Virginia Postrel narrates photographs from the Metropolitan Museum of Art's superhero costume exhibit.
Once the province of Garbo and Astaire, movie glamour now comes from Superman, Spider-Man, and Storm.
Ross Douthat, who reviewed Richard Perlstein's new book for the May
Atlantic, interviews the author about the Watergate era and challenges his vision of modern-day America.
A sweeping new social history portrays Richard Nixon as the president his fratricidal country deserved—and perhaps the best we could have hoped for.
Joshua Green traces Al Franken's journey from Saturday Night Live to Senate candidacy.
“Franken has become a good enough campaigner that it’s easy to lose sight of just how audacious a move he’s trying to make. A little more than a year ago, he was playing radio characters like ‘Liam the Loose-Boweled Leprechaun’; a year hence, he could be a sitting U.S. senator. It’s enough to make Bill O’Reilly’s head explode. But Franken doesn’t see it this way. ‘A satirist looks at a situation and sees the inconsistencies and hypocrisies, and he cuts through the baloney and gets to the truth,’ he often says when confronted by skeptics. ‘I think that’s pretty good training for the Senate, don’t you?’”
A conversation with Jeffrey Goldberg
“As a young Zionist in the late 1980s, I was drawn to the idea that Israel represented the most sublime and encompassing expression of Jewishness, so I moved there and joined its army. This decision was unfathomable to many of my new Israeli comrades. One of my commanders asked me, ‘Why would a person leave America to die in Israel?’ Then he asked if we could switch places—he would move to New York and marry a doctor’s daughter, and I would die chasing Palestinians through the casbah of Nablus. I was dreaming Leon Uri’s dreams, but he was having visions out of Goodbye, Columbus.
“I didn’t die, obviously, but his argument bothered me, and still does.”
Also see: Prophesying Palestine: Jeffrey Goldberg looks back at Atlantic predictions from the 1920s and '30s about prospects for a Jewish homeland.
In this two-part series, an Atlantic contributor discusses his
profile of Bill Cosby
and his new memoir, The Beautiful Struggle.
“There was cheering as Cosby went on. Perhaps sensing that he had the crowd, he grew looser. ‘The lower-economic and lower-middle-economic people are not holding their end in this deal,’ he told the audience.
“Cosby disparaged activists who charge the criminal-justice system with racism. ‘These are people going around stealing Coca-Cola. People getting shot in the back of the head over a piece of pound cake,’ Cosby said. ‘Then we all run out and are outraged: “The cops shouldn’t have shot him.” What the hell was he doing with the pound cake in his hand? I wanted a piece of pound cake just as bad as anybody else. And I looked at it and I had no money. And something called parenting said, “If you get caught with it, you’re going to embarrass your mother.“’”
