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.
In 1933, the author Isadore Luce Smith made a bold declaration in The Atlantic: “A new type of parent has evolved.” These parents, Smith reported, hired baby specialists, pored over child-rearing books, and were obsessed with issues such as thumb-sucking.
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.
“Dogs are so numerous in New York, indeed, that they have already become a nuisance,” the journalist Charles Dawson Shanly wrote in The Atlantic in 1872. He was annoyed by “all the barking … and there is a good deal of it.
When I brought my new dog, a 4-year-old Cavalier King Charles spaniel named Grace, home for the holidays last year, I was nervous. I didn’t know how she’d react to the unfamiliar environment, so I kept scanning the floor for items she might swallow. She wasn’t perfectly house-trained yet, so I was constantly watching to see if she started to walk in circles—a sign that she has to go to the bathroom.
After a week with no trouble, my mom gently called me out.
The past few years have seen an intensifying of the ways politics can intervene in education, including the censorship of books. Lawmakers in Texas have made repeated pushes to restrict the books that kids can access in schools. Leaders in other states across the country have done the same, including in Tennessee, where one local school board infamously banned Maus, a graphic novel that brutally—but honestly—depicts the Holocaust.
To me, the true sign of fall isn’t apple picking, fuzzy sweaters, or leaves turning new colors. It’s the sudden urge—which typically emerges on sleepy weekend afternoons—to dig up a cookbook and start measuring and mixing ingredients for sweet treats. The practice can be a salve for anxiety and provides comfort in stressful moments. It’s also just really cozy.
Nothing is less fun than a fun fact. The mandate to share one about yourself, typically posed as an icebreaker in schools, offices, and other formal settings, is deeply constraining. The form demands a tidbit that’s honest without being overly revealing, interesting but never indecent, unique but not weird. Within such parameters, it’s virtually impossible not to come off as either hopelessly boring or a complete fool.
In The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information, Craig Robertson chronicles the history and influence of the titular 19th-century invention that revolutionized offices. The machine—for it was advertised as a piece of high-tech equipment rather than as a mundane furniture item—promised corporations a new level of capitalist efficiency. All company information could be quickly classified and stored according to a rigid system, and then just as easily retrieved.
In The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information, Craig Robertson chronicles the history and influence of the titular 19th-century invention that revolutionized offices. The machine—for it was advertised as a piece of high-tech equipment rather than as a mundane furniture item—promised corporations a new level of capitalist efficiency. All company information could be quickly classified and stored according to a rigid system, and then just as easily retrieved.
Vacations are often depicted as escapes in which one leaves the stresses of home and travels to a blissful paradise, unburdened by worry. Yet, as the best literature about tourism makes clear, there’s a cost to believing that any destination could be uncomplicated.Sarah Stodola’s The Last Resort, which traces the ocean-side hotel over time, easily exposes the dark side of this fantasy.
The short story “Go, Team,” by Samantha Hunt, traces a series of conversations within a group of mothers after a woman disappears into the woods during a children’s soccer game. They aren’t sure if the vanished woman is a mom, though they wonder if she might be. But even when it’s only suspected, motherhood is such an all-consuming identity that the possibility suffuses every element of their discussion.
When Russia invaded Ukraine, the writer and photographer Yevgenia Belorusets began to journal about her experience living in Kyiv. The resulting account, which she published online in real time, provides insight into the conflict that more straightforward news coverage has failed to capture. It is, as she put it in an interview with my colleague Gal Beckerman, “a very complex picture of reality at a moment when war has turned everything incredibly awful.
When Russia invaded Ukraine, the writer and photographer Yevgenia Belorusets began to journal about her experience living in Kyiv. The resulting account, which she published online in real time, provides insight into the conflict that more straightforward news coverage has failed to capture. It is, as she put it in an interview with my colleague Gal Beckerman, “a very complex picture of reality at a moment when war has turned everything incredibly awful.
Editor’s note: This week’s newsletter is a rerun.
We’ll be back with a fresh newsletter next week.After the Capitol riot, Matt Hawn, a teacher from Tennessee, brought an Atlantic essay to class for his students to analyze: “The First White President,” by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Earlier the class had discussed a police shooting in Kenosha, Wisconsin; later in the year, they watched a performance of Kyla Jenée Lacey’s poem “White Privilege.
Atlantic staff writer Anne Applebaum, an expert on Eastern Europe, has long watched social media’s power with great concern. Yesterday, at Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy, a conference hosted by The Atlantic and the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, she spoke with David Axelrod, the founding director of the Institute of Politics, about the dangers these platforms pose to democracy.
When the CDC recommended COVID-19 vaccines for 5-to-11-year-olds in early November, adult publications rushed to explain what the move meant for families, schools, and the pandemic at large. While most of the media competed for grown-up attention, a different network of sources targeted the group most affected by the news—but first, it had to explain what a vaccine is.
Editor’s note: This week’s newsletter is a rerun.
We’ll be back with a fresh newsletter soon.In dozens of novels written over a decades-long career, the romance writer Jackie Collins sharply observed the role of sex and power in Hollywood. She wrote incisively about abuse in the industry and empowered female characters who found liberation in a male-dominated world.
When considering the history of American food, a few notable figures, such as James Beard and Julia Child, invariably come to mind. But our nation’s culinary roots are so much broader and more diverse than what can be captured by considering the work of such a small number of individuals.For one, even the famous names didn’t work on their own.
After the Capitol riot, Matt Hawn, a teacher from Tennessee, brought an Atlantic essay to class for his students to analyze: “The First White President,” by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Earlier the class had discussed a police shooting in Kenosha, Wisconsin; later in the year, they watched a performance of Kyla Jenée Lacey’s poem “White Privilege.
In Sally Rooney’s novels, idealistic college students espouse Marxism despite never having read any of the ideology’s foundational texts; they advocate for radicalism while keeping up their grades and wrestling with deeply traditional romantic desires. They are startlingly realistic—but their role as political actors is much fuzzier. Indeed Rooney has long been criticized as insufficiently political.
In the media reporter Brian Stelter’s book Hoax, he shares an anecdote that neatly sums up so much about Fox News and its influence on how its viewers communicate. A staffer who described a restaurant chain’s decision to offer a vegan burger as an improvement to the menu said they were castigated and corrected: The new option was actually proof of the “war on meat,” a network superior said. Thus, the story was quickly reframed in the channel’s familiar vernacular.
When The Last Jedi came out, some viewers had déjà vu: Certain aspects of the movie’s plot were strikingly similar to the events in several popular stories on the fan-fiction site Archive of Our Own. The coincidence may seem strange, but in many ways it’s unsurprising that the people who were thinking most deeply about a franchise—its creators and devotees alike—would come to the same conclusions about each character’s fate.
Shortly before the start of the coronavirus pandemic, Celia, an American who was working as a teaching assistant in Spain, began to date a man casually. When the spread of the virus intensified, she essentially moved in with him. She was stressed about the status of their relationship, which they never defined. But the couple didn’t argue, and they were both very affectionate; after finishing work, they cooked and baked together.
In 1983, the historian Benedict Anderson published his pioneering work Imagined Communities, which looks at the intangible factors that bond nations together. His analysis was prescient, thanks to the expansive lens it took in examining what unites people, and the book still helps deepen considerations of modern issues, such as the importance of a representative Pride flag.
Baseball, like many sports, sometimes seems as though it’s leaving the realm of human athleticism and instead marching toward an almost technical optimization. Steroids (illicitly taken) have made some players stronger than ever. Sabermetrics, which involves the detailed statistical analysis of baseball data, has turned the artistry of staffing a team into mere mathematics, a phenomenon that the author Michael Lewis writes about in Moneyball.
Joe Sanderson arrived in El Salvador as a white American traveler with ambitions of writing a novel. But during his journey, he became something else entirely: a revolutionary, fully enmeshed in the culture he’d set out to document. The journalist Héctor Tobar’s The Last Great Road Bum chronicles this transformation, interrupting Sanderson’s real journal entries with commentary from Tobar.
In dozens of novels written over a decades-long career, the romance writer Jackie Collins sharply observed the role of sex and power in Hollywood. She wrote incisively about abuse in the industry and empowered female characters who found liberation in a male-dominated world. She was brilliant and prescient—and overlooked in literary circles by those who wrote off her work as trashy airport smut.
Peter Turnley / Corbis / Getty
When the psychologist Michael Reichert became a father to sons, he aimed to avoid putting his boys into narrow masculine boxes, an effort that he details in his book, How to Raise a Boy. Still, he sometimes slipped. For example, in a 2019 Atlantic interview, Reichert recalled forcing his young son to face off against bullies rather than offering him a refuge.
In A Little Life, a novel by the author Hanya Yanagihara, the tone is exaggerated, almost melodramatic. But the book brings nuance to a key realm—its portrayal of queerness—as its four protagonists each arrive at complex understandings of their sexuality.Indeed the best works of queer literature create space for this complexity. For example, the critic Andrea Long Chu questions simplistic narratives about trans identity in Females, which itself resists genre characterization.
The author Brontez Purnell’s short story “Early Retirement” focuses on Antonio, a struggling actor who is unfulfilled by his job. One night, Antonio drinks too much and blacks out in the middle of a performance, experiencing a “cool and complete dissociation onstage.” He is booted from the cast the next day.Purnell’s story illustrates a common experience of disillusionment in modern-day work culture.
In nature documentaries such as A Perfect Planet and Planet Earth, the wilderness seems free of human influence, Emma Marris wrote in a recent story for The Atlantic. Sweeping, unpeopled vistas and close-up shots of animals render the world in an enhanced, almost unnatural, high-definition style.Such visions of untouched, wild lands are nothing new; John Muir, an early conservationist, even likened our country to a sort of Garden of Eden.