Here’s something we can all agree on: Jack Reacher kicks ass. Kicks it with relish. Kicks it with—not abandon, he’s too in control for that—but with a sense of near-blissful release. Kicks it, most importantly, in the name of justice, in the name of everybody getting what they deserve.
America loved Jack Reacher from the moment it met him. Lee Child, his creator, has written 28 Reacher novels, all of them best sellers. But there’s a special spice, a special piquancy, to our Reacherism right now.

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The GOP has collapsed as a party, but voters in general don’t seem to care about what parties once represented.
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
Bill Ackman is a brilliant fictional character.

The word indie has lost a lot of its credibility over the years. A term that’s supposed to signal nonconformity is now a bland aesthetic label, evoking microbrews and mason jars. Many supposedly indie institutions have allied with corporations, such as when Pitchfork, the music-reviewing website known for catapulting obscure bands and tearing down big ones, was bought by Condé Nast, the glossy media company, in 2015.

Once upon a time, a restless cashier would eye each and every item you, the consumer, purchased and key it into the register. This took skill but also time—and proved to be an imperfect way to keep track of inventory. Then one day, a group of grocery executives and inventors came up with a better way: what we now know as the barcode, a rectangle that marks items ranging from insulin to Doritos. It’s so ubiquitous and long-lived that it’s become invisible.