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Exploring the American idea through ambitious, essential reporting and storytelling. Of no party or clique since 1857.
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Today, parents have access to apps that can track when their infant breathes, what their toddler eats in day care, and how quickly their teenager is driving on the highway, Sarah Zhang writes in The Atlantic’s December cover story.
But omniscience doesn’t necessarily mean more safety—just the perception of it, one expert told Zhang. All of this tracking might be worsening parents’ anxiety, inhibiting children’s ability to develop independence, and even causing rifts among family members.
Teenagers today are less likely to get a job, go on a date, or drive than previous generations—“all of which involve some small but tangible risk or uncertainty in the physical world,” Zhang writes. “Their lives have turned inward, and when they do venture out, they’re tracked.” It’s hard to imagine that a diminished tolerance for risk and uncertainty in teenagers is not affecting their well-being, Zhang continues.
Faith, a recent college graduate, told Zhang that her own mother watched her closely during high school on the location-tracking app Life360. She would call when Faith was driving on the highway to lecture her about her speed, and one time even showed up at Faith’s friend’s house because she didn’t recognize an address she saw on the app. It was embarrassing, Faith told Zhang, but her friend wasn’t particularly shocked; this kind of thing happens when everyone is being tracked.
At the link in our bio, she examines the consequences of constant surveillance.
🎨: @miguelporlan
10 Nov 2026
New technologies allow parents to surveil their children from birth into adulthood—and they’re rewiring childhood and parenting, Sarah Zhang reports.
“No one warned me, when I became a parent, about all the apps that would colonize my phone,” Zhang writes. The app for the baby monitor, the app for the smart bassinet, the app for preschool. “Parents with children older than mine tell me they obsess over grades, which are updated instantly with each new assignment or quiz. They watch their kids via the camera on their Ring doorbell; they monitor text messages … But most of all, parents track their kids everywhere they go,” Zhang continues. Young children might have an AirTag slipped into their backpack; for kids old enough to have their own smartwatch or phone, the GPS is built right in. Three-quarters of parents with teenagers ages 14 to 17 had access to their kids’ location data, according to one study.
“Our phones promise us a kind of omniscience from the moment a kid is born,” Zhang continues. “Even when we are physically apart, we remain digitally tethered. But as parents, we are supposed to undergo our own transformation as our children grow, relinquishing the knowledge and control we once held.”
For The Atlantic’s December cover story, she examines the consequences of constant surveillance and talks with experts trying to help parents and kids manage the anxiety that comes with granting children independence.
Read more at the link in our bio.
🎨: @miguelporlan
09 Nov 2026
On March 11, Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, received a connection request on Signal, an encrypted messaging service, from a user identified as “Michael Waltz” (Michael Waltz is the name of President Donald Trump’s national security adviser). Goldberg did not assume it was the real Michael Waltz—it is not at all uncommon these days for nefarious actors to try to induce journalists to share information that could be used against them.
Still, Goldberg accepted the connection request, hoping that this was the actual national security adviser, and that he wanted to chat about some important or newsworthy matter. Two days later, Goldberg was added to a Signal chat group called the “Houthi PC small group.”
In all, the group had 18 members, including “MAR” (the secretary of state is Marco Antonio Rubio), “JD Vance,” “TG” (presumably Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence), “Scott B” (apparently Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent), and “Pete Hegseth.”
On March 14, Goldberg witnessed a detailed policy debate (screenshots of which are shared above). The next morning, explicit operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing, were shared by the account labeled “Pete Hegseth.”
After receiving the first messages, Goldberg still couldn’t believe that the text chain could be legitimate. But once bombs dropped in Yemen and members of the group celebrated in the chat, Goldberg concluded that the chat was almost certainly real. Today, a spokesperson for the National Security Council confirmed that the Signal group was, in fact, authentic.
“I have never seen a breach quite like this,” Goldberg writes. By coordinating national-security-related action over Signal, Waltz may have violated the Espionage Act, which governs the handling of “national defense” information, according to several national-security lawyers interviewed by Atlantic staff writer Shane Harris for this story. Waltz may have also violated federal records law by setting some of the messages to automatically delete after a certain amount of time. Read more at the link in our bio.
24 Mar 2025
Tens of thousands of Mississippi voters were marked as inactive—and now a Senate seat could come down to a legal battle, Toluse Olorunnipa and Yvonne Wingett Sanchez report.
Last summer, Mississippi began an effort to “continue to build on the accuracy of Mississippi’s voter rolls and strengthen the integrity of elections,” as Republican Secretary of State Michael Watson put it. “Using data from the credit-reporting agency Experian, the state scrutinized its list of registered voters, searching for anyone who may have moved, left the state, or died,” Olorunnipa and Wingett Sanchez write.
On Election Day, many voters whose registration was switched to inactive status—a crucial step toward purging them from the rolls—“showed up at the polls, only to be told that they were not properly registered. Their best option was to fill out an affidavit ballot, a more involved process that increases the likelihood that a vote will not count,” Olorunnipa and Wingett Sanchez continue.
Now the Democratic challenger, Scott Colom, narrowly leads the Republican incumbent, Cindy Hyde-Smith. “And voting-rights advocates say that Mississippi, a state with a long history of voter suppression and discrimination, has once again undermined one of its citizens’ most sacred rights,” the writers report.
“Experian now says that its data were never supposed to be used to scrub Mississippi’s voter rolls in this way,” Olorunnipa and Wingett Sanchez write. “A postelection legal battle over the affidavit ballots is intensifying, as lawyers from the campaigns and voting-rights groups argue over how those ballots should be treated. Hyde-Smith’s campaign has called for affidavit ballots to be separated from regular ballots, suggesting that it may attempt to challenge their validity in the days ahead. Colom’s campaign has said there is no legal basis for treating affidavit ballots any differently once they are processed. The back-and-forth could be a precursor to a legal battle in which the courts could ultimately decide whether Colom or Hyde-Smith prevails.”
Read more at the link in our bio.
📸: Aron Smith / Jackson State University / Getty
10 Nov 2026
Congress could use public criminal trials to hold ICE officers accountable, the former DHS official Scott Shuchart tells @anneapplebaum2000, adding, “people like me prefer the Nuremberg model.”
Watch the first episode of the new season of Autocracy in America at the link in our bio.
10 Nov 2026
Stephen Miller will no longer recuse himself from matters of AI and space policy after his wife, the podcaster Katie Miller, spent the weekend “rearranging her own life” to avoid conflicts of interest, Michael Scherer reports.
Read more at the link in our bio.
📸: Saul Loeb / AFP / Getty
10 Nov 2026
Yesterday, Representative Thomas Massie, a Republican, introduced articles of impeachment against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Marie-Rose Sheinerman, Madison Hahamy, and Jack Rodriquez-Vars report on the move, which could force a vote as early as this evening.
Massie’s argument is that if Republicans like him don’t hold the secretary of defense accountable now for his various abuses of power, Democrats will in January, Sheinerman, Hahamy, and Rodriquez-Vars report.
This is Massie’s second attempt to impeach Hegseth, following an unsuccessful effort in September. Instead of allowing a vote at the time, House Speaker Mike Johnson sent lawmakers home. “This time could end differently: Although most Republicans are likely to close ranks behind the GOP defense secretary in the middle of a war, only a few defections would create a majority for impeachment,” the Atlantic writers continue.
At the link in our bio, they break down the eight articles of impeachment against Hegseth, which focus on four primary issues.
📸: Evelyn Hockstein / Reuters
10 Nov 2026
JetBlue has long found itself in the mushy middle of the airline industry, somewhere between discount airlines and big legacy carriers—but that sweet spot in the market is shrinking, James Surowiecki writes.
At the link in our bio, read more about how the company went from an early success story to struggling—and why it might not yet be doomed.
📸: Charly Triballeau / AFP / Getty
10 Nov 2026
President Trump rallied his base around releasing the Epstein files, only to bungle their disclosure, stymie investigations, and watch Democrats steal his playbook, Sarah Fitzpatrick reports. At the link in our bio, read more about how the once-motivating issue helped doom Republicans.
🎨: @adamomaida / The Atlantic. Source: Zuma Press Wire / Reuters.
09 Nov 2026
Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, Sikhs, and others around the world are celebrating the five-day festival of Diwali. Observers offer prayers and use fireworks, lanterns, and colorful lights to celebrate the triumph of light over darkness, good over evil, and knowledge over ignorance.
See more images at the link in our bio.
📸: Thein Zaw / AP; Indranil Mukherjee / AFP / Getty; Nick Lachance / Toronto Star / Getty; Saddman Zaman / ZUMA / Reuters; Rajesh Kumar Singh / AP; Akhtar Soomro / Reuters; Kevin R. Wexler / NorthJersey.com / USA Today / Reuters; Mahesh Kumar A. / AP
09 Nov 2026
Now that they’ve retaken Congress, Democrats will have to navigate a painful divide over how to handle America’s relationship with Israel, Gabby Deutch reports. She spoke with Michigan voters about the issue.
Read more at the link in our bio.
09 Nov 2026
This weekend’s “Saturday Night Live” assessed the midterms by acknowledging the ways in which American politics today is a battle for attention—and a test of one’s ability to steal a scene, Megan Garber writes:
📸: Will Heath / NBC
09 Nov 2026
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