4 ways to fix "fake news"

If your Facebook feed is filled with garbage, it means you were reading garbage in the first place. The algorithm simply gives you more of what you crave.

Jim VandeHei

This is exactly how a nuclear war would kill you

Alex Ward

It’s better to be born rich than gifted

A revolution in genomics is creeping into economics. It allows us to say something we might have suspected, but could never confirm: money trumps genes. Using one new, genome-based measure, economists found genetic endowments are distributed almost equally among children in low-income and high-income families. Success is not. The least-gifted children of high-income parents graduate from college at higher rates than the most-gifted children of low-income parents.

Andrew Van Dam

Kavanaugh and Trump are part of a larger crisis of elite accountability in America

Now he may end up as a Supreme Court justice despite never in his life having been involved in anything that was actually successful. He has never meaningfully taken responsibility for the substantive failures of the Starr inquiry or the Bush White House, where his tenure as a senior staffer coincided with both Hurricane Katrina and failed Social Security privatization plan as well as the email shenanigans he misled Congress about, or for his personal failure as a bystander to Kozinski’s abuses.

Matthew Yglesias

The Mueller investigation is showing how badly we’ve failed to prosecute white-collar crime

It shouldn’t take a special counsel to catch these guys.

Matthew Yglesias

“Socialism” vs. “capitalism” is a false dichotomy

We need go-go capitalism to afford a generous welfare state, and people won’t support go-go capitalism without a safety net. “Socialists” and Republicans forget different parts of this lesson.

 Will Wilkinson

Actually, the 1 Percent Are Still The Problem

The Atlantic trots out a familiar argument blaming the upper middle class for income inequality. It’s wrong.

Jordan Weissmann

How Baby Boomers Broke America

These distinctly American ideas became the often unintended instruments for splitting the country into two classes: the protected and the unprotected. The protected overmatched, overran and paralyzed the government. The unprotected were left even further behind. And in many cases, the work was done by a generation of smart, hungry strivers who benefited from one of the most American values of all: meritocracy.

Steven Brill

The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

The class divide is already toxic, and is fast becoming unbridgeable. You’re probably part of the problem.

Matthew Stewart

How a Hole Punch Shaped Public Perception of the Great Depression

Aida Amer

The Case for Redistribution

If we’re serious about sexual fulfillment, we should worry more about economic inequality, not sex robots.

Tyler Zimmer

Is Robin Hanson America’s Creepiest Economist?

Jordan Weissmann

Why Would the Atlantic Hire Kevin Williamson?

Describing a 2014 visit to the impoverished city of East St. Louis, Illinois, Williamson compared a black child to a “primate” and a “three-fifths-scale Snoop Dogg” before likening his own trip through Illinois to Marlow’s journey up the Congo River in Heart of Darkness, all within the space of a single paragraph.

Jordan Weissmann

Trump is Reshaping the Census to Reflect His Vision of America

The count has always revealed our deepest anxieties about race and inequality.

Gregory Smithsimon

Martin Shkreli Is Going to Jail and I Can’t Even Bring Myself to Enjoy It

That sums up a lot about the state of U.S. capitalism and law. It’s perfectly kosher to milk grotesque profits from old, life-saving medications. But playing games with a relatively small amount of investors’ cash can get you put away for the better part of a decade.

Jordan Weissmann

How states with loose oversight export crime guns nationwide

Christopher Ingraham

The Soul-Crushing Legacy of Billy Graham

Bob Moser

Cop Stoppers

How did the NRA become an enemy of law enforcement?

Millions of decent people pay dues every year to sustain the NRA. They think they’re supporting law and order. What they’re really supporting is the nation’s most effective anti-police lobby.

William Saletan

Don’t kid yourself. The future is bleak.

Democracy is really a prisoner's dilemma, and we're losing at ours.

The only way democracies stop being so polarized is after some kind of catastrophe — a catastrophe that more often than not is brought on by, yes, polarization. Indeed, the two most optimistic examples that Levitsky and Ziblatt can come up with are the way Chile's parties from across the ideological spectrum were eventually able to set aside their rather substantial differences to support democracy in the years after Augusto Pinochet's coup and how German conservatives managed to overcome their traditional Catholic-Protestant divide to do the same in the wake of World War II. Remember, the fact that democracy can come back after a dictatorship is supposed to be the good news here.

Matt O'Brien

What David Brooks Misunderstands About Abortion

“Late term” abortion is a wastebasket term used by the anti-choice zealots to describe a spectrum of procedures and needs. It is nonspecific and conjures up the worst images, likely on purpose. Most procedures beyond 20 weeks do occur before 24 weeks, the long-standing threshold for viability, but most of these babies would not be viable if they reached term anyway. The reason there is no comfortable upper threshold for ending a pregnancy is that lethal anomalies can be discovered late in a pregnancy. Should a mother be condemned to carry her anencephalic fetus (which would be born without any brain tissue but a brainstem) to term because she received late prenatal care? What is the argument for that?

Cheryl Axelrod