see a double feature of movies that weren’t playing at the theaters back home:…

Most Americans follow up their 21 st birthdays with a hangover; Stevie Wonder opted for arguably the greatest sustained run of creativity in the history of popular music. Wonder’s “classic period”—the polite phrase for when Stevie spent five years ferociously dunking on the entire history of popular…

“We’re going to have to redesign the social compact,” Obama said. “And I know how to build a bridge to that new social compact.” Photograph by Pari Dukovic for The New Yorker The morning after Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, Barack Obama summoned staff members to the Oval…

Following is a transcript of President-elect Donald J. Trump ’s interview on Tuesday with reporters, editors and opinion columnists from The New York Times. The transcription was prepared by Liam Stack, Jonah Engel Bromwich, Karen Workman and Tim Herrera of The Times. More on the Trump transition…

An expanded version of this article will appear in the next issue of The Atlantic . At dawn on a warm September morning in 2013, a minivan pulled up to a shattered villa in the town of Azaz, Syria. A long-bearded 29-year-old white man emerged from the building, along with his pregnant British wife…

From their studios, ateliers, film sets and kitchens — and even the White House — these are the people whose inventive spirits shaped the conversation this year. Michelle Obama Image Credit Collier Schorr One of T’s biggest stories this year was our Greats issue cover on Michelle Obama, in which…

Updated Programmers were left staring at broken builds and failed installations on Tuesday after someone toppled the Jenga tower of JavaScript. A couple of hours ago, Azer Koçulu unpublished more than 250 of his modules from NPM , which is a popular package manager used by JavaScript projects to…

The Amazon Echo, an internet-connected speaker that responds to voice commands. Mark Lennihan/Associated Press In a move that promises to raise new questions about electronic privacy, detectives investigating a murder in Arkansas are seeking access to audio that may have been recorded on an Amazon…

T he eternal human struggle to live meaningfully in the face of inevitable death entered its newest phase one Monday in the summer of 2007, when employees of Google gathered to hear a talk by a writer and self-avowed geek named Merlin Mann. Their biggest professional problem was email, the digital…

According to a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers assessment, “Mosul Dam is the most dangerous dam in the world.” Photograph by Victor J. Blue for The New Yorker On the morning of August 7, 2014, a team of fighters from the Islamic State, riding in pickup trucks and purloined American Humvees, swept out…

T he decision by U.K. voters to leave the EU is such a glaring repudiation of the wisdom and relevance of elite political and media institutions that — for once — their failures have become a prominent part of the storyline. Media reaction to the Brexit vote falls into two general categories: (1)…

This is the first installment in our series examining the intersections of education and entertainment in 2016. Check back for more entries on late-night comedy, a play, animated movies , and television . The directors behind 2002’s critically acclaimed Lost in La Mancha are the unlikely providers…

A dilemma has haunted nuclear strategy since the first detonation of an atomic bomb: How do you prevent a nuclear attack while preserving the ability to launch one? PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDY CROSS / THE DENVER POST VIA GETTY On June 3, 1980, at about two-thirty in the morning, computers at the National…

I spent years working for Russian channels. What I saw would terrify the West. “There is no such thing as objective reporting,” the managing editor of RT, Alexey Nikolov, told me when I interviewed him in 2013. By then, I was based in London again, working in think tanks, and Nikolov met me in his…

A sign at Donald Trump’s victory party in midtown Manhattan, early Wednesday morning. Photograph by Spencer Platt / Getty Images On Tuesday, Donald J. Trump, a Manhattan real-estate developer who promoted his candidacy with the instrument of bigotry, was elected President of the United States. The…

ELKHART, Ind.—This city once had the highest unemployment rate in the nation. Now, though, it’s booming. The once-shuttered factories of the recreational vehicle industry, which is concentrated here, are full of workers, their parking lots packed with employees stepping over snow banks to work long…

(Getty Images/Ringer illustration) A man writhes in his sickbed with a thick bandage obscuring his eyes, but of course we still recognize the face: It’s David Bowie. “Look up here,” he sings, “I’m in heaven,” the first words of a haunted, mournful song and video called “Lazarus,” also the name of an…

President-elect Donald J. Trump’s Twitter post last week that the United States must “ greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability” provoked confusion and anxiety that intensified the next day when he added, in a television interview, “ Let it be an arms race . We will outmatch them at…

This is the second installment in our series examining the intersections of education and entertainment in 2016. Read a previous entry on a documentary , and check back for future pieces on a play , animated movies, and television . It’s no secret that politics has been especially central to…

Scott Olson/Getty Images [S]ooner or later, as the globalist elites seek to drag the country into conflicts and global commitments, preside over the economic pastoralization of the United States, manage the delegitimization of our own culture, and the dispossession of our people, and disregard or…

Glenn Greenwald, pictured in Rio de Janeiro on July 9, 2013. Sergio Moraes/Reuters The release of hacked Democratic National Committee emails last week was followed on Wednesday by Donald Trump’s invitation to Russia to find and release Hillary Clinton’s missing emails. Trump has since claimed that…

Well before the White House or U.S. intelligence agencies publicly blamed the Russian government for interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, two members of Congress did. Back in September, Adam Schiff, the leading Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, and Dianne Feinstein, the…

Donald J. Trump won the white working-class vote over Hillary Clinton by a larger margin than any major-party nominee since World War II. Instead of this considerable achievement inspiring introspection, figures from the heights of journalism , entertainment , literature and the Clinton campaign…

(Ringer illustration) Steve Jobs saved Apple, but it was Tim Cook who made it the most valuable public company in the world. When Cook arrived at Apple in 1998 as senior vice president for worldwide operations, his job was to fix the company’s woefully inefficient supply chain. The new iMac, Apple’s…

Getty Images/Ringer Illustration Winner: Frank Ocean Micah Peters : After Channel Orange , expectations and demand for Frank Ocean were high. But he escaped the pop culture centrifuge and disappeared into the wilderness for four solid years to live out what was left of his 20s in peace: racing rally…

I wrote last year about the bizarre alternate reality game leading up to Frog Fractions 2 . In the ensuing year, leading up to the recent launch of Frog Fractions 2 , the ARG has only gotten more complex and esoteric. If you’ve got a head for this sort of thing, you can read the entire history of…

In a weak moment after a bad breakup, I downloaded Tinder. Soon, I was swiping daily through the never-ending human carousel in an attempt to get over my ex. I'm not exactly proud of it, but ¯\(ツ)/¯. Most of my experiences on the app have been pretty shallow, albeit sexual. It's par for the course…

The first time someone faded me, I did not take it well. I sent the male in question untold number of reproachful, schoolmarmish texts. I ranted to my friends until they couldn’t take it anymore. Later the same week, when the brother of a man I’d slept with months before invited me to a games night…

The electorate has, in its plurality, decided to live in Trump’s world. Source Photograph by Joe Raedle / Getty The election of Donald Trump to the Presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad,…

‘Trump will also be in charge of a terrifying nuclear arsenal.’Photograph: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images I n a little over two months, Donald Trump – after his shocking victory last night – will control a vast, unaccountable national security and military apparatus unparalleled in world history. The…

They said they were facing an economic apocalypse, we offered “retraining” and complained about their white privilege. Is it any wonder we lost? One after another, the dispatches came back from the provinces. The coal mines are gone, the steel mills are closed, the drugs are rampant, the towns are…

Chicago protesters demonstrate the wrong way to respond to the election! Photo by Whitney Dawn Carlson , from Twitter. “In the end it is how you fight, as much as why you fight, that makes your cause good or bad.” — Freeman Dyson I’ve struggled for the past couple of days trying to come to terms…

Vincent Peters You're sitting across from Miles Teller at the Luminary restaurant in Atlanta and trying to figure out if he's a dick. You've just told him, by way of making conversation, that according to legend the champagne coupe in your hand is shaped like Marie Antoinette's left breast, and he…