This year, the Atlantic staff writer Anne Applebaum was awarded the German Book Trade’s Peace Prize for her “indispensable contribution to the preservation of democracy.” Applebaum is the author of Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World; Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine; Gulag: A History; and other books about dictatorship and democracy. This article is adapted from the acceptance lecture that she delivered today in Frankfurt.

Michael Keaton is a movie star who has the air of just a regular dude.
That much was evident during his Saturday Night Live monologue last night, where he played the straight man to Mikey Day and Andy Samberg. The comedians were dressed as Beetlejuice, the beloved bio-exorcist character that Keaton reprised in Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice earlier this year.

Ibogaine, a psychedelic compound found in plants native to central Africa, is notorious for the intensity of the trips it induces. Those who consume it are plunged into vivid hallucinations, often preceded by a loud buzzing noise, that last between 24 and 48 hours. In one case report, a 29-year-old woman from Gabon met her dead relatives, and later looked into a mirror and saw a woman crying and holding a baby.

Before we’d even started she’d begun
to clear, the whitefish salad bought special
for those among us still unschmeared.
So good to see you, and so good you’ll come again,
and so wonderful to think of you next year.
When will I see you? I’ll be there. I’ll be here.
Her holiday the selling season, the store she’d had long dead.
The stories anchored her and us to her.
October is Thanksgiving is the New Year.

About a month ago, I was greeted by a welcome sight at the gas station in Connecticut where I usually fill my tank: the price of regular had fallen below $3 a gallon. In the weeks that followed, however, the Middle East was racked by escalating conflict. Israel—which was already in the middle of a nearly year-long invasion of Gaza—assassinated the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah with an air strike in Beirut.

This article was originally published by High Country News.
Every July, the western sandpiper, a dun-colored, long-beaked bird, leaves the shores of Alaska and migrates south. It may fly as far as the coast of Peru, where it spends several months before making the return trip. Western sandpipers travel along the Pacific Flyway, a strip of land that stretches along the western coast of the Americas, from the Arctic down to Patagonia.

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With Election Day just over two weeks away, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are looking to motivate their bases—while also persuading any remaining voters in key battleground states.

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One of the many effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on Americans’ social lives was that it allowed introverts and extroverts to understand each other better. “In ordinary times, American introverts are like cats living in Dogland: underappreciated, uncomfortable, and slightly out of place,” Arthur C.

In Elon Musk’s vision of human history, Donald Trump is the singularity. If Musk can propel Trump back to the White House, it will mark the moment that his own superintelligence merges with the most powerful apparatus on the planet, the American government—not to mention the business opportunity of the century.
Many other titans of Silicon Valley have tethered themselves to Trump. But Musk is the one poised to live out the ultimate techno-authoritarian fantasy.

The killing on Thursday of the Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, the principal architect of the October 7 attack on southern Israel, offers a golden opportunity for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to declare victory and begin pulling troops out of Gaza. But that is not going to happen. Most likely, nothing will change, because neither Netanyahu nor Hamas wants it to.
Netanyahu’s calculation is no mystery.