Today's Liberal News

Amy Weiss-Meyer

Do the Oscars Still Mean Anything?

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.
“Hollywood is easy to hate, easy to sneer at, easy to lampoon,” Raymond Chandler wrote in The Atlantic in 1945.
Chandler, at the time already a popular author of detective fiction, had lately begun working as a screenwriter, but he still considered himself an outsider in the movie business.

What Stephen Sondheim Knew About Endings

Back in 2020, I might’ve imagined the end of the pandemic being something like that gum commercial: everyone together, vaccinated, picking the same time to come safely and communally out of lockdown and get back to the way things were before, so grateful to be alive we practically leapt into one another’s arms as soon as we got the chance. That is not, of course, the way things have gone in 2021.

What Stephen Sondheim Knew About Endings

Back in 2020, I might’ve imagined the end of the pandemic being something like that gum commercial: everyone together, vaccinated, picking the same time to come safely and communally out of lockdown and get back to the way things were before, so grateful to be alive we practically leapt into each other’s arms as soon as we got the chance. That is not, of course, the way things have gone in 2021.

‘A Wishing So Strong That There Are Moments She Nearly Believes It’

Editor’s Note: Read Morgan Thomas’s new short story, “Bump.” “Bump” is a new short story by Morgan Thomas. To mark the story’s publication in The Atlantic, Thomas and Amy Weiss-Meyer, a deputy managing editor at the magazine, discussed the story over email. Their conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.Amy Weiss-Meyer: “Bump” begins with a confrontation of sorts, addressed “to those who accuse me of immoderate desire.

What Ever Happened to the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife?

At a September 2012 academic conference in Rome, Karen King, a historian at Harvard Divinity School, made a major announcement. She had discovered a fragment of papyrus that bore a shocking phrase: “Jesus said to them, My wife.” If the scrap was authentic, it had the potential to upend centuries of Roman Catholic tradition.