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For the past couple of years, scientists have watched with growing concern as a massive outbreak of avian flu, also known as H5N1 bird flu, has swept through bird populations. Recently in the U.S., a farm worker and some cattle herds have been infected. I spoke with my colleague Katherine J. Wu, who covered the virus’s spread in North America, about the risk of human infection and how, for animals, this has already been “a pandemic many times over.”

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Welcome to the TikTok meltdown. The Republicans who want American carnage Columbia has resorted to pedagogy theater.

Not a Five-Alarm Fire

Lora Kelley: How does this bird-flu outbreak compare with previous ones?

Katherine J. Wu: When we’re considering the toll on nonhuman animals, this is the largest, most deadly H5N1 outbreak that has been recorded in North America. It has been unfolding slowly for about two and a half years now, but it’s become a gargantuan wave at this point.

Lora: Wow—how alarmed are you by that?

Katherine: I’m medium concerned—and I have been medium concerned for a couple of years now. It’s difficult to gauge the amount of alarm to feel, because it’s so unprecedented. Still, most H5N1 outbreaks in the past have totally fizzled without much consequence, especially in this part of the world.

I am worried because so many species have been getting sick. A huge number of wild birds have been infected, including species that haven’t been affected in the past. And we’ve seen these massive outbreaks in domesticated chickens, which are packed together in farms.

Avian flu is known to be a bird problem. Beyond that, we’ve been seeing these outbreaks in mammals for a couple of years now, which is more concerning because, of course, we are also mammals. Humans seem to be potentially susceptible to infection, but at the same time, it would take quite a lot for this to become another big human-flu pandemic.

Lora: Should we be concerned about getting sick?

Katherine: People should be vigilant and paying attention to the news. But right now, as you and I are talking, there is still not a huge risk to people. You don’t get a pandemic unless you have a pathogen that spreads very, very easily among people, and there’s no evidence so far that this virus has mutated to that point.

There have been some human cases globally so far, but it’s a very small number. They seem to have been cases where someone was highly exposed to the virus in domesticated animals. People got sick, but they didn’t pass it to someone else.

I’m definitely not saying that person-to-person transmission can’t happen eventually, but there’s a pretty big chasm between someone getting infected and someone being able to efficiently pass the virus on. It is concerning that we continue to see more mammal species affected by H5N1, including species that have a lot of close contact with humans. But this is not a five-alarm fire so far.

Lora: How will people’s lives be affected?

Katherine: The virus has already affected our lives. Egg prices went completely bonkers in 2022 and early 2023, and over the course of this outbreak, more than 90 million domestic poultry have died. It’s not that all of those birds got sick—when this virus breaks out on chicken farms, it’s generally considered good practice to cull the chickens to halt the spread. Still, when you have that many chickens dying, egg prices are going to go up.

We’re probably not on track to see that with cows anytime soon. Even though this virus has now been detected in dairy cows, they aren’t getting wildly sick, and transmission doesn’t seem as efficient. I don’t think we’re going to be in a situation where we’re killing all of our dairy cows and no one can get milk.

Lora: The FDA announced yesterday that genetic evidence of this bird-flu virus had been found in samples of pasteurized milk. Is it still safe to drink milk?

Katherine: So far, the answer is: generally, yes, if it’s been pasteurized. Pasteurization is a process by which milk is treated with heat so that it will kill a whole bunch of pathogens, including bacteria and viruses, and H5N1 is thought to be vulnerable to this. Also, researchers have been working to test cows so they can figure out which ones are sick. Only milk from healthy cows is authorized to enter the general food supply, though the trick will be finding all the cows that are actually infected. For now, the main ways that this virus will affect us will be indirect.

Lora: Is there anything that can be done to curb the spread among wild animals?

Katherine: For the animal world, this has already been a “pandemic” many times over. It has been truly devastating in that respect. So many wild birds, sea lions, seals, and other creatures have died, and it’s difficult to see how people can effectively intervene out in nature. There have been very few cases in which endangered animals have received vaccines because there’s a real possibility that their populations could be 100 percent wiped out by this virus.

For most other animals in the wild, there’s not a lot that can be done, except for people to pay attention to where the virus is spreading. The hope is that most animal populations will be resilient enough to get through this and develop some form of immunity.

Lora: Responses to COVID became very politicized. How might the aftermath of those mitigation measures shape how people respond to this virus, especially if it becomes a greater threat to humans?

Katherine: We’re so fresh off the worst days of COVID that if people were asked to buckle down or get a new vaccine, I suspect that a lot of them would be like, Not again. There is still a lot of mitigation fatigue, and many people are sick of thinking about respiratory viruses and taking measures to prevent outbreaks. And, certainly, people have lost a lot of trust in public health over the past four years.

That said, H5N1 is still a flu, and people are familiar with that type of virus. We have a long history of using flu vaccines, and the government has experience making a pandemic vaccine, keeping that stockpile, and getting it out to the public. That gives me hope that at least some people will be amenable to taking the necessary preventative measures, so any potential bird-flu outbreak among humans would not turn into COVID 2.0.

Related:

Bird flu leaves the world with an existential choice. Bird flu has never done this before.

Today’s News

President Joe Biden signed into law a bipartisan foreign-aid package that includes aid for Ukraine, Israel, and U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific, and a measure that forces TikTok’s parent company to sell the social-media app or face an outright ban. The U.S. Supreme Court seems divided over whether a federal law can require hospitals to provide access to emergency abortions and override state-level abortion bans. George Santos, the embattled former New York representative facing multiple charges of fraud, ended his independent bid for a U.S. House seat on Long Island.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: Tesla is not the next Ford, Matteo Wong writes. It’s the next Con Ed.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani

Why Did Cars Get So Expensive?

By Annie Lowrey

Inflation, finally, has cooled off. Prices have increased 2.5 percent over the past year, down from increases as high as 7 percent during the early pandemic. Rents are high but stabilizing. The cost of groceries is ticking up, not surging, and some goods, such as eggs, are actually getting cheaper. But American consumers are still stretching to afford one big-ticket item: their cars.

The painful cost of vehicle ownership doesn’t just reflect strong demand driven by low unemployment, pandemic-related supply-chain weirdness, and high interest rates. It reflects how awful cars are for American households and American society as a whole.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

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Culture Break

Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Source: Ashok Kumar / Getty.

Listen. Taylor Swift’s music often returns to the same motifs: pathetic fallacy, the passing of time, the mythology of love. Her latest album shows how these themes have calcified in her work, Sophie Gilbert writes.

Look. Take a photo tour of several of Chile’s national parks, which protect many endangered species, wild landscapes, and natural wonders.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Updated at 6:17 p.m. ET on April 16, 2024

Donald Trump is among the most famous and most polarizing people alive. The task of selecting 12 impartial jurors who can render a fair verdict in the criminal trial of a former president is a first for America’s court system.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Welcome to pricing hell. Gaza is dividing Democrats. David Frum: Why Biden should not debate Trump

A Reasonable Middle Ground

Yesterday, jury selection began in Donald Trump’s first criminal trial, and today, seven jurors were selected. The New York trial, centered on accusations that Trump falsified business records to conceal a hush-money payment to the porn star Stormy Daniels, may be the only of Trump’s various legal cases to wrap up before the November election. Many Americans are set on their hopes for the trial’s outcome before it begins, which makes finding impartial jurors a real challenge. Ninety-six potential jurors were called into the courtroom yesterday—an usually large number—and more than half of them quickly raised their hand to say they couldn’t be impartial and thus needed to be dismissed. Some prospective jurors who had indicated yesterday that they could be impartial changed their mind today.

The task of the judge is not necessarily to select people who have no feelings about Trump—that’s near-impossible. Rather, the point is to select people who can be impartial (about both Trump and other potential witnesses), listen to evidence, and follow the law and the rules given by the court, Sharon Fairley, a professor from practice at the University of Chicago Law School, told me. The jurors selected so far, whose names haven’t been released, reportedly include a young corporate lawyer, a man originally from Ireland who works in sales, and a young Black woman who said that some of her friends have strong opinions about the former president but that she is not a political person.

Criminal convictions, Fairley reminded me, require a unanimous decision from the jury. So Trump’s lawyers are likely hoping for even a single holdout—a person who is independent in their thinking and perhaps not a stickler for following rules. The government’s lawyers, for their part, are likely looking for people who are intelligent and discerning, who believe in the rule of law, and who are able to see through the “smoke and mirrors” that the Trump defense may introduce to the courtroom, Fairley said. Lawyers from either side can dismiss 10 potential jurors for any reason (so far, both Trump’s lawyers and the prosecution have done this with six potential jurors). Beyond that, Fairley explained, the judge has discretion in selecting people who he feels could credibly set aside personal feelings to render a fair judgment.

Trump has held tight to his narrative that this trial is a politically motivated “witch hunt,” a tactic that will only add to the court’s unique challenges here. Usually, the prosecution is more likely to generate publicity about criminal trials than the defense, Valerie Hans, a law professor at Cornell University, told me in an email—most defendants do not “have the public microphone of Donald Trump.” Already, Hans noted, one prosecutor, Joshua Steinglass, has been trying to draw a distinction for prospective jurors between what they have seen about the trial in the news and the actual evidence that they will go on to see.

Part of the court’s challenge is weeding out people who are actually able to be impartial versus those who say they are because they want to get on the jury for their own reasons, James J. Sample, a law professor at Hofstra University, told me in an email. Ideological jurors could come from either side, Sample noted: “Yes, Manhattan is mostly blue. But might there be one true believer who wants to cement themselves as a MAGA hero? Absolutely.”

How each prospective juror voted will be of interest to lawyers on either side, but it likely won’t be the deciding factor in who gets placed on the jury—and lawyers aren’t allowed to ask that question directly. Justice Juan M. Merchan’s 42 questions for would-be jurors, including ones about whether they are part of advocacy groups or have attended campaign events for Trump (or anti-Trump groups), “suggest an attempt to find a reasonable middle ground here—not ruling out anyone who has some views on Trump or disqualifying them based on their vote in 2020 or 2016, but also making sure they’re not rah-rah activists either for or against,” my colleague David Graham told me.

There’s also a simple irony at the core of this whole process: The type of person best suited to be a thoughtful and credible juror in this case will almost by definition know something about Donald Trump. “A hypothetical juror who had never heard of Mr. Trump at all,” Sample acknowledged, “would be such an uninformed citizen as to be of suspect legitimacy from the jump.”

The trial is expected to last about six weeks (though it could take longer). After the rest of the jury is chosen, the trial proceedings will kick off in earnest, with former Trump-world figures including Michael Cohen and possibly even Stormy Daniels herself expected to testify. But in the meantime, the public and the defendant (who seemed to nod off on the first day) will need to sit through more of the same. As David told me, “Monday’s start to the trial was both huge in historic terms and mostly very boring in substance.”

Related:

Trump’s alternate-reality criminal trial The cases against Trump: a guide

Today’s News

The U.S. Supreme Court justices considered whether the Justice Department can charge January 6 defendants with violating an obstruction statute—a decision that could affect the election-interference case against Donald Trump. Israel’s military chief said yesterday that Iran’s recent strike “will be met with a response” but did not specify a timeline or the scale of a retaliatory attack. A federal appeals court ruled that a West Virginia law, which bans transgender girls and women from playing on certain sports teams, violates the Title IX rights of a teen athlete.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

What Happens When You’ve Been on Ozempic for 20 Years?

By Gary Taubes

Of all the wonder drugs in the history of medicine, insulin may be the closest parallel, in both function and purpose, to this century’s miracle of a metabolic drug: the GLP-1 agonist. Sold under now-familiar brand names including Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro, these new medications for diabetes and obesity have been hailed as a generational breakthrough that may one day stand with insulin therapy among “the greatest advances in the annals of chronic disease,” as The New Yorker put it in December.

But if that analogy is apt—and the correspondences are many—then a more complicated legacy for GLP-1 drugs could be in the works. Insulin, for its part, may have changed the world of medicine, but it also brought along a raft of profound, unintended consequences …

With the sudden rise of GLP-1 drugs in this decade, I worry that a similar set of transformations could occur.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

How the Biden administration messed up FAFSA Salman Rushdie strikes back. The myth of the mobile millionaire Trump’s presidential-immunity theory is a threat to the chain of command.

Culture Break

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Courtesy of the author; FPG / Getty; Tom Kelley / Getty.

Care for a loved one. With the right amount of self-awareness, you can learn parenting lessons from raising a dog, Kate Cray writes.

Watch. Recent prestige TV shows have featured difficult men: heroes who are resolutely alienated, driven to acts of violence they don’t want to inflict and can’t enjoy, Sophie Gilbert writes.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Israel’s response to Iran’s attack this past weekend signals an “astonishing win,” my colleague Graeme Wood wrote yesterday. With help from several allies, Israel managed to fend off what could have been a mass-casualty event (though one 7-year-old girl sustained life-threatening injuries). But the attack was also “a gift to the hapless Benjamin Netanyahu,” Graeme argues. I called Graeme in Tel Aviv yesterday to talk about how the prime minister could use this moment as an opportunity to revitalize Gaza negotiations—and why he’s not likely to do so.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Gavin Newsom can’t help himself. Trump’s willing accomplice The RFK Jr. strategy clicks into focus. What the upper-middle-class left doesn’t get about inflation

A Realignment

Isabel Fattal: You wrote yesterday that Israel’s response to Iran’s attack signals an operational and strategic win. How so?

Graeme Wood: For the past two weeks, since it struck Iran’s consulate in Damascus, killing multiple officers and senior officials of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Israel has been on anxious footing waiting to figure out how Iran was going to attack. There was some doubt, I think, in ordinary people’s minds about how Israel would handle whatever Iran was going to do next. What Iran eventually decided to do was to send more than 300 drones and missiles toward Israel. And Israel not only survived that, but by dawn the next day, the country was up and running as if nothing had happened. The ability for Israel to weather the attack was beyond anyone’s expectations—both as a matter of technical ability and also as a kind of moral ability, to have life go on after what Iran promised was going to be a serious challenge.

Isabel: You write that this could be the moment for Netanyahu to tell his more militaristic right flank to stand down.

Graeme: The way that a lot of people naturally understand these types of attacks is as a matter of tit for tat. Of course there are many in Israel who think, We need to respond in kind. That is the view from Netanyahu’s right. But it is not the most productive way that the aftermath of this attack can be used.

Whenever something big like this happens, it’s almost impossible to put oneself into the mindset of 24 hours ago. But 24 hours ago, many of us would have said, Israel’s in a horrible muddle because it has waged an absolutely brutal war in Gaza. It has not succeeded in dislodging Hamas. It has not gotten its hostages back. There is a humanitarian catastrophe. And there is no negotiation that’s anywhere near happening that could redeem Israel from this pickle that it’s partially put itself in.

Now there is this kind of realignment of the security paradigm. Could a creative, thoughtful, competent government use that realignment to move forward from what seemed like an intractable position in Gaza? Yes. There are angles that a government could take so that tomorrow is not like yesterday. Part of that includes just acknowledging, where did this success come from? The success came in part because Israel, over the past several years, has created what turns out to be a pretty durable and effective alliance with the governments of Arab states in the region. We’re talking about Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Without those states, the prospects for having only one casualty in Israel from the Iranian attack would have been nil. That means that there’s gratitude to be doled out to those states, and there are compromises that can be made as part of that expression of gratitude.

Isabel: So you think that now there could be an opening for negotiation that didn’t exist before the attacks?

Graeme: Yes, exactly. The reason that opening didn’t exist previously is that Netanyahu has consistently tried to mollify those to his right who have maximalist views of the post-Gaza situation—maximalist views meaning that, at the end of the day, there’s not just no Hamas, but no Palestinian government or security force whatsoever in Gaza, and no Arab security force whatsoever. That’s not a reasonable hope for the future, and it has prevented Netanyahu and his government from considering any reasonable future at all.

Among the things that they could have considered are creative solutions that would have involved these Arab allies who have populations, as well as governments, who are not thrilled by what they’re seeing in Gaza. And in the past 24 hours, Israel’s need for those countries has been demonstrated. It’s a moment where a trusted, courageous leader could step in and perhaps create some kind of change in policy that would allow the Gaza war to, if not conclude, then come closer to its conclusion.

Isabel: What’s Netanyahu’s window to do something like this?

Graeme: If you see what’s being spoken about in Israel, it’s Netanyahu being pressured to retaliate. This is not an incomprehensible command. If there were 300 drones sent toward any country, the population of that country would say, We have to do something material to cause those who sent them to regret having done so. It’s unclear whether Netanyahu is going to take that bait, or do what a great politician has to do sometimes, which is to say to people, You’re not going to get what you want; you’re going to get what you need. And what we need as a country is something other than this. That’s what the situation really calls for, and it’s a call that would probably have to be answered in, I would say, the next week.

Isabel: What else should readers keep in mind as they’re following this story?

Graeme: One thing that I think will be a nagging question for a lot of people is, What did the Iranians want to happen? Even if they didn’t want massive death and destruction, what they did was an unambiguous act of aggression. But another possibility, which is reasonable to consider, is that they didn’t expect most of those drones and missiles to get through. They needed to retaliate, and as soon as they did so they said, Okay, we’re done here. Even before the missiles and drones would’ve reached their targets, they said that. So we have to consider the possibility that this was a half-hearted attack.

Isabel: This attack is also unprecedented in a few ways, isn’t it?

Graeme: They’re attacking from Iranian territory. And if you attack from Iranian territory, you invite retaliation on Iranian territory, which is a huge change from the status quo ante. This really is a before-and-after moment. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander said this publicly, which means it’s probably an official statement of doctrine now: From now on, if Israel attacks Iranian interests, figures, and citizens anywhere, we will retaliate from Iran. If that’s what they’re going to do, that’s a new disposition.

Related:

What will Netanyahu do now? The coalition of the malevolent

Today’s News

Jury selection is under way on the first day of Donald Trump’s hush-money trial in Manhattan; it marks the first time a former president has been on trial for criminal charges. The civil war in Sudan has now reached the end of its first year. More than 14,000 people have been killed, according to some estimates; last month, the UN warned that nearly 5 million people could soon suffer a “catastrophic” level of hunger. The FBI opened a criminal probe into the recent collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge. The investigation will cover, in part, whether the ship’s crew knew their vessel had “serious system problems” before leaving port, according to The Washington Post.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: Savor your favorites while you can—the ongoing cocoa shortage may change the future of chocolate forever, Isabel Fattal writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Philip Shribman, in a college photo from around 1940; behind it, an excerpt from a wartime letter he sent to the sociology professor George F. Theriault Sources: Courtesy of David Shribman; Wieland Teixeira / Getty

The Man Who Died for the Liberal Arts

By David M. Shribman

Philip Alvan Shribman, a recent graduate of Dartmouth and just a month away from his 22nd birthday, was not worldly but understood that he had been thrust into a world conflict that was more than a contest of arms. At stake were the life, customs, and values that he knew. He was a quiet young man, taciturn in the old New England way, but he had much to say in this letter, written from the precipice of battle to a brother on the precipice of adulthood …

He acknowledged from the start that “this letter won’t do much good”—a letter that, in the eight decades since it was written, has been read by three generations of my family. In it, Phil Shribman set out the virtues and values of the liberal arts at a time when universities from coast to coast were transitioning into training grounds for America’s armed forces.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

Getty

Please laugh. The most hated sound on television is the laugh track, Jacob Stern writes. Now it has all but disappeared.

Watch. The third season of Bluey (out now on Disney+) might be signaling the end for the beloved children’s show, Sophie Gilbert writes.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Pardon the interruption, but I’m breaking into our regular programming to share some good news about The Atlantic.

First, here are three new stories that are worth your time:

The coming birth-control revolution The politics of gun safety are changing. There is more good than evil in this country.

Excellent News

For the third consecutive year, the American Society of Magazine Editors has bestowed upon The Atlantic its top prize, the National Magazine Award for General Excellence. This is a tremendous honor. Only one other magazine has been awarded this prize three times in a row, and that was more than 25 years ago. The competition was tough. We were up against a raft of excellent magazines: The New Yorker, New York magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and The Economist’s 1843 magazine.

It is particularly gratifying to note that this was not the only award The Atlantic won last night. Three of our staff writers won National Magazine Awards for their stellar work: Tim Alberta, one of America’s most gifted feature writers, received the top prize in profile writing, for his incisive and influential profile of Chris Licht, the now-former head of CNN. Sophie Gilbert, a critic of exceptional discernment and acuity, won the top prize in reviews and criticism, for her brilliant work on pop culture and feminism. And Jennifer Senior won the top prize in columns and essays for her beautifully elegiac story about her aunt Adele, who was institutionalized by her family as a toddler because of an intellectual disability and left to wither for decades in terrifying facilities before landing in a supportive group home in middle age. Tim and Sophie were first-time finalists for the National Magazine Award. For Jen, this was a repeat trip to the podium; she has been a finalist each of the past three years, and she won the National Magazine Award in Feature Writing two years ago, for her story on the aftermath of 9/11 (it’s worth noting that she also won the Pulitzer Prize for that story). The general view across our industry, one that I endorse, is that Jen is doing some of the best writing in the English language today.

I’m also pleased to let you know that The Atlantic won the prize for best print illustration, for the portrait of our senior editor Jenisha Watts, by Didier Viodé. Jenisha herself was a first-time finalist in feature writing. Her gorgeous and brave cover story, “Jenisha From Kentucky,” is one of the best personal essays The Atlantic has ever published.

Our magazine’s special issue on Reconstruction, edited by Vann R. Newkirk II and John Swansburg, was a finalist in the single-topic-issue category, the first time The Atlantic has been so recognized. This issue was extraordinary. If you missed it, now is a good time to visit its stories (and an original play, This Ghost of Slavery, by our contributing writer Anna Deavere Smith).

All in all (and I apologize for the unseemly bragging), The Atlantic brought home more National Magazine Awards than any other publication.

Last year, when we won the prize for general excellence for the second consecutive time, I assumed we wouldn’t be able to keep up this streak. But my generally excellent colleagues keep outdoing themselves, and so the judges, though perhaps predisposed to grant this prize to a magazine with New York in its title, made what I consider to be the inevitably correct decision.

As some of you know, The Atlantic has had a run of positive news lately. The biggest development: We just recently crossed the 1-million-subscription threshold. This has never happened in our 167-year history. We are also, again, a profitable magazine company. This is important not merely because these developments allow us to pursue the most ambitious journalism possible but because we hope to show the world that it is possible to have an economically self-sustaining print-and-digital publication that is committed to producing only the best journalism. As I wrote last year, we realized that the way to differentiate The Atlantic in a crowded field is to make stories only of the highest quality and ambition. We sometimes fall short of our objective, but not for lack of trying.

Tomorrow, a return to your regular newsletter programming. For now, let me thank you, our readers and subscribers, for your loyalty and your commitment to the ideals of The Atlantic.

Read all of our National Magazine Award winners and finalists here.

Today’s News

A 7.4-magnitude earthquake hit Taiwan today, killing at least nine people and injuring more than 900 others. It is the strongest earthquake the country has experienced in the past 25 years. The University of Texas at Austin laid off at least 60 employees who had worked in roles related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, the Austin American-Statesman reported yesterday. Texas passed an anti-DEI law last summer that went into effect in January. To replenish its forces, Ukraine lowered its conscription age from 27 to 25 for men and removed some draft exemptions.

Dispatches

Notes From the Editor in Chief: Republicans such as Rob Portman could have ended Donald Trump’s political career, Jeffrey Goldberg writes. They chose not to. Work in Progress: Millions of Americans stopped going to church in the past 25 years, Derek Thompson writes. They seem to have found no alternative method to build a sense of community. The Weekly Planet: Rising temperatures could push millions of people north, Abrahm Lustgarten writes. These climate boomtowns could have lasting implications for America.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Apple TV+

If Teenage Girls Ran America

By Shirley Li

Early in the new documentary Girls State, one of the participants in the titular leadership program for high schoolers chuckles after learning the camp song. She feels silly practicing the flashy choreography and rousing lyrics when the weeklong intensive is meant for building a mock government with other civic-minded teenagers. “If the boys don’t have to do this,” she says, “I’m going to be pissed.”

As it turns out, the boys don’t—and she’s not the only one miffed about the disparity between the sibling programs run by the veterans association American Legion. Girls State, which begins streaming on Apple TV+ this Friday, is a follow-up to the acclaimed 2020 documentary Boys State … But Girls State is much more than a gender-flipped version of the previous project. Instead, the film offers a sharp study of how a supposedly empowering environment can simultaneously inspire and limit aspiring female leaders.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

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Culture Break

Parrish Lewis / Netflix

Don’t look away. “Sometimes, the sexiest thing two people can do on-screen is simply look at each other,” Sophie Gilbert wrote last year. What would we lose if Hollywood did away with intimate sex scenes?

Read. These seven books are best enjoyed while one relaxes at a park, a beach, or an open-air café on a sunny day.

Play our daily crossword.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

For the third consecutive year, The Atlantic won the top honor of General Excellence for a News, Sports, and Entertainment publication at the 2024 National Magazine Awards.

Below is a list of the stories that received recognition from the American Society of Magazine Editors:

Winner: Profile Writing

Inside the Meltdown at CNN

Mark Peterson / Redux for The Atlantic

By Tim Alberta

CEO Chris Licht felt he was on a mission to restore the network’s reputation for serious journalism. How did it all go wrong?

Winner: Columns and Essays

The Ones We Sent Away

Photo-illustration by Oliver Munday. Courtesy of Rona Senior.

By Jennifer Senior

For The Atlantic’s September 2023 issue, Senior wrote about her aunt Adele, who was institutionalized as a toddler because of an intellectual disability, and the life she could have lived.

Winner: Reviews and Criticism

“The Death of the Sex Scene,” “Porn Set Women Up From the Start,” and “Madonna Forever”

Starz

By Sophie Gilbert

A collection of probing essays exploring womanhood in pop culture.

Finalist:  Feature Writing

Jenisha From Kentucky

Didier Viodé

By Jenisha Watts

When Watts moved to New York to pursue journalism, she hid her past. For The Atlantic’s October 2023 cover story, she wrote about her tumultuous childhood in Kentucky, and the freedom that writing offered her.

Finalist: Single-Topic Issue:

To Reconstruct the Nation

Jon Key

The Atlantic’s December 2023 issue was led by Vann R. Newkirk II and included pieces from Lonnie G. Bunch III, Drew Gilpin Faust, Eric Foner, Adam Harris, Peniel E. Joseph, Vann R. Newkirk II, and Jordan Virtue on America’s most radical experiment. Plus: a new play by Anna Deavere Smith, David W. Blight annotates Frederick Douglass, and more.

Winner: Best Print Illustration

Jenisha From Kentucky

Didier Viodé

Illustration by Didier Viodé

For the third consecutive year, The Atlantic was awarded the top honor of General Excellence for a News, Sports, and Entertainment publication at the 2024 National Magazine Awards, the most prestigious category in the annual honors from the American Society of Magazine Editors.

The Atlantic also won reporting awards for “Inside the Meltdown at CNN,” by staff writer Tim Alberta; “The Ones We Sent Away,” the September cover by staff writer Jennifer Senior; and cultural reviews and criticism by staff writer Sophie Gilbert. It also was a finalist for “Jenisha From Kentucky,” the October cover story by senior editor Jenisha Watts; and “To Reconstruct the Nation,” a special issue in December that reexamined Reconstruction and the enduring consequences of its failure.

Editor in Chief Jeffrey Goldberg said: “Once again, our team has shown themselves to be the best in the business. It is deeply gratifying to receive this recognition again.”

More on the winners and finalists follows:

Staff writer Tim Alberta won in Profile Writing for “Inside the Meltdown at CNN,” an in-depth profile of CNN’s former CEO Chris Licht. Alberta had been meeting with Licht throughout the course of his tenure, and for this story spoke with nearly 100 CNN staffers. The report was explosive and dominated news cycles.

In Reviews and Criticism, staff writer Sophie Gilbert won for three articles: “The Death of the Sex Scene,” “Porn Set Women Up From the Start,” and “Madonna Forever.” Gilbert was also a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Criticism, and is the author of the recent Atlantic Edition title On Womanhood: Bodies, Literature, Choice, which is a timely, probing essay collection of her writings exploring womanhood in pop culture.

Staff writer Jennifer Senior won in the Columns & Essays category for “The Ones We Sent Away,” which was the cover of the September 2023 issue. Senior unraveled the story of her aunt Adele, who was born in 1951 with various intellectual disabilities and was sent away to an institution when she was younger than 2 years old. Senior then explored the ways in which the improved care and facilities in the latter part of Adele’s life helped restore her humanity and identity––defying the expectations that were placed on her as a child.

Staff writer Jenisha Watts was a finalist for Feature Writing. In “Jenisha From Kentucky,” which was the cover of the October 2023 issue, Jenisha wrote with remarkable candor about growing up in a crack house, and how she survived it. Watts writes that she was always a “collector of words,” and found solace and escape in her deep love of books; she eventually found her way to the literary and journalistic world of New York, where she tried to hide her past. It is, as Goldberg said in an editor’s note, “one of the most heartbreaking, insightful, and emotionally resonant stories in recent memory.”

Nominated for Single-Topic Issue was “To Reconstruct the Nation,” from December 2023. The centerpiece of the issue, which was led by senior editor Vann R. Newkirk II, was a new feature-length play by the actor, playwright, and Atlantic contributing writer Anna Deavere Smith, which appears along with essays by writers, historians, and scholars including Secretary of the Smithsonian Lonnie G. Bunch III, Jordan Virtue, Peniel E. Joseph, Drew Gilpin Faust, and Eric Foner.

For the second straight year, The Atlantic earned the honor for Best Print Illustration, this year for the October cover portrait of Jenisha Watts by Didier Viodé.

In the past year, The Atlantic’s journalistic excellence has driven growth across the company, including the recent announcement that the company surpassed 1 million subscriptions and is profitable. Last month, it published “The Great American Novels,” an ambitious project collecting the most consequential novels of the past 100 years. The April cover story, “The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending,” by Franklin Foer, looks at how the rise of anti-Semitism on both the right and the left threatens to end an era of unprecedented safety and prosperity for Jewish Americans.

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