Mike Giglio

Mike Giglio is a staff writer at The Atlantic , covering intelligence and national security .
He is the author of Shatter the Nations : ISIS and the War for the Caliphate He was previously based in Istanbul as correspondent for BuzzFeed , reporting on the wars in Iraq , Syria , and Ukraine .
• Would You Sacrifice Your Privacy to Get Out of Quarantine ?
The coronavirus has reignited the post-9/11 debate about security and civil liberties .
The U.S. response to that tragedy has lessons for how to manage the trade-offs this time around .
• The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ America ’ s medical professionals are risking their lives .
But their greatest fear is that they ’ ll move from being part of the solution to part of the problem .
• The Syrian Sisters Who Refuse to Give Up on America Their saga shows America ’ s deep malaise about the civil war in Syria and the resulting refugee crisis .
Will anything change in 2020 ?
• Trump ’ s Intelligence War Is Also an Election Story With a loyalist as acting director of national intelligence , the official line @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bend closer to the president ’ s .
• The group is bigger now than when it founded its self-styled caliphate , and America ’ s conflict with Iran is only making the fight against it more complicated .
• Trump ’ s Chance to Take the High Road With Iran Tehran ’ s immediate retaliation for Qassem Soleimani ’ s killing could be an opportunity for both sides to de-escalate .
Will Trump take it ?
• The Soleimani Assassination Is America ’ s Most Consequential Strike This Century The U.S. attack @ @ @ @ @ @ @ far greater repercussions than the killings of al-Qaeda and ISIS leaders .
• What ISIS Will Become The group has lost its territory and its leader .
But it has survived before—and can do it again .
• The instincts and strategy attributed to the ISIS leader illustrate why his terror group is likely to survive his death .
• ‘ The U.S. Should Have Committed to Its Promises ’ A prominent Syrian-Kurdish leader , in an interview , says both America and its allies are now in a weaker position in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ military pullout .
• The Deadly End of American Policy in Syria Over the course of the long civil war , Syrians who cast their lot with America have often met with grim fates .
Those who remain are suddenly scrambling to escape .
• The Intelligence Fallout From Trump ’ s Withdrawal in Syria The chaotic withdrawal from Syria will severely weaken U.S. efforts in the country—and could also be a boost for Russia and Iran .
• How the War Against ISIS Was Won , Before It Was Lost As Donald @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ISIS in his rise to the presidency , the battle to take down Mosul , the group ’ s crown jewel in Iraq , was just beginning .
This is what those moments felt like .
• The U.S.-backed soldiers who battled ISIS across Syria and Iraq could be locked in the struggle for a very long time .
• Trump has long worried that America ’ s intelligence professionals would try to undermine him from the shadows .
All they had to do was play by the rules .

Mike Giglio is the author of Shatter the Nations: ISIS and the War for the Caliphate
Philip Montgomery A Pro-Trump Militant Group Has Recruited Thousands of Police, Soldiers, and Veterans An Atlantic investigation reveals who they are and what they might do on Election Day.
The Atlantic Would You Sacrifice Your Privacy to Get Out of Quarantine? The coronavirus has reignited the post-9/11 debate about security and civil liberties. The U.S. response to that tragedy has lessons for how to manage the trade-offs this time around.
The Atlantic The Biggest Worry for Doctors Fighting the Pandemic America’s medical professionals are risking their lives. But their greatest fear is that they’ll move from being part of the solution to part of the problem.
BULENT KILIC / AFP via Getty The Syrian Sisters Who Refuse to Give Up on America Their saga shows America’s deep malaise about the civil war in Syria and the resulting refugee crisis. Will anything change in 2020?
Jonathan Ernst / Reuters Trump’s Intelligence War Is Also an Election Story With a loyalist as acting director of national intelligence, the official line on issues like Russian election meddling could bend closer to the president’s.
Ali Hashisho / Reuters The Inconvenient Truth About ISIS The group is bigger now than when it founded its self-styled caliphate, and America’s conflict with Iran is only making the fight against it more complicated.
Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP / Getty Trump’s Chance to Take the High Road With Iran Tehran’s immediate retaliation for Qassem Soleimani’s killing could be an opportunity for both sides to de-escalate. Will Trump take it?
Press Office of Iranian Supreme Leader / Anadolu … The Soleimani Assassination Is America’s Most Consequential Strike This Century The U.S. attack against the top Iranian general will have far greater repercussions than the killings of al-Qaeda and ISIS leaders.
Martyn Aim / Corbis / Getty What ISIS Will Become The group has lost its territory and its leader. But it has survived before—and can do it again.
Alaa al-Marjani / Reuters Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s Ugly Legacy The instincts and strategy attributed to the ISIS leader illustrate why his terror group is likely to survive his death.
Maya Alleruzzo / AP ‘The U.S. Should Have Committed to Its Promises’ A prominent Syrian-Kurdish leader, in an interview, says both America and its allies are now in a weaker position in the region after Donald Trump’s sudden military pullout.
Huseyin Aldemir / Reuters The Deadly End of American Policy in Syria Over the course of the long civil war, Syrians who cast their lot with America have often met with grim fates. Those who remain are suddenly scrambling to escape.
Ghaith Abdul-Ahad / Getty The Intelligence Fallout From Trump’s Withdrawal in Syria The chaotic withdrawal from Syria will severely weaken U.S. efforts in the country—and could also be a boost for Russia and Iran.
Bulent Kilic / AFP / Getty How the War Against ISIS Was Won, Before It Was Lost As Donald Trump seized on fears of refugees and ISIS in his rise to the presidency, the battle to take down Mosul, the group’s crown jewel in Iraq, was just beginning. This is what those moments felt like.
Martyn Aim / laif / Redux The Forever War Fought by America’s Allies The U.S.-backed soldiers who battled ISIS across Syria and Iraq could be locked in the struggle for a very long time.
Bulent Kilic / AFP / Getty Trump’s Gift to ISIS America had the chance to help its local partners ensure ISIS’s lasting defeat. Instead it’s abandoning them.
Jon Elswick / AP The U.S. Government Keeps Too Many Secrets American officials classify too much information, from the trivial to the politically inconvenient. The overreliance on secrecy invites abuse.
Carlo Allegri / Reuters Revenge of the Intelligence Nerds Trump has long worried that America’s intelligence professionals would try to undermine him from the shadows. All they had to do was play by the rules.
Lucas Jackson / Reuters The Big Costs of Treating Ukraine Like Little Trumpland Trump’s push to get Ukraine’s new president to do his political bidding threatens to undermine a key U.S. partnership in countering Russia.


Adam Serwer

Adam Serwer is a staff writer at The Atlantic , where he covers politics .
• Julián Castro : ‘ This Is the Time to Make Change ’ The former mayor of San Antonio discusses police reform , America ’ s housing crisis , and whether a run for statewide office in Texas is in his future .
• Trump Is Struggling to Run Against a White Guy The president is having a difficult time deploying his traditional culture-war playbook against Biden .
• The chief justice expects the federal government to adhere to basic standards of honesty and fidelity @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Protest Is the Highest Form of Patriotism ’ A conversation with Lonnie Bunch , the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution , about the long tradition of black protest • It Didn ’ t Have to Be Like This The desperation of American workers in the aftermath of the coronavirus was the product of a series of policy decisions and missed opportunities .
• Fifty-seven officers were willing to take a stand to defend misconduct rather than oppose it .
• The president didn ’ t cause America ’ s policing crisis , but @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The president is attempting to bring social-media platforms into his authoritarian infrastructure—or otherwise censor them .
• The conspiracy theories surrounding Obama ’ s birthplace and religion were much more than mere lies .
They were ideology .
• The Coronavirus Was an Emergency Until Trump Found Out Who Was Dying The pandemic has exposed the bitter terms of our racial contract , which deems certain lives of greater value than others .
• The White House is closing pathways to citizenship while maintaining a flow of exploitable immigrant labor .
• The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Power Grab Both the president and his party are committed to a long-term project of impunity from both the law and the electorate .
• We Can Finally See the Real Source of Washington Gridlock America ’ s political dysfunction is rooted not in ideological polarization , but in the Republican Party ’ s conviction that it alone should be allowed to govern .
• Trump Is Inciting a Coronavirus Culture War to Save Himself The president ’ s attempt to racialize the pandemic is a cover-up of the fact that he trusted @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Trump ’ s Cult of Personality Did This The autocratic political culture that has propped up the Trump administration has left the nation entirely unprepared for an economic and public-health calamity .
• The Fight Over the 1619 Project Is Not About the Facts A dispute between a small group of scholars and the authors of The New York Times Magazine ’ s issue on slavery represents a fundamental disagreement over the trajectory of American society .

Adam Serwer is a staff writer at The Atlantic.
He is the author of the New York Times best-seller The Cruelty Is the Point . Adam has previously been a recipient of the 2021 Moment Magazine Robert S. Greenberger Journalism award, the 2019 Hillman Prize for opinion journalism, and the 2019 Salute to Excellence Award for commentary from the National Association of Black Journalists.
John Tully / The New York Times / … They Are Still With Him Conservative elites lack the courage and will to use their influence to oppose Trump, and that is why he remains a force in American politics.
Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic Alabama Is Defying the Supreme Court on Voting Rights The state’s refusal to comply has been met with a revealing silence on the right.
Hulton Archive / Getty The Most Baffling Argument a Supreme Court Justice Has Ever Made An opinion from Justice Clarence Thomas exposed the limits of originalism.
Drew Angerer / Getty The Roberts Court Draws a Line There are limits to the conservative theories that a majority of the justices are willing to endorse.
Shelby Tauber / Reuters Latinos Can Be White Supremacists A mass shooting carried out by a Hispanic suspect who authorities said had “neo-Nazi ideation” caused some confusion. It shouldn’t have.
Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Eric Lee / … What the Supreme Court Does in the Shadows Unsigned, unexplained orders have reshaped American law.
Illustraction By Paul Spella / The Atlantic; Shutterstock; … Clarence Thomas Is Winning His War on Transparency The justice’s failure to disclose his financial entanglements aligns with his long-standing opposition to public disclosure laws.
Drew Angerer / Getty The Fox Lawsuit Was Never Going to Save America The only real solution is to prevent those operating under delusions, or the politicians beholden to them, from wielding power.
David Paul Morris / Bloomberg / Getty The Violent Fantasy Behind the Texas Governor’s Pardon Demand A grant of clemency would encourage those who dream about someday engaging in murderous political violence.
Daniel Zender / The Atlantic; Getty Elon Musk’s Free-Speech Charade Is Over Now that the mogul has swung Twitter to the right, conservatives no longer believe that social-media policies violate the First Amendment.
Illustration by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic The Ruling That Threatens the Future of Libraries Knowledge is too precious to be abandoned to the whims of the profit motive.
Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty. Make Wisconsin a Democracy Again Badger State Republicans can’t bear having to compete for power.
Tom Brenner / The New York Times / … Did the Media Learn Nothing From 2016? The wall-to-wall coverage of Trump’s arraignment shows how quickly the lessons of his election have been forgotten.
Tom Brenner / Reuters Don’t Cut Corners on Indicting Trump Trumpists will portray any indictment as political. Prosecutors can’t let them make that argument persuasively.
The Atlantic; source: Library of Congress Woke Is Just Another Word for Liberal What many conservative critics of wokeness actually oppose is the pursuit of equality.
The Atlantic; sources: Tayfun Coskun / Getty The January 6 Deniers Are Going to Lose Just look at what happened with the Ku Klux Klan.
Jon Cherry / Getty Boycott Bans Are an Assault on Free Speech A court ruling upholding an anti-BDS law in Arkansas sets a dangerous precedent.
Drew Angerer / Getty Why Is Biden Attacking Democracy? Supporting self-rule for Washington, D.C., only when it does what you want isn’t supporting self-rule at all.
Nicholas Kamm / AFP / Getty The FBI Desperately Wants to Let Trump Off the Hook He just won’t allow it.


Ben Zimmer

Ben Zimmer is a contributing writer at The Atlantic .
• The band formerly known as the Dixie Chicks has changed its name in light of the growing rejection of racist symbols and phrases .
• Why Trump Is So Obsessed With Antifa The president strategically invokes the group in his speeches to stoke fear and shift discourse away from systemic racism .
• How Normalcy Went From Misnomer to Safe Word A recent uptick in Google searches for the term signals a longing for the usual state of affairs .
• When conservative figures continually refer to the “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” it ’ s clear they ’ re doing it to make a point .
• How the ‘ Purity Test ’ Became Political Speak When Elizabeth Warren challenged Pete Buttigieg on fundraising during last night ’ s debate , the exchange brought another issue to the forefront .
• A newcomer used the term in a presidential debate for the first time ever—and it turned out to be the most apt descriptor of the night .
• The president exhibited rare restraint yesterday when he censored himself at a press conference @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Where Does Trump ’ s ‘ Invasion ’ Rhetoric Come From ?
The racist language used by the president—and the alleged El Paso shooter—to describe immigrants originated on the West Coast more than a century ago .
• The Most Bonkers Phrase From CNN ’ s Presidential Debate “ People who shower after work ” has been used by politicians to demonstrate an empathetic connection with people in blue-collar jobs .
• Whether the president ’ s tweets about four Democratic congresswomen of color are bigoted can not be decided solely by dictionary @ @ @ @ @ @ @ president says words such as loco and hombres • How Eight Middle Schoolers Toppled the Scripps Spelling Bee As the quality of the top contestants has ramped up dramatically in recent years , the national competition has struggled to keep up .
• Why John Singleton Wanted the ‘ Z ’ in Boyz n the Hood The late filmmaker ’ s unconventional spelling was a stylistic choice that signified the forging of an anti-establishment identity in rap music .
• Cardi B Didn ’ t Invent ‘ Okurrr , ’ but That Might @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rapper is looking to protect a phrase she made popular , though not for the reason one might think .
• A ‘ Meritocracy ’ Is Not What People Think It Is The college-admissions scandal has illuminated the fact that the word ’ s original definition was satirical .
But Americans , for the most part , have ignored that entirely .

Peter Sokolowski / Merriam-Webster inc.; Webster’s New International … The Evolution of Racism A look at how the word, a surprisingly recent addition to the English lexicon, made its way into the dictionary
Camerique Archive / Getty What Trump Doesn’t Understand About the Suburbs The president’s idea that suburbia is characterized by homogeneity and monotony erases recent demographic history.
Getty / The Atlantic What Dixie Really Means The band formerly known as the Dixie Chicks has changed its name in light of the growing rejection of racist symbols and phrases.
Getty / The Atlantic Why Trump Is So Obsessed With Antifa The president strategically invokes the group in his speeches to stoke fear and shift discourse away from systemic racism.
Hossein Fatemi / Panos Pictures / Redux How Normalcy Went From Misnomer to Safe Word A recent uptick in Google searches for the term signals a longing for the usual state of affairs.
DuKai Why Trump Intentionally Misnames the Coronavirus When conservative figures continually refer to the “Wuhan virus” or “Chinese coronavirus,” it’s clear they’re doing it to make a point.
Scott Olson Pete Buttigieg’s Coded Use of American Heartland The phrase’s political currency as a folksy label for Middle America can reinforce a poisonous “us versus them” mentality.
Chris Carlson / AP How the ‘Purity Test’ Became Political Speak When Elizabeth Warren challenged Pete Buttigieg on fundraising during last night’s debate, the exchange brought another issue to the forefront.
John Minchillo / AP Keep Your ‘Frenemies’ Closer A newcomer used the term in a presidential debate for the first time ever—and it turned out to be the most apt descriptor of the night.
Carolyn Kaster / AP Why Trump Wouldn’t Say ‘Jockstrap’ The president exhibited rare restraint yesterday when he censored himself at a press conference. Here’s why.
Andrew Harnik / A{ How Maguire Accidentally Made the Case for Singular ‘They’ The national intelligence director’s recent testimony inadvertently supported the argument against grammar purists.
Bettmann / Getty Where Does Trump’s ‘Invasion’ Rhetoric Come From? The racist language used by the president—and the alleged El Paso shooter—to describe immigrants originated on the West Coast more than a century ago.
Lucas Jackson / Reuters The Most Bonkers Phrase From CNN’s Presidential Debate “People who shower after work” has been used by politicians to demonstrate an empathetic connection with people in blue-collar jobs.
Nicholas Kamm / AFP / Getty Why Donald Trump’s Racist Language Isn’t Debatable Whether the president’s tweets about four Democratic congresswomen of color are bigoted cannot be decided solely by dictionary definitions.
Jacquelyn Martin / AP Why Trump Uses Mock Spanish The real reason the president says words such as loco and hombres
Susan Walsh / AP How Eight Middle Schoolers Toppled the Scripps Spelling Bee As the quality of the top contestants has ramped up dramatically in recent years, the national competition has struggled to keep up.
Fred Prouser / Reuters Why John Singleton Wanted the ‘Z’ in Boyz n the Hood The late filmmaker’s unconventional spelling was a stylistic choice that signified the forging of an anti-establishment identity in rap music.
Mario Anzuoni / Reuters Cardi B Didn’t Invent ‘Okurrr,’ but That Might Not Matter to a Trademark Judge The rapper is looking to protect a phrase she made popular, though not for the reason one might think.
Jonathan Ernst / Reuters A ‘Meritocracy’ Is Not What People Think It Is The college-admissions scandal has illuminated the fact that the word’s original definition was satirical. But Americans, for the most part, have ignored that entirely.


Nicolas Pollock

Nicolas Pollock is a former video producer , writer , and editor at The Atlantic .
• In accordance with a centuries-old treaty , Kimberly Teehee is on a quest to give the Cherokee Nation a voice .
• Snails in Hawaii are disappearing at a faster rate than any other animal on the planet .
Meet the scientists fighting for their survival .
• A new lawsuit could challenge the NHL over its alleged dismissal of the dangers of CTE .
• The Tragic Consequences of the NHL ’ s Science Denial The National Hockey League insisted that Todd @ @ @ @ @ @ @ related to his hockey career .
Science suggests otherwise .
• The Tragic Post-Hockey Life of an NHL ‘ Enforcer ’ For 11 seasons , Todd Ewen fought in almost every game he played .
He didn ’ t live to his 50th birthday .
• Even in the U.S. , They ’ re Not Safe From China The Chinese government is detaining and threatening Uighurs , members of a Muslim ethnic minority .
• An expert on dog psychology reveals the unique features of canine intelligence .
• In the history of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
• Governor Ricardo Rosselló describes how opportunity can be created for the island in the wake of Hurricane Maria .
• ‘ America Has Always Been a Tribal Society ’ Some of tribalism 's worst impulses , such as demagoguery and scapegoating , are beginning to permeate American politics .
• There was no rulebook for Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper when his state voted to legalize marijuana .
• The former president of the ACLU believes censorship—including on Facebook and other platforms—is ineffective .
• ‘ I ’ m an Undocumented Citizen @ @ @ @ @ @ @ explains why his lack of papers shouldn ’ t disqualify him from being regarded as an American .

Nicolas Pollock is a former video producer, writer, and editor at The Atlantic.
The Iguana King How iguanas went viral in Florida
Portraits of Isolation in the Arctic A photographer captures his northern Canadian community in quarantine.
Will Congress Fulfill a 184-Year-Old Promise? In accordance with a centuries-old treaty, Kimberly Teehee is on a quest to give the Cherokee Nation a voice.
Goodbye, Snails Snails in Hawaii are disappearing at a faster rate than any other animal on the planet. Meet the scientists fighting for their survival.
Matt Slocum / AP Hockey’s Next Head-Injury Reckoning A new lawsuit could challenge the NHL over its alleged dismissal of the dangers of CTE.
The Tragic Consequences of the NHL’s Science Denial The National Hockey League insisted that Todd Ewen’s death wasn’t related to his hockey career. Science suggests otherwise.
Glenn Cratty / Getty The Tragic Post-Hockey Life of an NHL ‘Enforcer’ For 11 seasons, Todd Ewen fought in almost every game he played. He didn’t live to his 50th birthday.
Even in the U.S., They’re Not Safe From China The Chinese government is detaining and threatening Uighurs, members of a Muslim ethnic minority.
Men Are Socialized to ‘Act Inhumanely’ A trans man offers a unique perspective on the internalization of masculinity.
The ‘Special Genius’ of Dogs An expert on dog psychology reveals the unique features of canine intelligence.
The Seismic Power of Women’s Rage In the history of America, female anger is political fuel.
Can Puerto Rico Rebuild Itself? Governor Ricardo Rosselló describes how opportunity can be created for the island in the wake of Hurricane Maria.
‘America Has Always Been a Tribal Society’ Some of tribalism's worst impulses, such as demagoguery and scapegoating, are beginning to permeate American politics.
A Great Social Experiment of the 21st Century There was no rulebook for Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper when his state voted to legalize marijuana.
Why Social Media Shouldn’t Censor Hate Speech The former president of the ACLU believes censorship—including on Facebook and other platforms—is ineffective.
‘I’m an Undocumented Citizen of This Country’ Jose Antonio Vargas explains why his lack of papers shouldn’t disqualify him from being regarded as an American.
‘Lessons’ From the Internet’s Most Violent Videos With more than a million followers on YouTube, John Correia educates the masses in self-defense.
How Video Can Create a Just Society Filming bystander footage can help protect human rights.
Comey Is ‘Really Concerned’ About Trump’s Attacks on the FBI James Comey reveals why the president’s criticism of the country’s legal institutions is corrosive.


Kori Schake

Kori Schake is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and director of foreign and defense policy at the American Enterprise Institute .
• This Upheaval Is How America Gets Better What ’ s happening right now is the way the U.S. corrects its own wrongs .
• The former vice president lacks a consistent philosophy of when and how to use military force .
• For all its failures , the U.S. has structural advantages over rival powers—and will come out of the pandemic even stronger .
• The Imperial Presidency Comes to a Sudden Halt Trump ’ s hands-off @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with the Founders ’ original vision—and is occurring at precisely the wrong time .
• The Damage That ‘ America First ’ Has Done A self-interested strategy will not help the U.S. fight the coronavirus outbreak .
• Trump ’ s Iran Strategy Isn ’ t Working as Well as He Thinks The killing of Qassem Soleimani upended expectations in useful ways , but the U.S. isn ’ t in a position to capitalize on the turmoil .
• Trump should have left Soleimani alive and in place , but made him operationally @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Being no different from our enemies has not been the aspiration of previous presidents , nor of our military .
• Now the war in Syria has a victor .
And it ’ s not the U.S. • After the agreement with Turkey , we should expect countries that are most reliant on U.S. security guarantees to search for alternatives .
• The president should have to answer for the Afghanistan mess in the 2020 election .
• The Bill for America First Is Coming Due Two of America ’ s closest treaty @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to exclude the U.S. • The Republican Party Needs Millennials to Survive Conservatives can win over young Americans to our principles , but first we have to live by those principles .
• Trump has now shown himself just as willing as President Obama to make empty threats that damage American credibility .
• Jared Kushner wants to use prosperity as a shiny object to distract Palestinians while their political aspirations are swept away .

Kori Schake is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the director of foreign- and defense-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
Before joining AEI, Schake was the deputy director general of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. She has worked at the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Department of Defense, and the National Security Council at the White House. She has also taught at Stanford, West Point, Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, National Defense University, and the University of Maryland. Schake is the author of five books, among them America vs. the West: Can the Liberal World Order Be Preserved? and Safe Passage: The Transition From British to American Hegemony .
Artur Widak / NurPhoto / Getty In Vilnius, NATO Got Two Wins and One Big Loss At last, NATO has a plan. Unfortunately, it doesn’t include admitting Ukraine.
Brendan Smialowski / AFP / Getty Biden Is More Fearful Than the Ukrainians Are The U.S. president has promised Ukraine “whatever it takes, as long as it takes.” But out of anxiety about escalation, Washington is making decisions that could prolong the war.
Illustration by Matt Chase / The Atlantic. Source: … An Utterly Trivial Reason to Give Away National Secrets The intelligence-leak suspect allegedly wanted to show off online.
Getty / The Atlantic Biden’s Loose Lips Make the Nuclear Threat Worse The president’s rhetoric will encourage Putin to test American resolve.
Alessio Mamo / Guardian / eyevin / Redux Ukrainian Success Will Not Be Catastrophic We’re the strong ones in this conflict, and we deter more effectively when we act with confidence on that knowledge.
The Atlantic The White House Is Getting Defense Wrong The Biden administration’s latest budget request has overshot the target, in the wrong way.
Sean Gallup / Getty Putin Accidentally Revitalized the West’s Liberal Order The Russian president thought he sensed an opportunity to take advantage of a disunited West. He has been proved wrong.
Sergei Supinsky / AFP / Getty Russia’s Aggression Against Ukraine Is Backfiring Putin’s military moves are rallying Ukrainians and unifying NATO.
Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP What Working for Colin Powell Taught Me The former general and ex–secretary of state made hard work fun.
Shah Marai / AFP / Getty Why the Afghan Army Folded America has historically struggled to train foreign militaries.
Adam Maida / The Atlantic Why Isn’t the Military Mandating COVID-19 Vaccines? Service members need to be protected against the coronavirus. This isn’t a close call.
Al Drago / Bloomberg / Getty What Is Happening to Our Apolitical Military? Remarks by America’s most senior military officer mark the latest step in the continued erosion of relations between the armed forces and their civilian leaders.
The Atlantic / Chip Somodevilla / Getty Biden Brings More Class Warfare to Foreign Policy The president’s version of “America First” echoes Trump’s misunderstanding of how the modern economy works.
Carsten Koall / Getty The U.S. Doesn’t Know How to Treat Its Allies If Biden wants to counter China, the U.S. needs to make some sacrifices.
Adam Maida The U.S. Puts Its Greatest Vulnerability on Display Runaway partisanship endangers the United States more than foreign enemies do.
WANA / REUTERS The Disastrous Idea That Won’t Go Away Trump might be tempted to order a military attack on Iran, because his “maximum pressure” campaign failed to thwart that country’s nuclear program.
Mark Wilson / Getty Trump’s Pettiness Is the Simplest Explanation The postelection shake-up at the Pentagon has raised alarms in the national-security world, but Trump’s likeliest motive is plain old spite.
Getty / Paul Spella / The Atlantic The Military Doesn’t Want to Get Involved Political partisans are trying to benefit from the armed forces’ popularity. But America’s most trusted institution got that way by staying out of civilian affairs.
Eric Lee This Upheaval Is How America Gets Better What’s happening right now is the way the U.S. corrects its own wrongs.


theatlantic--2020-05-12--When Will We Want to Be in a Room Full of Strangers Again?

All that makes everyone keen to open their doors again .
The government furlough scheme has been widely adopted in the theater sector—the Kiln , for example , has put 12 out of 26 permanent staff on paid leave , plus 45 front-of-house workers on short-term contracts .
But the program is scheduled to end on June 30 .
( The government has suggested it will gradually wind it down to avoid suddenly making huge numbers of people unemployed , but no firm announcements have been made . )
Without it , life will be very hard for the casual @ @ @ @ @ @ @ box-office staff , and bartenders—as well as for the actors , writers , and directors who typically work as freelancers .
The industry ’ s more privileged members will be best placed to weather the crisis .
“ If you come from a low socioeconomic background , or are an immigrant working here and your life here is already quite precarious , you go : I can ’ t take the risk anymore , ” the critic Lyn Gardner told me .
The playwright Barney Norris says that his father , a professional @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a writer that he should take notice of the number of his peers who dropped out in their early 30s , as they decided to start a family .
“ There comes a moment when people who have been living their dream say , ‘ I 'm going to stop living my dream ; now I ’ m going to get a pension , ’ ” he told me .
“ That might well happen to the entire planet now , regardless of their age.
” The real financial crunch point comes if @ @ @ @ @ @ @ most theaters open their Christmas show—in Britain , this is traditionally a pantomime or other family-friendly offering .
At local theaters and in the West End , audiences often book tickets for the Christmas show as early as February , and grandparents bring their grandchildren , instilling a theater-going habit that might last a lifetime .
The loss of that revenue , and that chance to introduce youngsters to play-going , would be hugely destructive across the sector .
This , too , could make theater more rarefied , as casual visitors are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are also already signs that Rubasingham ’ s worries about risk aversion are well founded .
The first major post-lockdown project announced by Sonia Friedman Productions , a West End powerhouse , is a revival of Jez Butterworth ’ s Jerusalem , with its original star , Mark Rylance .
It ’ s as close to a banker as any production can be : The original sold out and transferred to Broadway .
“ People will want to get those tickets , ” Gardner said .
“ That gets them over the psychological @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Aside from beloved landmark productions , what else will people want to see ?
Will they hunger for escapism , for farces and comedies and lighthearted romps , or will they expect playwrights to address the aftermath of the pandemic ?
“ Comedy is fine , but catharsis is essential , ” says Michael Grandage , a director who runs a West End production company .
“ It doesn ’ t matter if we can gather in a room and laugh .
To me , it ’ s more important that we can @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Frankly you could watch Hamlet right now , and find lots of COVID dilemmas—a man feeling lost in the world.
” Barney Norris said that , so far , all the artistic directors he had spoken with were trying to honor their existing commitments , which would create an “ interesting tension ” between pre- and post-coronavirus commissions when shows resume—one person I talked to said an existing , and overtly political , project now felt oddly dated .
On top of all that , the Arts Council ’ s funding requirements now @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” as the highest goal of British theater .
Everyone is dreading the inevitable onslaught of work full of overwrought plague metaphors , and the possibility of stand-up comedy shows called Now Wash Your Hands .

Georgian Spring Series by Mark Power/Magnum
Editor’s Note: This article is part of Uncharted, a series about the world we’re leaving behind, and the one being remade by the pandemic.
Walking into the Kiln Theatre in North London is like uncovering a time capsule—from before lockdown, before social distancing, before face masks and injunctions to stay six feet apart. When staff do their regular checks on the building, its artistic director, Indhu Rubasingham, told me, they say it feels “frozen,” caught in the moment before everything changed. “The stage is all set; the dressing rooms are ready for the actors to come in the next day,” she said.
Rubasingham is not alone in facing an uncertain future. In March, the government ordered theaters to shut, and no one yet knows when they will reopen. The Arts Council, which distributes state funding, quickly gave out £160 million ($200 million) in crisis grants to organizations and individual workers in need. In combination with the government’s furlough scheme—which offers to pay a portion of workers’ wages until the end of June—this has stabilized the industry. Just like the Kiln’s building, many projects and individual careers are frozen in time.
As a live art form, theater is particularly affected by the coronavirus, along with concerts and stand-up comedy performances. As I talked with writers, directors, and producers, the same refrain recurred: When will anyone want to be in a dark room full of strangers again? Many of those I spoke with were quietly updating their scenario-planning documents to account for a return next spring, and warned that, without a bailout, that long of a shutdown would financially cripple some institutions. Even when theaters reopen, social-distancing rules could hamper rehearsals, and force venues to sell fewer (and therefore more expensive) tickets. Most believe theater will eventually rebound, but there is talk of a generation of artists and audiences being lost. Rubasingham worries that the industry could become more white, more posh—and more cautious: “We’re going to be so much more fragile coming back, so do we become more risk-averse?”
Theater matters to Britain in purely economic terms; the West End is a significant driver of tourism. And although many see commercially run theaters and the subsidized sector as distinct, theater’s ecology is complicated and interconnected. The money-spinning West End is bolstered by projects that originated in the state-subsidized economy, such as the Royal Shakespeare Company’s musical Matilda, and you can trace a direct line from productions in smaller theaters in Britain and continental Europe through to Broadway. It is also a creative engine for the rest of the arts: film directors such as Sam Mendes, Stephen Frears, and Danny Boyle were nurtured there. James Graham, who won an Emmy for his drama Brexit: The Uncivil War, spent the early years of his career writing for the Finborough Theatre, a 50-seat room above a bar in West London. Lucy Prebble, who works on HBO’s Succession, had her first professional play staged by the subsidized Royal Court in its 90-seat studio. The Fleabag creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Alice Birch, the adapter of Normal People, also started out in theater. The Tudor musical Six (which had to shut down hours before it was due to open on Broadway, because of the coronavirus) began as a fringe show written by students, before going on tour around Britain. The same route—from tiny theaters to the commercial sector—has been followed by less visible workers, such as costume and set designers, as well.
The message from the industry is clear. If grassroots theater dies, what else dies with it?
The cost of “going dark” is significant. Nica Burns, whose company, Nimax, has six theaters in the West End, estimated that the lockdown would cost her business £2.5 million over three months. For the 800 museums, galleries, and theaters supported by the Arts Council, the monthly bailout bill—if the furlough scheme ends—will be £100 million. Few were surprised when Rufus Norris, the artistic director of the National Theatre, said in April that some organizations were “days, not weeks,” away from filing for bankruptcy. On May 6, Nuffield Southampton Theatres, in the south of England, announced that it had run out of cash.
“The National will survive,” Tamara Harvey, the artistic director of Theatr Clwyd, in northern Wales, told me. “My fear is that the smaller and regional companies who aren’t visible might be allowed to sink.” Many of those local theaters are also community centers, providing adult-education classes, activities for older people, and singing and acting lessons for children whose schools cannot provide them. This community spirit is obvious in those theaters that have repurposed themselves to tackle the pandemic fallout: The costume department at the Royal Exchange in Manchester has begun to sew masks for health workers; the tiny Slung Low theater in Leeds has been delivering food parcels; Theatr Clwyd has become a blood-donation center.
Many of these smaller sites rely on state subsidies to survive, but now face a painful struggle to secure financial support. The Conservative government has said little publicly during this crisis about the future of theater, but the party has historically taken a dim view of arts subsidy—its first budget after winning a general election a decade ago cut the Arts Council’s funding by nearly a third. And with the pandemic badly hitting other parts of society, the demands on the state are huge. Many outsiders might echo the Los Angeles Times theater critic Charles McNulty, who wrote recently: “Call me callous but the fate of our hospital system straining under the weight of desperately sick patients [seems] more urgent to me than the budgetary death spirals of experimental theater companies.” Money, and sympathy, are finite.
As well as a financial response to the pandemic, buildings and artists are trying to decide the best artistic one. The crisis has already prompted a scramble to find production methods that are coronavirus-compliant, and to make recorded productions available to watch from home. Nick Hytner of the Bridge Theatre in London is reviving Talking Heads, the classic British monologue series, for the BBC, with lone actors talking to the camera in a deserted television studio. (They have rehearsed over Zoom, and must do their own hair and makeup to maintain social-distancing rules.) The National Theatre has made filmed versions of much of its back catalog available to schools, and it broadcasts a different archive show on YouTube every week, alongside an appeal for donations—the first show, One Man, Two Guvnors, starring James Corden, had more than 200,000 viewers. Four London plays that closed early will now be broadcast on BBC Radio. There have also been numerous variety shows for charity, which seem to attract pun-based titles, such as All the Web’s a Stage and The Show Must Go Online.
Although everyone is publicly supportive of these efforts—and recognizes the need for fundraising—in private, there are grumbles. The big organizations, with their box-office hits and star casts, are best placed to drive traffic to their online shows, while smaller companies struggle (and may not have had the resources to film productions in the first place). The Talking Heads monologues will be professionally produced, for example, but there has also been a rash of homespun productions of varying technical competence, which are often unsatisfying as pieces of art. After all, what makes theater great—and worth anything up to £250 a ticket in the West End—is the electricity of a shared experience. On-screen, plays can seem static, and the kind of acting that reaches the back of an auditorium can look forced or hammy. Too often, recordings of plays just look like bad television. The film industry is experiencing some success with “lockdown premieres,” releasing movies directly to home streaming, but no one in theater has so far felt comfortable charging anything close to a full ticket price for a digital offering.
All that makes everyone keen to open their doors again. The government furlough scheme has been widely adopted in the theater sector—the Kiln, for example, has put 12 out of 26 permanent staff on paid leave, plus 45 front-of-house workers on short-term contracts. But the program is scheduled to end on June 30. (The government has suggested it will gradually wind it down to avoid suddenly making huge numbers of people unemployed, but no firm announcements have been made.) Without it, life will be very hard for the casual staff who keep playhouses going—the ushers, box-office staff, and bartenders—as well as for the actors, writers, and directors who typically work as freelancers.
The industry’s more privileged members will be best placed to weather the crisis. “If you come from a low socioeconomic background, or are an immigrant working here and your life here is already quite precarious, you go: I can’t take the risk anymore,” the critic Lyn Gardner told me. The playwright Barney Norris says that his father, a professional pianist, told him when he became a writer that he should take notice of the number of his peers who dropped out in their early 30s, as they decided to start a family. “There comes a moment when people who have been living their dream say, ‘I'm going to stop living my dream; now I’m going to get a pension,’” he told me. “That might well happen to the entire planet now, regardless of their age.”
The real financial crunch point comes if the shutdown lasts beyond November, when most theaters open their Christmas show—in Britain, this is traditionally a pantomime or other family-friendly offering. At local theaters and in the West End, audiences often book tickets for the Christmas show as early as February, and grandparents bring their grandchildren, instilling a theater-going habit that might last a lifetime. The loss of that revenue, and that chance to introduce youngsters to play-going, would be hugely destructive across the sector. This, too, could make theater more rarefied, as casual visitors are turned off the art form.
There are also already signs that Rubasingham’s worries about risk aversion are well founded. The first major post-lockdown project announced by Sonia Friedman Productions, a West End powerhouse, is a revival of Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem, with its original star, Mark Rylance. It’s as close to a banker as any production can be: The original sold out and transferred to Broadway. “People will want to get those tickets,” Gardner said. “That gets them over the psychological hurdle of returning to the theater.”
Aside from beloved landmark productions, what else will people want to see? Will they hunger for escapism, for farces and comedies and lighthearted romps, or will they expect playwrights to address the aftermath of the pandemic? “Comedy is fine, but catharsis is essential,” says Michael Grandage, a director who runs a West End production company. “It doesn’t matter if we can gather in a room and laugh. To me, it’s more important that we can gather in a room and cry. Frankly you could watch Hamlet right now, and find lots of COVID dilemmas—a man feeling lost in the world.” Barney Norris said that, so far, all the artistic directors he had spoken with were trying to honor their existing commitments, which would create an “interesting tension” between pre- and post-coronavirus commissions when shows resume—one person I talked to said an existing, and overtly political, project now felt oddly dated. On top of all that, the Arts Council’s funding requirements now place “relevance” over “excellence” as the highest goal of British theater. Everyone is dreading the inevitable onslaught of work full of overwrought plague metaphors, and the possibility of stand-up comedy shows called Now Wash Your Hands.
Several artistic directors I spoke with referred to the same nightmare scenario: of reopening too early, with all the associated costs of set design, front-of-house staff, and actors, only to have to close again weeks later were another lockdown put in place. Not only would they take a financial hit, but audiences might lose confidence about booking future performances. The West End relies heavily on visitors from outside London, and people often buy tickets for popular shows months, even years, in advance. The commercial-theater sector in particular is therefore largely downbeat about the prospect of reopening anytime this year. Investors won’t want to risk another shutdown, and the budgets simply don’t add up if houses are only half full, or less.
The budget issue is also why there is little appetite for the kind of social-distancing measures the government hopes will allow other businesses, such as shops and restaurants, to reopen. Theaters in countries with previous experience of pandemics, such as South Korea, have installed disinfection sprays and temperature checks on arrival, and face masks must be worn throughout performances. Every attendee’s personal information is recorded, so that if anyone present is diagnosed with COVID-19, everyone in the theater can be traced and quarantined.
The consensus here in London is that theatergoers simply won’t stand for this. “I started thinking about socially distanced rehearsal rooms, socially distanced staging—what that means in terms of costumes and makeup, not having any of that,” Harvey told me. “Do we have to have actors standing far apart?” She concluded it was impossible, and would risk the long-term future of the Theatr Clwyd, because a bad experience could put off audiences forever. Grandage was equally unenthused: “Ask any actor if they want to play to a half-empty house on a comedy, and they’ll tell you it’s not a very desirable thing to do.” The prospect of reopening in a global recession has also focused minds on ticket prices, which have risen by 30 percent since 2012.
One obvious way to cut costs is to reduce cast sizes. (“Hope you like Waiting for Godot,” a friend joked to me recently.) That helps theaters balance their books, but hurts actors. Revivals are often easier to sell—Chekhov and Ibsen are, in marketing terms, strong brands—but that hurts contemporary writers. And an overall reduction in programming hurts directors, too, most of whom are hired for individual projects rather than receiving a salary from an institution.
On May 1, the Arts Council warned that it does not have the money to bankroll the industry through an extended lockdown, nor “the ability to support the costs of reopening under changed circumstances.” Underneath the uplifting language—“through creativity and culture, we will heal”—the message was clear. We can’t save you. Unsurprisingly, there is now concerted lobbying of the government by artistic directors, and high-profile figures in the arts. The “Big 13” regional theaters in England have been coordinating their efforts over Zoom discussions, as have a group of senior national figures led by David Lan, the former artistic director of the Young Vic in London. If the shutdown continues into next year, their success or failure will determine what kind of industry emerges from the crisis. Yes, someone might be writing the modern equivalent of King Lear in lockdown. But who will commission it? And will they be told: Could you manage with just two daughters? And no storm?


theatlantic--2020-03-17--NIH Director: ‘We’re on an Exponential Curve’

When I asked Collins what has surprised him most about the coronavirus from his perspective as a doctor and a scientist , he told me : “ The degree to which this is so rapidly transmissible .
More so than SARS was .
SARS was a terribly scary situation for the world 18 years ago , but it never reached the level of infections or deaths that we have for this coronavirus , because it wasn ’ t as transmissible .
SARS was transmissible but only from people who were really very sick .
This one seems to be transmissible @ @ @ @ @ @ @ maybe no illness at all—which is why it has been so difficult to get control or to know when you should be imposing these stringent measures we ’ ve been talking about .
If you wait until you ’ ve seen lots of affected cases , you know you ’ ve waited too late , because the number of people who haven ’ t yet turned up in the health-care system but who are already infected is probably 100 times the number of cases you know about.
” Ken Harbaugh : The next @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s being done to help hospitals that are being overwhelmed , I asked Collins , and what about the issue of ventilators and protective gear ?
“ There ’ s a huge effort to try to prepare for that in terms of inventories of personal protective equipment , the so-called PPE ; there is a national stockpile , and we ’ re trying to figure out how best to distribute that where it will be most needed , ” he told me .
“ Every hospital is looking at what their capabilities @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to do in terms of setting up additional facilities nearby .
With universities having closed up for students , it ’ s possible we may need to see university space used as spillover for patient care .
There are lots of concerns about whether there are enough health-care professionals , especially in places that were already short on physicians , like in rural communities .
There is a major effort organized through [ Health and Human Services ] , but obviously a lot of it is going to come down to what happens @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lot of it will depend upon whether we ’ re successful in flattening that curve so that the need for intense medical attention stretches out over the course of several months as opposed to hitting us all at once in the next few weeks.
” Because we don ’ t yet have a vaccine , and we don ’ t yet have therapeutics that we know work , the best means of trying to prevent what Collins says “ could be a really terrible outcome , ” in addition to social distancing , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ faithfully with hot water and soap for 20 seconds as many times during the day as you possibly can .
“ Those all seem like medieval practices , but they work , ” he told me .
The soonest a vaccine will be available is in a year to 18 months , despite “ being developed in record time , ” according to Collins , so that ’ s off the table for now .
( One vaccine began phase 1 trials in 45 volunteers on Monday . )
More encouragingly , he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the therapeutic aspects—most notably with a drug called remdesivir , which is now in clinical trials in China , Japan , South Korea , and the U.S.—will show that that particular antiviral has considerable efficacy for people who are very sick .
That would help a lot if we actually had a drug that could be offered to people who most need it .
”

“There are estimates that if nothing goes right and if we fail to flatten the curve and if health systems are overwhelmed, we might see the deaths of as many as a million and a half people in the United States.”
That’s what Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, told me on Saturday. Collins is one of the most widely respected physician-geneticists in the world, who is deeply involved in containing the coronavirus pandemic. (Anthony Fauci, arguably the world’s leading infectious-disease specialist, works for Collins at the NIH and is a close friend.)
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Collins was not offering a prediction, but a realistic worst-case scenario of what awaits America in the next eight weeks or so unless, in his words, we embrace “the more extreme version” of social distancing.
Read: The dos and dont’s of social distancing
“If you look at the rates of new cases that are being diagnosed, we’re on an exponential curve,” Collins told me. “That curve, some would say, places us only about eight days behind Italy. If that’s true, we have only a very short period of time before this becomes an obvious national crisis with many people presenting with serious illness and hospitals quickly becoming very stressed with the ability to handle all of these sick people, especially older people who are at higher risk and who may need not just a hospital bed but even a ventilator.”
I asked Collins whether that means we seem to be tracking with what happened in Italy.
“Right,” Collins told me. “If you look at the curve of new cases being diagnosed over the course of the last month, just look at the curve of what happened in Italy, and then look at our curve in the U.S., and you say if you go back eight days from today, they had about the same number of cases that we have today—that is, slightly over 2,000. And then if we follow that same track, then eight days from [March 22], we would be having the same kind of incredible crisis that they are facing.” (The New York Times described the catastrophe befalling Italy: “The coronavirus epidemic raging through Italy has already left streets empty and shops shuttered as 60 million Italians are essentially under house arrest. There are the exhausted doctors and nurses toiling day and night to keep people alive. There are children hanging drawings of rainbows from their windows and families singing from their balconies. But the ultimate metric of pandemics and plagues is the bodies they leave behind. In Italy, with the oldest population in Europe, the toll has been heavy, with more than 2,100 deaths, the most outside of China. On Monday alone, more than 300 people died.”)
Collins added this important qualifier: “Now we have a chance to change that, by applying now the most draconian measures on social distancing to try to limit the spread of coronavirus from person to person. But we will not succeed at changing the course from that exponential curve unless there is full national engagement in those commitments to try to reduce spread. I think we’re getting there; certainly in the last few days there seems to be a lot of waking up to just how serious the threat is, but that’s obviously not universal across this large and complicated country.”
Aaron E. Carroll and Ashish Jha: This is how we can beat the coronavirus
Since our interview, we’re seeing what “waking up” means in concrete terms: Ohio is postponing its presidential primary and ordering restaurants and bars to close as of 9 p.m.; Washington State and Maryland have announced the shutdown of restaurants and bars (except for delivery and takeout), and entertainment venues and recreational facilities. The new mandates from Washington’s Governor Jay Inslee will also require reduced occupancy for retail outlets. California called for all people 65 and older to shelter in their homes. In Los Angeles, Mayor Eric Garcetti closed movie theaters and gyms, while the Bay Area is in lockdown, requiring people to stay home except for essential needs. More than 30 states have closed down schools. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended Sunday that no gatherings with 50 people or more—including weddings, festivals, parades, concerts, sporting events or conferences—be held in the United States for the next eight weeks. On Monday, it went a step further, saying we should avoid gatherings of more than 10.
When I asked Collins what has surprised him most about the coronavirus from his perspective as a doctor and a scientist, he told me: “The degree to which this is so rapidly transmissible. More so than SARS was. SARS was a terribly scary situation for the world 18 years ago, but it never reached the level of infections or deaths that we have for this coronavirus, because it wasn’t as transmissible. SARS was transmissible but only from people who were really very sick. This one seems to be transmissible from people who have minor illness or maybe no illness at all—which is why it has been so difficult to get control or to know when you should be imposing these stringent measures we’ve been talking about. If you wait until you’ve seen lots of affected cases, you know you’ve waited too late, because the number of people who haven’t yet turned up in the health-care system but who are already infected is probably 100 times the number of cases you know about.”
Ken Harbaugh: The next, terrible phase of the crisis
What’s being done to help hospitals that are being overwhelmed, I asked Collins, and what about the issue of ventilators and protective gear?
“There’s a huge effort to try to prepare for that in terms of inventories of personal protective equipment, the so-called PPE; there is a national stockpile, and we’re trying to figure out how best to distribute that where it will be most needed,” he told me.
“Every hospital is looking at what their capabilities might be and what they might have to do in terms of setting up additional facilities nearby. With universities having closed up for students, it’s possible we may need to see university space used as spillover for patient care. There are lots of concerns about whether there are enough health-care professionals, especially in places that were already short on physicians, like in rural communities. There is a major effort organized through [Health and Human Services], but obviously a lot of it is going to come down to what happens at the community level. And a lot of it will depend upon whether we’re successful in flattening that curve so that the need for intense medical attention stretches out over the course of several months as opposed to hitting us all at once in the next few weeks.”
Because we don’t yet have a vaccine, and we don’t yet have therapeutics that we know work, the best means of trying to prevent what Collins says “could be a really terrible outcome,” in addition to social distancing, is using sanitizers and washing your hands faithfully with hot water and soap for 20 seconds as many times during the day as you possibly can. “Those all seem like medieval practices, but they work,” he told me.
The soonest a vaccine will be available is in a year to 18 months, despite “being developed in record time,” according to Collins, so that’s off the table for now. (One vaccine began phase 1 trials in 45 volunteers on Monday.) More encouragingly, he said, “I would hope that the therapeutic aspects—most notably with a drug called remdesivir, which is now in clinical trials in China, Japan, South Korea, and the U.S.—will show that that particular antiviral has considerable efficacy for people who are very sick. That would help a lot if we actually had a drug that could be offered to people who most need it.”
He added, “It’s a drug that actually was developed in part by academic researchers supported by NIH and then taken on by Gilead, and which did show strong effectiveness against MERS, a related coronavirus, in an animal model. But one hopes that this drug might turn out to be beneficial in this current pandemic. If we had that as a potential medical intervention for the people who most need it, that could change things very much for the better because all the modeling assumes that there's nothing that we have to offer except supportive care.” The earliest trials should give a result sometime this spring, according to Collins.
Yascha Mounk: Cancel everything
I asked Collins when he imagines the testing regime will be at a point where he’ll be happy, and it will be giving Americans the information he feels is needed.
“I would hope in the next two weeks we’ll get there. It may start in those zip codes where the incidence of the disease appears to be the highest, and then quickly spread across the country. This model of having drive-through testing facilities in parking lots seems like the best way to make this accessible to people who really should be getting tested. But that’s pretty complicated to set up. It’s going to take an awful lot of moving parts to come together.”
Collins conceded, as has Fauci, that the well-publicized testing failures of the CDC were a blow. “It’s truly unfortunate that the testing got off to such a bad start. The CDC did have in place a plan, and this is certainly what they’ve done before, like with H1N1, where they have the capabilities of putting together a test fairly quickly and then distributing it to the state health departments. Keep in mind, the CDC is a federal organization, but most of what they try to get done has to be done through state health departments, which are often underfunded and unprepared for an event like what we are seeing now.”
Collins, honest and a man of integrity, added, “Unfortunately, their very rapid development of this test ended up delivering kits that were defective for reasons that I don’t entirely understand. That meant we lost a period of maybe three weeks while they were trying to figure out how to fix the problem. Meanwhile, the FDA, which normally is pretty stringent about who’s allowed to offer tests of this sort that are going to have a profound impact on clinical decision-making, did decide to relax that stringency in order to unleash the ability of other laboratories who had made their own tests to begin to use them. But that came at the very last day of February after a lot of time had passed where testing ideally should have been widely available. There was a plan back in February to begin to sample in five cities anybody who showed up in an emergency room with a flu-like illness who tested negative for influenza—so that we could begin to find out what is the representation of coronavirus in the community. But that plan didn’t happen because the testing wasn’t working. We are now playing catch-up.”
When I asked Collins what that specifically means, he said, “This is moving in the direction of having drive-through facilities at Walgreens, Walmart, and Target where you could drive up after getting an online approval. That means you would have a specific need for the test, which means you’ve got to have symptoms of some sort. You could then get the test done without ever getting out of your car, so it doesn’t expose other people.” The hope is that this would greatly open up the potential for testing, which has happened for example in South Korea, where they’ve given tens of thousands of tests in this fashion.
David Frum: The worst outcome
“There are such drive-by facilities already popping up in New Rochelle, New York, and at a few other places around the country. And this does seem like the right kind of model. I wish we’d had those functioning a month ago. We’d be in a much better place to know what’s coming. But here it is, we can’t go back and reinvent that, and we are pulling out all the stops to make it happen as fast as possible.” (That’s much more in the CDC’s sweet spot than it is in the NIH’s, but the NIH is doing what it can to help.)
I asked the NIH director what the best-case scenario might look like. “The best hope would be that the measures now being implemented in most states, some quicker than others, will slow the transmission of the virus so that it extends over many months instead of over the next three weeks,” he said. “That’s what we mean by ‘flattening the curve’ to give the health-care system a chance to take care of those who are seriously ill. That way we won’t have an example like Italy in our own country. On top of that, I would hope that the chance that this virus will begin to fade during the arrival of warmer weather will turn out to be true. That certainly has helped with influenza. We have no reason to think that that will necessarily apply to coronavirus, but it might. So let’s hope for that.”
Collins also spoke about civic responsibility and the importance of selflessness in the midst of a pandemic. “I think we as a nation have to get into a place of not just thinking about ourselves, but thinking about everybody else around us, and particularly the most vulnerable people—those who are older and those people with chronic diseases. Young people may have a relatively low risk of serious illness, kids seem to have a very low risk, but if you want to avoid what could be the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, then it is incumbent on all of us to severely limit our social interactions. We need to ask the question about every interaction we have, and whether it is necessary or not. I’m going to speak very strongly about that. Obviously, people do have to get food in the house and do other absolutely essential things, but beyond that, we should be volunteering to engage in the most stringent kind of isolation.”
He added, “That means we all need to take responsibility, even if we are thinking of ourselves as relatively impervious to this illness. It would be easy for a young person to look at the data and go, ‘Well, you know, what if I get it? I’m probably going to be fine.’ But you have to think of yourself also as a vessel for other vulnerable people. Even if you don’t think you need to do this kind of isolation for your own good, you’re doing it for the rest of the country—and particularly for your grandparents and other people who are in a vulnerable state.”
And Collins also offered a big-picture perspective for Americans. “I think people need to be prepared that we are going to be in this space for more time than they will like,” he said. “In many ways, the best sign that we’re making progress will be that the duration of the epidemic goes on a little longer. That’s what flattening the curve means. It means that the most serious cases do get stretched out over time and don’t all happen right at the beginning. So anybody who’s imagining that this will all be over and done within a month, needs to get their mind around the fact that we’re in this, I think, for quite a long stretch of time. I can’t imagine that schools that have decided to give students off two weeks will be back in session then, and probably not for this whole academic year. I think we’re facing the fact that, at least until June, we all need to be in the space of taking this with the greatest seriousness—and that means every American taking responsibility about this and not coming up with reasons why it’s not necessary.”
The coronavirus crisis is merely the latest chapter in the dazzling career of Francis Sellers Collins.
Collins, who grew up on a farm in rural Virginia—he was homeschooled until the sixth grade—received a B.S. in chemistry from the University of Virginia, a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from Yale University, and an M.D. with honors from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. (He completed his Ph.D. his first year in medical school.)
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Collins once told me in a private conversation what those who know him best can testify to: Helping people who are suffering has always been a commitment. That was part of what explained his shift in focus from physical chemistry to medicine. “Although I loved the experience of working in quantum mechanics and wrestling with second-order differential equations, it was lonely,” he said. “It did not have that kind of human connection that I was beginning to long for. And that did drive me then to seek another way to explore science that was going to be more sociable, but also more devoted to outcomes that would help people who were suffering—and medicine was the perfect path to go down, even though it seemed like quite a dramatic departure from the career trajectory I had been on.”
Collins eventually found his way to the University of Michigan, where he spent nine years on the faculty, focused on internal medicine and genetics, and met his future wife, Diane Baker. At Michigan, Collins was part of a team that among other things identified the major gene defect that causes cystic fibrosis, one of the most common genetic killers in the United States.
In 1993, Collins joined the NIH, the world’s leading organization supporting biomedical research, and led the Human Genome Project. He made landmark discoveries in the genetic origins of various disorders and was the leader of an effort that revolutionized the practice of medicine: the announcement on June 26, 2000, that scientists had completed the first survey of the entire human genome, the set of instructions that defines the human organism. It revolutionized the diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of most human diseases. The New York Times described it as “an achievement that represents a pinnacle of human self-knowledge,” and the breakthrough ranks among the most significant in medical science in history. (Collins was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in November 2007.)
Reflecting on the events of 20 years ago, Collins told me, “I thought long and hard about what I was going to say that morning, and wrote [my speech] at five that morning. It was particularly poignant because my sister-in-law had died of breast cancer a few days earlier, and I had spoken at her funeral on that Saturday, and this was the Monday morning where I was talking about how the human genome sequence was going to help a lot of things, including cancer—but it hadn’t come quickly enough for her. So I had that very much on my mind.”
But his earlier work on cystic fibrosis had already taught him that translating basic research into treatment can be complicated. “At the time,” he told me, “this was a moment of celebration because we finally had an answer, and we could finally do accurate diagnosis, and I hoped that that might lead fairly quickly to better treatments for all these young adults and kids suffering from this disease. It was a long, hard journey to get the therapeutic side of this to start to work.”
The big moment came 30 years later, in November of last year, when the announcement was made that, based on rigorous clinical trials, a triple-drug therapy would provide, if not a cure, certainly a remarkable improvement in the life experience of 90 percent of people with cystic fibrosis, who might now be able to live out a pretty normal life span.
“I did have the chance to be there in Nashville on that day, as this announcement was being made,” Collins said. “This is a community I had stayed close with for all of those 30 years, even when my lab was no longer working on cystic fibrosis. I had written a song about what we all hoped might happen someday, way back in the 1990s, a song called “Dare to Dream.” Now that dream was coming true. At that moment, with 5,000 people gathered as scientists, care providers, families, people who had cystic fibrosis, all gathered in that same room, we all sang that song together.”
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“Boy, it was hard to get through it without really breaking down because all of the people represented in the room, and what they had gone through, their courage, their determination, their belief that this could happen—represented there in the most dramatic way. It felt like such a moment of thankfulness that God’s grace had somehow gotten us to this point. I will not forget that.”
I first met Francis Collins when I worked in the White House during the George W. Bush presidency. He, Michael Gerson, the president’s chief speechwriter, and I had lunch in the West Wing to discuss not politics but science and faith. (All three of us were concerned about some prominent Christians who were denying evolution, which we knew was anti-science and we believed was discrediting to the Christian witness.) Most of those who know about Collins associate him with science; far fewer know about his interest in Christian witness. So I asked him to describe his journey of faith.
Growing up, Collins’s religious instruction was limited to being sent to the local Episcopal church choir to learn music, “instructed by my dad to ignore the rest of it, which I did,” he told me. In college and then graduate school, he found himself moving from the category of agnostic to atheist. “I would have challenged anybody who wanted to bring to the conversation some discussion about God. I would have asserted they were basically stuck in some past era of supernaturalism that is no longer necessary, because science has eliminated the need for it,” is how he put it to me. But the time came when, as a third-year medical student, he was no longer learning about the human body in a lecture hall; he was sitting at the bedside of people with terrible illnesses, most of which physicians had imperfect methods to be able to help.
“Watching those individuals’ fates, what was going to be coming soon, the end of their life, I was trying to imagine what I would do in that circumstance,” Collins shared with me. “This was in North Carolina, and there were a lot of wonderful individuals, many of them having had relatively simple lives, but lives that were totally dedicated to helping other people. Many of these people were deeply committed to faith. I was puzzled and unsettled to see how they approached something that I personally was pretty terrified about: the end of their lives. They had peace and equanimity, and even a sort of sense of joyfulness that there was something beyond. I didn’t know what to do with it.”
“It made me realize that I had never really gone beyond the most superficial consideration of whether God exists, or a serious consideration about what happens after you die.”
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Collins told me about a patient he had gotten pretty attached to—“she reminded me of my grandmother,” he said—and who suffered from advanced cardiac disease, which included almost daily episodes of crushing chest pain. “And yet she came through this all with remarkable peace and was very comfortable sharing the reasons for that with me, namely her faith in Jesus. And at one point after one of those sharing moments, she looked at me in a quizzical way and said, ‘You know, doctor’—she did call me doctor, I wasn’t yet—‘You have listened to me talk about my faith, but you never say anything. What do you believe?’ Just very direct, very simple question, and it was like a thunderclap. Like a realization that I could not walk away from, but that was the most important question I’ve ever been asked.”
Collins later met a Methodist pastor, Sam MacMillan, who was “a very willing partner for me, tolerating my blasphemous questions and assuring me that if God was real there would be answers.” It was MacMillan who introduced Collins to the work of C. S. Lewis, starting with Mere Christianity.
“I realized in the very first two or three pages of that book that most of my objections against faith were utterly simplistic. They were arguments from a schoolboy. Here was an Oxford intellectual giant who had traveled the same path from atheism to faith, and had a way of describing why that made sense that was utterly disarming. It was also very upsetting. It was not the answer I was looking for.” But it was, for Collins, the answer he eventually found, and at 27, he became a Christian.
The embrace of that faith transformed not only his relationship with God, but also how he viewed other people, and himself. “They are all, as Lewis said, angels around you. And the notion therefore that it is okay to put yourself in the driver’s seat in every way, regardless of what effect that has on others, it’s simply indefensible. I think it did take what had been for me a pretty strong ambitious driving approach and moderate it, not to say that I didn’t retain a fair amount of that, but maybe in a somewhat more loving, forgiving approach.”
When I asked him how he sees faith now, in his late 60s, compared with how he saw things in his late 20s, he told me, “I think I’ve also arrived at a place where my faith has become a really strong support for dealing with life’s struggles. It took me awhile, I think—that sense that God is sufficient and that I don’t have to be strong in every circumstance.”
I found that striking, particularly in this moment. “One of my great puzzles when I first became a Christian is that verse, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, because My strength is made perfect in your weakness,’” he told me. “That was so completely upside down for me. Weakness? And now I embrace that with the fullness of everything around me when I’m realizing that my strength is inadequate, whether it’s coronavirus or some family crisis, God’s strength is always sufficient. That is a such a great comfort, but it took me a long time to get to the point of really owning that one.”
Collins was the founder and creative force behind BioLogos, an organization that invites the church and the world to see the harmony between science and biblical faith. (BioLogos was launched at the time Collins was asked by President Obama to become the director of the NIH, in April 2009, which required him having no other affiliations with any other organizations.)
I asked Collins what he hopes more Christians would understand about science and what he hopes more scientists would understand about faith.
“To Christians I would say, think of science as a gift from the Creator. The curiosity that we have been instilled with to understand how the universe works can inspire even greater awe of the Creator. This gift could hardly be a threat to God, the author of it all. Celebrate what science can teach us. Think of science as a form of worship.”
“Scientists, by their nature, are trying to understand how nature works. And I think the message to scientists has to be there are really important questions that fall outside of what science is able to address meaningfully, such as ‘Why is there something instead of nothing? What is the meaning of love? Is there a God? What happens after you die?’ Those are not questions for which science or scientific methods can be applied.” He believes scientists would be better served by getting outside of a mindset that says the only questions worth asking are those about the material world.
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“It constricts the universe of important questions to assume they are all questions that science can address.”
It was said of Freud that he both hated and feared music because it affected him so powerfully and he couldn’t rationally explain why. Anyone who knows Francis Collins well is aware of his gift for music, and his love of it. “It does something to my soul to be part of a musical experience,” he told me. “In fact, we have, right now, a really interesting moment to try to understand that connection, because neuroscience is progressing rapidly in terms of how music has the ability to so powerfully affect us.” He added, “I do think that music provides glimpses of what Lewis called joy, those moments where you have a sense of something profoundly desirable but as soon as you have started to realize it, it slips through your fingers. Music carries me there, probably more than in almost any other experience.”
Collins remembers being 12 years old at a Christmas Eve service, with a choir and an organ playing, and “just feeling like there was something profound happening that caused me to long for something I couldn’t actually name. And that is very much what music is capable of doing. So it gives us a glimpse of something intensely desirable. It can provide a way to the awesome goodness and loving kindness of God himself—and somehow through the experience of beauty, in this case musical beauty, you can touch [God] for an instant.”
A final story worth knowing about Francis Collins. The setting: A dinner following an October 11, 2007, debate at Georgetown University between Christopher Hitchens, a prominent writer, polemicist, and atheist, and Alister McGrath, a theologian and Christian apologist from Northern Ireland. I attended the event, as did Collins.
When the dinner hosts opened things up to questions from the audience, Collins asked Hitchens a question along the lines of: If you’re going to argue that there is no basis for human morality other than evolutionary responses to survival, then one might argue that there is no objective moral grounding to good and evil, that those are actually mirages, concepts that we’ve been hoodwinked into by our evolutionary ancestors. What would you say to that?
Hitchens responded quickly and dismissively, saying that he was shocked that one of the greatest scientific minds in the world would ask such a superficial and silly question, but not actually answering it. The audience, meanwhile, was taken aback by his rudeness, as was I, someone who was friendly with Hitchens. After the dinner broke up, Collins sought out Hitchens to talk to him in a garden area, in hopes of continuing the conversation.
“I wouldn’t say that went particularly well either,” Collins told me, “but it did seem to me that this was a pretty interesting fellow, and there might be an opportunity to go a little deeper than that superficial response. So I filed that away.”
A short time later Collins was invited to a modest-size apartment in Friendship Heights, a residential neighborhood in Washington, D.C., by somebody who wanted to have a discussion, a sort of a salon, about life and faith.
“I went without realizing that it had really been set up as a debate between Hitch and myself,” Collins told me. “While everybody else sipped on their cocktails and watched, we got more deeply into it at that point. It was a little bit more useful; he was a little bit more willing to engage in substance. It was more of a respectful conversation that had substance; other people engaged and had questions, and it was a pretty useful evening.”
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After the gathering broke up, Collins and Hitchens engaged in a more personal discussion that started them “on a pathway where we could be completely at opposite ends when it came to the harmony of science and faith, but we could also have a meaningful conversation about other life matters without bringing too much baggage into it.”
Then, in the summer of 2010, Collins learned, along with the rest of the world, that Hitchens had been diagnosed with esophageal cancer and that it had spread, a condition which eventually killed him in December 2011. “And so at that point I reached out to him and indicated my willingness to do anything I could to help him sort through what the options might be, knowing that this was going to be one of those things where standard therapy was probably not going to offer a lot,” Collins told me. “And he quickly picked up on that and then began a series of gatherings in his apartment where he would invite me down to talk—ostensibly about his medical decision making but usually ending up in a very far-ranging conversation. A conversation with Christopher was always intensely interesting; whether it was about Thomas Jefferson, or whether it was about esophageal cancer, you knew you were going to have a provocative moment graced by a fair amount of alcohol. And in the process I met his wife, Carol Blue, and met his daughter. We became good friends in that circumstance, although obviously with very different views about the fundamental truths of Christian faith, which he continued to discount.”
Collins did help by identifying for Hitchens the possibility of taking advantage of advances in genomics. A protocol at Washington University in St. Louis had just been announced whereby it would be possible to do a complete DNA analysis of esophageal cancers to see what drug treatment might be particularly appropriate for that individual.
“That genomic analysis was carried out and it did suggest some alterations in the way in which his disease was being approached, which I think may have ultimately given him a few more months, although I can’t prove that. We continued to converse about that and to sit together in his apartment watching the sun go down from time to time. I would occasionally play his piano. And things began to gradually get worse. I remember a time where he was urgently admitted to Georgetown Hospital.”
Collins went to see Christopher, who was in tough shape at that time, although he rallied. “And then gradually things went from being able to continue his very energetic lifestyle to more and more difficulties with the cancer, and our communication became more by email.” Collins said of Hitchens, “He was very respectful. I never really had a circumstance in a private conversation where Christopher would say derogatory things about faith or about people of faith. Curious, yes, probing, oh, yes, but not denigrating.”
Hitchens himself, in an article in Vanity Fair published 15 months before he died, referred to Collins as “the best of the faithful,” a “great humanitarian,” and “one of the greatest living Americans.” His affection for the man he once treated with disdain was undisguised.
At the conclusion of my interview with Collins, I asked him what it was about the relationship with Hitchens that was special. “You know, I think it was the opportunity to see what lies underneath a very hard-edged perspective that you would normally be really put off by. It’s a reminder of the fact that if we really want to understand each other, we can’t be put off by those kind of superficial, admittedly sometimes difficult to listen to, perspectives. There is real humanity in everyone. This was a guy who was intensely curious about everything. It was a guy who cared deeply about his wife and his daughter. It was a guy who was in many ways a little isolated, maybe a little lonely, who cherished the chance to develop a friendship, and especially with somebody who was very different from him.”
On Friday, April 20, 2012, at a memorial service for Hitchens, Collins spoke, and played his “Hitchens Sonata” on the piano. It was a beautiful and touching moment, an act of friendship by a man of great grace.
Christopher Hitchens was right about Francis Collins. He is the best of the faithful.


Alan Taylor

Alan Taylor is a senior editor at The Atlantic , where he oversees the Photo section .
• A few glimpses of Maine 's landscape , and some of the animals and people calling it home • Mountaintop yoga in China , a sunrise over Glastonbury Tor , a sneaky gull in Denmark , a field of lavender in England , “ Rays of Victory ” in Russia , a concert for plants in Spain , a ski run in Australia , and much more • Recent images of some of the services and memorials in Brazil , Chile , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Salvador , and more • Photographers across Africa , the Middle East , and Asia captured the celestial phenomenon and many of its observers .
• A few glimpses of Iowa ’ s landscape , and some of the animals and people calling it home • Continued burials of coronavirus victims in Chile , dinosaur art in Shanghai , ongoing protests against police brutality and systemic racism worldwide , workout pods in California , a horse named Mr. Glitter Sparkles in England , and much more • A collection of images of some @ @ @ @ @ @ @ call Turkey ’ s Lake Van basin home • Images from across Europe over the past two weeks , as different countries slowly emerge from months of pandemic lockdown • Delaware : Images of the First State A few glimpses of Delaware ’ s landscape , and some of the animals and people that call it home • Rhythmic gymnastics on a British seashore , anti-racism protests across the United States , the funeral procession of George Floyd in Houston , a wildfire in California , idled elephants in Thailand , and much @ @ @ @ @ @ @ traveled with health-care workers attending to the residents of small river communities and larger towns in Brazil ’ s Marajo Island .
• Photos from the past 48 hours of demonstrations around the world , where thousands of people marched to show solidarity with American protests over the killing of George Floyd • A few glimpses of Alabama ’ s landscape , and some of the animals and people calling it home • Swimming in Mallorca , mountain art in Switzerland , protests against racism and police brutality across the United States , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in Kenya , and much more • Photos of demonstrations in nearly two dozen cities—a snapshot from the seventh day of a nationwide protest movement • With the passing of artist Christo , yesterday , at the age of 84 , a look back at some of the enormous installations created by Christo and his wife and partner Jeanne-Claude .
• Fire and Protests in the Twin Cities A third day of protests took place yesterday in Minneapolis and St. Paul , over the death of George Floyd , a black man who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ after an officer kneeled on his neck and ignored his pleas that he couldn ’ t breathe .

Alan Taylor is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he oversees the Photo section.
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