The Atlantic

The Machine Zone

What an anthropologist's examination of Vegas slot machines reveals about the hours we spend on social networks

There's More to Life Than Being Happy

Meaning comes from the pursuit of more complex things than happiness

The Girl Who Turned to Bone

Unexpected discoveries in the quest to cure an extraordinary skeletal condition show how medically relevant rare diseases can be.

Surviving Anxiety

I've tried therapy, drugs, and booze. Here’s how I came to terms with the nation's most common mental illness.

A Million First Dates

How online romance is threatening monogamy

There's No Such Thing as Everlasting Love

A new book argues that the emotion happens in "micro-moments of positivity resonance."

Social Connection Makes a Better Brain

Recent trends show that people increasingly value material goods over relationships—but neuroscience and evolution say this goes against our nature.

All Can Be Lost

We rely on computers to fly our planes, find our cancers, design our buildings, audit our businesses. That's all well and good. But what happens when the computer fails?

The Third Phase of the Asexuality Movement

Now that he's raised awareness of his lifestyle, David Jay, founder of AVEN, is working to change mainstream beliefs about sex drives.

The Man Who Broke Atlantic City

Don Johnson won nearly $6 million playing blackjack in one night, single-handedly decimating the monthly revenue of Atlantic City’s Tropicana casino. Not long before that, he’d taken the Borgata for $5 million and Caesars for $4 million. Here’s how he did it.

Dumb Kids' Class

The benefits of being underestimated by the nuns at St. Petronille’s

The Cheapest Generation

Why Millennials aren’t buying cars or houses, and what that means for the economy

Pointless Shame

A reflection on the useless taboos that surround female nudity.

A Call for Spelling Standardization (or Is That Standardisation?)

British English, American English, Noah Webster English, or 'New Yorker' English? Let's just pick one and stick with it.

Boys on the Side

The hookup culture that has largely replaced dating on college campuses has been viewed, in many quarters, as socially corrosive and ultimately toxic to women, who seemingly have little choice but to participate. Actually, it is an engine of female progress—one being harnessed and driven by women themselves.

How Headphones Changed the World

If real estate is the ultimate scarce resource, a headphone is a small invisible fence around our minds, creating separation, helping us listen to ourselves

Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?

Social media—from Facebook to Twitter—have made us more densely networked than ever. Yet for all this connectivity, new research suggests that we have never been lonelier (or more narcissistic)—and that this loneliness is making us mentally and physically ill. A report on what the epidemic of loneliness is doing to our souls and our society.

The Evidence for a Vegan Diet

There's plenty of science to justify a plant-based diet, but the stories of personal transformation—curing diabetes, losing 100 pounds, living an active lifestyle—make the biggest impression.

How to Land Your Kid in Therapy

Why the obsession with our kids’ happiness may be dooming them to unhappy adulthoods. A therapist and mother reports.

Learning to Love the (Shallow, Divisive, Unreliable) New Media

Everyone from President Obama to Ted Koppel is bemoaning a decline in journalistic substance, seriousness, and sense of proportion. But the author, a longtime advocate of these values, takes a journey through the digital-media world and concludes there isn’t any point in defending the old ways. Consumer-obsessed, sensationalist, and passionate about their work, digital upstarts are undermining the old media—and they may also be pointing the way to a brighter future.