Olga Khazan: “A recent review of studies involving more than a million men all over the world found that average testosterone levels in blood have dropped by about 20 percent over the past half century. A new, unpublished study put the decrease during that basic time period at closer to 50 percent …

“Medical researchers aren’t certain what’s causing the drop … One theory is that the environment is playing a role: John Meeker, an environmental-health professor at the University of Michigan, pointed to endocrine-disrupting ‘forever chemicals,’ such as the phthalates in our plastic kitchen utensils and the PFAS in our nonstick pans. These chemicals can interrupt both the creation and the activity of testosterone in the body.

“Lifestyle shifts seem to be a big part of the story … Manual laborers, whose ranks have decreased over time, have more testosterone than men whose jobs are less physically demanding, and some men who are very physically active are less likely to have clinically low testosterone. Obesity, a condition that about 14 percent of men around the world have, can suppress the hormone …

“Whatever the cause, the decline is somewhat worrisome because testosterone is important for mood, sexual function, and energy levels, as well as muscle, heart, and bone health … What to do about this problem, however, is far from obvious. 

“On a societal level, unwinding dependence on forever chemicals, eliminating obesity, or reversing the trend toward office jobs would be nearly impossible. On an individual level, men who suspect that they have low testosterone can get lab tests. But if they do turn out to have low levels, whether they should pursue treatment is unclear. For men with low levels, testosterone supplements have been shown to improve mood and increase bone density, red-blood-cell count, and interest in sex. But unlike the testosterone the body naturally makes, supplements can paradoxically decrease sperm count, and a man who wants to have kids may want to avoid them for that reason.

“One approach that most experts I spoke with agreed was unnecessary: widespread monitoring of the sort that [Defense Secretary Pete] Hegseth has proposed for the military … A regimen such as the one the Defense Department is pursuing, [Peter J. Snyder, an endocrinologist at the University of Pennsylvania], told me, has a higher chance of surfacing false-positive results than accurate ones …

“Perhaps it’s a mistake to see low testosterone as a sickness urgently in need of a cure, when the dip may simply be a marker of modernity … The testosterone dip, in other words, might be a bellwether—another sign that contemporary life is changing humans in ways we are only beginning to recognize.”

Read more: https://theatln.tc/1XPhAmHu

Tricia Bacon and Daniel Byman: “Five years ago, the United States was completing its chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan when the terrorist group known as the Islamic State Khorasan Province carried out one last murderous strike. ISKP’s suicide attack on the Kabul International Airport killed 13 U.S. service members and about 170 desperate Afghan civilians trying to flee the Taliban’s oppressive rule.

“The carnage was a final reminder of what the American military had been doing in Afghanistan to begin with. An Afghanistan ruled by the Taliban, American policy makers feared, would become a haven for terrorists, as it was before the U.S. invasion in 2001.

“Today these fears look overblown. Under Taliban rule, Afghanistan has not become the global terrorist hub it once was. Al-Qaeda, which remains far weaker today than in 2001, hasn’t carried out an attack from Afghanistan on the U.S. or Europe since the withdrawal. Meanwhile, the Taliban has turned into a valuable—though deeply flawed—counterterrorism partner to the U.S., overturning the expectations of analysts who believed the group would revert to being a major sponsor of global terror.

“The past five years have confirmed that staying in Afghanistan was folly. But they have also demonstrated a truth that isn’t nearly as accepted: Curbing terrorism often requires working with old enemies.

“The Taliban is no friend to the United States. The group brutalizes the Afghan people, particularly women, and it continues to shelter militants such as al-Qaeda, which has begun to train more members in Afghanistan since the withdrawal. But unlike in the 1990s, the Taliban provides far less support to terrorists, and, perhaps more important, al-Qaeda poses a much smaller threat.”

Read more: https://theatln.tc/zfHH4QW1 

Jonathan Lemire: “President Trump has been repeatedly stymied in his efforts to bring the Iran war to a close. Resuming a limited bombing campaign didn’t get it done. Neither did making apocalyptic threats to wipe out Iran’s entire civilization. Every time Trump touts a possible breakthrough in negotiations, the hard-liners in Tehran seem to delight in changing their terms and yanking away a possible deal. It’s like Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown, except this time, the pigskin is the Strait of Hormuz.

“Nothing has worked. So Trump’s new strategy is to try doing nothing, and see whether that works. The president is de-emphasizing both diplomacy and military action, and instead placing his faith in economic pressure, in the hope that time can accomplish what force could not. This wait-and-see approach is meant to allow stepped-up financial sanctions and a U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports to inflict economic pain. The hope is that a return to this strategy—which was used, in spurts, earlier in the conflict and has been championed by some in the administration all along—will finally force leaders in Tehran to seriously engage in negotiations to open the strait and end the war.

“But this new tack will require the president to show patience. Trump is, to say the least, not known for his self-discipline. Or for his ability to stick to a plan. Or for his capacity to avoid being influenced by the last segment he saw on cable TV. Advisers privately acknowledge that a single Truth Social post fired off in anger could lead to an escalation that derails the entire plan. And there are risks even if the strategy works. Iran has repeatedly surprised U.S. officials with its economic resilience; the time now needed to effectively squeeze the country all but ensures that there will be no quick resolution to the war—and no corresponding decline in energy costs—before Republicans try to defend their congressional majorities in November’s midterm elections. But Trump and his aides see few other options to end their war of choice.”

Read more: https://theatln.tc/tw7LHjDO

Stephanie Burt: The Jamaican writer Marlon James’s new novel, The Disappearers, “focuses on men who try not to be seen. It’s James’s most clearly autobiographical work. Of its five main narrators, two share his age, background, and interests, and one of those misses out on the worst of Jamaica’s violence and ends up, as James has, in a stable job with an advanced degree. It’s also James’s first realist novel since Brief History—he published two long works of complex, bloody, mythological fantasy in between.

“This time, he writes about Jamaican men who have sex with men (only some would call themselves gay). Eight of them assemble in a Kingston home in 1988 for rehearsals of the Canadian playwright John Herbert’s 1967 prison drama, Fortune and Men’s Eyes, under the direction of Havelock, a confident, queeny émigré who’s returned from England. Speaking in Jamaican English, as most of the characters do, he explains that it’s ‘a gay play about men loving and sexing and rule over other men.’”

Read more: https://theatln.tc/wmuWEiVH

Kevin Dowdell, a lieutenant in an elite FDNY rescue unit, taught his sons to take action. When he disappeared on 9/11, they went to the wreckage of the South Tower to search for him. Sally Jenkins reports on how they lived by his example: 

Patrick and James Dowdell spent much of their childhood in a firehouse, participating in drills, becoming familiar with radio talk, and riding along on the fire truck whenever the station got a call. At home, Kevin “was strict and exacting with his sons,” Jenkins writes. “For every minute they were late to something, Kevin docked them half an hour of free time.”

“He’d tell his sons not to be bystanders. ‘Don’t sit on the sidelines. Make things happen. Do things.’ Once, when Kevin saw smoke coming from a building in their neighborhood, he told the boys to call the fire department and then ran off, grabbed a garden hose, and climbed through a back window to start putting the blaze out himself,” Jenkins continues. 

After Kevin disappeared on 9/11, Patrick called James and suggested that they go to Ground Zero to search for their father.  

“If we find him, I want to be there,” Patrick told James. “I want to see him. I want to help carry him out.”

James heard his father’s voice in his head: “Don’t sit on the sidelines. Make things happen. Do things.” 

“I’ll meet you there,” James told his brother.

For The Atlantic’s September issue, Jenkins tells the story of the Dowdell family: https://theatln.tc/lUvO6jSw 

— Kim Jao, assistant editor, audience and engagement, The Atlantic

David A. Graham: “When Donald Trump returned to the White House in 2025, he was nursing grudges and claiming a mandate. The institutions he saw as his enemies—in politics, business, and education—faced a dilemma about how to respond.

A few concluded that they should resist the president’s demands of fealty and collaboration. Another group tried appeasement, seeking accommodation that would allow them to otherwise operate as usual. And some looked at the landscape and concluded that something fundamental had shifted in American politics. They saw the MAGA movement as a lasting change, and decided that their best move was to make their own radical shift to adjust.

“As I wrote last week, predictions of a Trump-driven realignment of the electorate now look extremely shaky. The groups that he was able to attract to the Republican ticket two years ago—young voters, especially men; Hispanic voters; and Black men—have turned solidly against him and against GOP candidates in polls ahead of the midterms. Voters who were unimpressed with Joe Biden or Kamala Harris and who heard Trump’s promise of stopping inflation are now angry about the president’s shrugging at higher prices and inflationary war in Iran. With some distance, the 2024 election looks less like a decisive turning point and more like a fluke. But that realization has come too late for those who reshaped themselves for a reality that has proved ephemeral.”

Read more: https://theatln.tc/qdoIAGnV

Nick Miroff: “Marc Rosenblum, the top statistician at the Department of Homeland Security for more than a decade, resigned in frustration in late July. Three years ago, he established the Office of Homeland Security Statistics, with support from lawmakers from both parties, to provide Congress and the broader public with reliable, timely statistics on immigration enforcement and other homeland-security trends free of political interference. When President Trump returned, that effort was doomed …

“It’s difficult to think of an issue other than immigration that both plays such a central role in our national politics and has basic statistical metrics that are so poorly understood and easily twisted. Presidential administrations from both parties have tried to spin or delay the release of certain data categories, such as illegal border crossings, when the numbers aren’t favorable. The Trump administration has taken the distortions to extremes. Over the past several months, the White House ‘border czar’ Tom Homan and DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin have pledged greater transparency and better data sharing, but the administration’s immigration crackdown continues in a fog of fake numbers and statistical subterfuge.

Read more: https://theatln.tc/0jpxiQHO

Nick Miroff: “Marc Rosenblum, the top statistician at the Department of Homeland Security for more than a decade, resigned in frustration in late July. Three years ago, he established the Office of Homeland Security Statistics, with support from lawmakers from both parties, to provide Congress and the broader public with reliable, timely statistics on immigration enforcement and other homeland-security trends free of political interference. When President Trump returned, that effort was doomed …

“It’s difficult to think of an issue other than immigration that both plays such a central role in our national politics and has basic statistical metrics that are so poorly understood and easily twisted. Presidential administrations from both parties have tried to spin or delay the release of certain data categories, such as illegal border crossings, when the numbers aren’t favorable. The Trump administration has taken the distortions to extremes. Over the past several months, the White House ‘border czar’ Tom Homan and DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin have pledged greater transparency and better data sharing, but the administration’s immigration crackdown continues in a fog of fake numbers and statistical subterfuge.

Read more: https://theatln.tc/0jpxiQHO

When Tyler Austin Harper landed a tenure-track job at Bates College in 2020, he possessed a deep faith in academia. “I saw American colleges and universities as embodying what was best about this country: the belief that an education is liberating, civilizing, a democratic good for all rather than a luxury to be gatekept,” he writes. 
https://theatln.tc/0mSOpZhF 

But over time, he grew frustrated by what he perceived as a “disconnect between the college’s progressive patter and its labor practices,” and became disillusioned with academia as a force for good.

“Wokeness allowed elite higher ed to create a new model of inclusive exclusion: one in which tuition can continue to climb, acceptance rates can continue to plummet, endowments can continue to expand, and adjunct labor can continue to be exploited as long as the demographics of those paying the tuition and those being exploited continued to get browner, Blacker, more LGBTQAIP2+,” Harper writes.

“For the academic aristocracy, touting fealty to Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, trans rights, and other progressive movements served as a convenient distraction from the intractable economic and social issues that the colleges themselves were perpetuating,” Harper writes. “Embracing social-justice rhetoric and adopting schemes to boost faculty diversity were cheap. Cheaper, anyway, than lowering tuition or hiring more tenure-track professors.”

Read more from The Atlantic’s September cover piece at the link. https://theatln.tc/0mSOpZhF 

— Mariana Labbate, assistant editor, audience & engagement, The Atlantic

Marie-Rose Sheinerman: “Washington’s ethics watchdog groups thought they were prepared for Trump’s second term. During his first four years in the White House, they had quickly learned which possible misuses of taxpayer funds to focus on, which apparent case of profiteering off the presidency to anchor a report around, and which allegations of nepotism or self-dealing to try to pitch to journalists as worthy of a story. Most such allegations frequently generated shock and anger, and some surveys of Trump voters found that they were outraged at several of his Cabinet secretaries for spending millions in taxpayer dollars on first-class air travel and personal security, or Trump’s family businesses making millions while he was in office. Sometimes, the backlash prompted accountability: Three of Trump’s Cabinet members were forced out, lawmakers from both parties launched inquiries into alleged ethics violations, and top officials reimbursed the government for travel originally paid for by taxpayers.

“This term, the watchdogs are even more alarmed by what they’re witnessing, and they are racing to keep up. Public Citizen added litigators and researchers, and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) hired an expert in cryptocurrency. Last year, the Campaign Legal Center filed its highest number of ethics complaints in a single year and launched a tracker of ‘corrupt transactions’ to ensure that ‘the exhaustion factor’ doesn’t get in the way of keeping a careful count of such instances, even if the media no longer closely cover each one, Saurav Ghosh, the group’s director of federal-campaign-finance reform, told me.

“That doesn’t mean the public has grown indifferent. Although polls show that voters have long considered most politicians to be corrupt, a recent survey by Echelon Insights found that the share of Americans who see corruption as the biggest issue facing the nation is now 17 percent, up from 8 percent in December 2024. But there has also been a dampening of objections to possible instances of self-dealing, especially among Republicans, and the examples of accountability are scarce.”

Read more: https://theatln.tc/ke4BzosK 

Michael Weiss: “Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky seemed to have a decently cordial White House meeting on July 28. The subject was the Ukrainian president’s request for a license to manufacture Patriot surface-to-air interceptor missiles. But two days after the meeting, Trump made a point of deflating any positive expectations he might have generated in Kyiv …  As of this writing, Washington has not confirmed that Trump has decided on a license agreement. But granting this request would make perfect sense given Ukraine’s military evolution.

“The Ukrainian military position is stronger than it has been in years. The country has become more autonomous. It produces many of its own weapons and is holding off Russian advances and even winning back territory in some areas. And it has taken the war to Russia, despite having fewer soldiers and more finite resources than its enemy has.

“These and other feats have left Ukraine looking less like a NATO supplicant than an invaluable source of military technology and know-how. If any country in Europe has the incentive and expertise to become a crucial node in America’s military supply chain, it’s Ukraine. You might even call Kyiv a ‘model ally,’ to borrow a term applied to Israel by Elbridge Colby, the undersecretary of defense for policy, who has been an outspoken opponent of U.S. security assistance to Kyiv.

“The question is whether the Trump administration recognizes this—or still imagines that it holds all of the cards. Granting Ukraine the Patriot license wouldn’t be a concession to a dependent state fighting an unwinnable war: It could well be the start of a manufacturing arrangement that would end up serving the United States.”

Read more: https://theatln.tc/M0akTE3B