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Many of the stories our readers spent time with this year revealed a curiosity about the historical events that shaped current circumstances at home and abroad, and a desire to examine humanity’s best and worst impulses. Spend some of your Sunday with 12 don’t-miss stories of the past year.

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Your 2023 Reading List

Mark Peterson / Redux for The Atlantic

Inside the Meltdown at CNN

By Tim Alberta

CEO Chris Licht felt he was on a mission to restore the network’s reputation for serious journalism. How did it all go wrong?

Maxime Mouysset

The Billion-Dollar Ponzi Scheme That Hooked Warren Buffett and the U.S. Treasury

By Ariel Sabar

How a small-town auto mechanic peddling a green-energy breakthrough pulled off a massive scam

Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times / Getty

The Decolonization Narrative Is Dangerous and False

By Simon Sebag Montefiore

It does not accurately describe either the foundation of Israel or the tragedy of the Palestinians.

Illustration by Ricardo Tomás

How America Got Mean

By David Brooks

In a culture devoid of moral education, generations are growing up in a morally inarticulate, self-referential world.

Ashley Gilbertson / VII for The Atlantic

The Patriot

By Jeffrey Goldberg

How General Mark Milley protected the Constitution from Donald Trump

Alicia Tatone. Sources: Tommaso Boddi / Getty; ITV / Shutterstock.

A Star Reporter’s Break With Reality

By Elaina Plott Calabro

Lara Logan was once a respected 60 Minutes correspondent. Now she trades in conspiracy theories that even far-right media disavow. What happened?

Illustration by Klaus Kremmerz

The Puzzling Gap Between How Old You Are and How Old You Think You Are

By Jennifer Senior

There are good reasons you always feel 20 percent younger than your actual age.

Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times / Getty

What Mitt Romney Saw in the Senate

By McKay Coppins

In an exclusive excerpt from Coppins’s biography of Romney, the senator reveals what drove him to retire.

Pierre Buttin

What the Longest Study on Human Happiness Found Is the Key to a Good Life

By Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz

The Harvard Study of Adult Development has established a strong correlation between deep relationships and well-being. The question is, how does a person nurture those deep relationships?

Nolwenn Brod for The Atlantic; courtesy of Valérie Beausert

The Children of the Nazis’ Genetic Project

By Valentine Faure

Across Europe, some adoptees have had to face a dark realization about their origins.

Didier Viodé

I Never Called Her Momma

By Jenisha Watts

I came to New York sure of one thing—that no one could ever know my past.

Daniele Castellano

The Fake Poor Bride

By Xochitl Gonzalez

In my decade-plus as a luxury-wedding planner, I saw it all: reality-TV brides, a scam from multimillionaires, even a bride who pretended to be poor.

Photo Album

An image of Eden Valley in Cumbria, United Kingdom (Stuart McGlennon / The Tenth International Landscape Photographer of the Year)

This year’s landscape-photography competition received more than 4,000 entries from around the world. Here are some of the top and winning images.

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

The Patriot

In the November 2023 issue, Jeffrey Goldberg considered what a general ought to do when the commander in chief undermines the Constitution.

I am a lifelong Republican voter. The Lafayette Square incident described in Jeffrey Goldberg’s article convinced me that any Democrat would be preferable to a second Trump term. The events of January 6 merely confirmed what Lafayette first suggested—that there are no boundaries Donald Trump will not cross.

General Mark Milley’s willingness to block Trump’s worst impulses puts a very different light on Senator Tommy Tuberville’s ongoing obstruction of military promotions. Perhaps Tuberville’s pro-life pretext is just that, a smoke screen providing a cover to gut the upper echelons of military leadership, such that Trump may have a free hand to load the Pentagon with loyalists if he wins the 2024 election. The first putsch failed. If Trump is reelected, the next one will not; there will be no Milley to stop him.

Steve Mittelstaedt
Ferndale, Wash.

“The Patriot” is a deeply insightful look at how the Constitution sits astride American political power dynamics. General Milley dealt with many complexities when serving as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Trump administration, most notably the challenge of balancing his sense of the obligations of his oath of office and the destructive, ugly fantasies of his commander in chief.

As Milley experienced, the press of time and situation rarely allows for good interpretation of the propriety of an order from someone in your chain of command—but Milley consistently did it exceptionally well. I was an enlisted service member. When I ended my term of duty as an Air Force sentry-dog handler, I was of the opinion that common sense and good moral judgment were likely to be inversely proportional to rank. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to accept that those qualities may simply be independent of military rank, as Milley’s tenure demonstrates.

In October 1968, on our last night on post at Tuy Hoa Air Base in Vietnam, my dog, King, and I were patrolling a section of beach adjacent to the South China Sea. At about midnight, my dog and I spotted a sampan about 75 yards offshore. The rule for fishing boats was that they had to be at least 200 meters offshore and have a running light aboard. The sampan was unlit and way too close to shore. I radioed in the sighting to Defense Control. The sergeant on dispatch replied, “Fire two shots over their heads.” My quick assessment was that those were probably two tired local fishermen who had drifted off course, and not a Vietcong recon team. I radioed back, “Firing a flare.” (When one has a radio or a rifle in one hand, and the leash of an alert 80-pound dog in the other, communications tend to be brief.) The flare signaled that we’d seen the boat and were instructing it not to come any closer. Clearly under surveillance, the people on the boat moved out.

My experience adjusting a military command was trivial compared with what Milley had to deal with during the Trump administration. There can be a risk in bucking orders. But Milley’s example provides a model for how and when to do it.

George Cartter
Vacaville, Calif.

What Mitt Romney Saw in the Senate

Behind closed doors, the hypocrisy and cynicism are even worse than you think, McKay Coppins wrote in the November 2023 issue.

Thank you for your article on the retirement of Senator Mitt Romney. Without his presence in the Senate, there is one fewer Republican willing to stand up for democratic principles and put the country above party and self-interest. His ethics and principles will be sorely missed in government.

Ken Derow
Swarthmore, Pa.

It is both charming and troubling that someone with Romney’s access and experience is surprised by the venality of his fellow senators and the illusory nature of American democracy.

Robert Scribner
Oakland, Calif.

Though Mitt Romney is correct that the Republicans in office now are a different sort of group than Republicans of the past, it’s wrong to say that the change is merely that they’ve fallen for a “demagogue” who doesn’t believe in the Constitution. The shift is far deeper and more insidious than that. Many of today’s Republicans have thrown away democratic principles for the acquisition of power. They disguise their betrayal of democracy with flag waving and hide their personal immorality behind Bible thumping; their main concern is satisfying whatever selfish impulse they are experiencing in the moment, regardless of who or what is harmed. This shift predates Donald Trump. His example just gives them permission to be more open about it.

Ginny Oliver
Santa Maria, Calif.

Behind the Cover

We decided for this month’s issue to use our cover as a table of contents, thereby placing the focus squarely on the stories and their authors. The cover as table of contents is a venerable tradition at The Atlantic : Our covers were used exclusively in this fashion from July 1905 to November 1947. This particular cover explicitly references the design—the typography, the layout, and the color—of The Atlantic in the late 1930s. Above, the August 1939 issue.

— Peter Mendelsund, Creative Director

This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “The Commons.”

The White House and Senate continue to work frantically toward a deal to supply Ukraine before Congress recesses for Christmas. Supposedly, all leaders of Congress are united in their commitment to Ukraine—so the new speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, insists. Yet somehow this allegedly united commitment is not translating into action. Why not?

The notional answer is that Republicans must have a border-security deal as the price for Ukraine aid. But who on earth sets a price that could stymie something they affirmatively want to do? Republicans have not conditioned their support for Social Security on getting a border deal. They would never say that tax cuts must wait until after the border is secure. Only Ukraine is treated as something to be bartered, as if at a county fair. How did that happen?  

Ukraine’s expendability to congressional Republicans originates in the sinister special relationship between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.

Pre-Trump, Republicans expressed much more hawkish views on Russia than Democrats did. Russia invaded eastern Ukraine and annexed Crimea in spring 2014. In a Pew Research survey in March of that year, 58 percent of Republicans complained that President Barack Obama’s response was “not tough enough,” compared with just 22 percent of Democrats. After the annexation, Republicans were more than twice as likely as Democrats to describe Russia as “an adversary” of the United States: 42 percent to 19 percent. As for Putin personally, his rule was condemned by overwhelming majorities of both parties. Only about 20 percent of Democrats expressed confidence in Putin in a 2015 Pew survey, and 17 percent of Republicans.

Trump changed all that—with a lot of help from pro-Putin voices on Fox News and right-wing social media.

At the beginning of Trump’s ascendancy in the GOP, even his future allies in Congress distrusted his pro-Russian affinities. Kevin McCarthy, a future House speaker, was inadvertently recorded in a June 2016 meeting with other Republican congressional leaders, saying, “There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump.” Some in the room laughed. McCarthy responded, “Swear to God.” (Dana Rohrabacher was a Republican House member from California, a notorious Putin apologist, and a joke figure among his caucus colleagues; despite almost 30 years’ seniority in the House, he was kept away from major committee assignments.)

If Trump had not caught a lucky bounce in the Electoral College in November 2016, he’d have gotten the Rohrabacher treatment too. After the Access Hollywood tape leaked, many prominent Republicans, including then-Speaker Paul Ryan, distanced themselves from Trump. In the election, Republicans lost two seats in the Senate and six in the House. Trump himself received a shade over 46 percent of the popular vote—a slightly larger share than John McCain got amid the economic catastrophe of 2008, but less than Mitt Romney in 2012, John Kerry in 2004, and Al Gore in 2000.

[Anne Applebaum: The American face of authoritarian propaganda]

Even if Trump had lost, there would still have been an enlarged constituency for American Putinism among far-right ideologues and social-media influencers. As early as 2013, the prominent social conservative Pat Buchanan had written a column that seemed to hail Putin as “one of us,” an ally in the fight against abortion and homosexuality. Buchanan-style reactionary nationalism exercised a strong influence on many of the next generation of rightist writers and talkers.

By the mid-2010s, groups such as the National Rifle Association were susceptible to infiltration by Russian-intelligence assets. High-profile conservatives accepted free trips and speaking fees from organizations linked to the Russian government pre-Trump. A lucrative online marketplace for pro-Moscow messages and conspiracy theories already existed. White nationalists had acclaimed Putin as a savior of Christian civilization for years before the Trump campaign began.

But back then, none of this ideological or opportunistic pro-Putinism was all that connected to the world of electoral politics or mainstream conservative thought. The future Fox News star Tucker Carlson—soon to be Russia’s preeminent champion in U.S. mass media—publicly avowed his sympathy for Putin only after Trump’s election.

But once Trump became the GOP leader, he tangled the whole party in his pro-Russia ties. A telling indicator came in January 2017, when Trump’s nominee for attorney general, Jeff Sessions, denied—under oath, yet falsely—that he had held two meetings with the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, during the 2016 campaign. This lie made little sense: As a senator on the Armed Services Committee, Sessions met with foreign ambassadors all the time, and he was never in the slightest implicated in any Trump-Russia impropriety. Why not tell the truth?

The answer seems to be that Sessions had somehow intuited that the Trump campaign was hiding some damaging secret about Russia. Without knowing what that secret was, he presumably wanted to put some distance between himself and it.

The urge to align with the party’s new pro-Russian leader reshaped attitudes among Republican Party loyalists. From 2015 to 2017, Republican opinion shifted markedly in a pro-Russia and pro-Putin direction. In 2017, more than a third of surveyed Republicans expressed favorable views of Putin. By 2019, Carlson—who had risen to the top place among Fox News hosts—was regularly promoting pro-Russian, anti-Ukrainian messages to his conservative audience. His success inspired imitators among many other conservative would-be media stars.

[David A. Graham: Republicans are playing house]

For Republican elected officials, however, the decisive shift seemed to come during Trump’s first impeachment. Trump withheld from Ukraine promised weapons in order to pressure Kyiv to announce a criminal investigation of his likely election rival, Joe Biden.

After the impeachment trial, 51 percent of Republicans surveyed by Pew said that Trump had done nothing wrong. The key to understanding how they could believe that is the concept of “undernews.” During the Obama presidency, more extreme conservative media trafficked in rumors that Obama was secretly gay and having an affair with a male aide, or else that Michelle Obama was secretly transgender. This rubbish was too lurid, offensive, and stupid ever to be repeated on Fox News itself. But Fox hosts regularly made jokes and references that only made sense to viewers who had absorbed the undernews from other sources.

Undernews made itself felt during the first Trump impeachment too. The official defense of Trump, the one articulated by more high-toned hosts, was that the extortion of Ukraine did not rise to the level of impeachment. After all, Ukraine got its weapons in the end: no harm, no foul. In the undernews, however, this defense was backed by an elaborate fantasy that Trump had been right to act as he did.

In this fantasy, Ukraine became the center of a global criminal enterprise masterminded by the Biden family. Trump, the myth went, had heroically acted to reveal the plot—only to be thwarted by the Deep State’s machinations in Washington and Kyiv. Believers in the undernews reimagined Ukraine as a pro-Biden mafia state that had cruelly victimized Trump. They burned to inflict payback on Ukraine for the indignity of Trump’s first impeachment.

This delusory narrative was seldom articulated in venues where nonbelievers might hear it. But the delusion shaped the opinion of believers—and the behavior of those who sought votes from those believers: congressional Republicans.

At first, the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 appalled almost all elected officials in Washington. A congressman named Mike Johnson, then a Republican backbencher, spoke for many: “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine’s sovereign territory threatens the greatest destabilization of the world order since WWII and constitutes a national security threat to the entire West,” he said in a statement published on the invasion’s first day.

Johnson voted for the first aid package to Ukraine a month later. Then, in May of that year, Johnson reversed himself, joining 56 other Republican House members to vote against a $40 billion package. This was Johnson’s explanation for his coat-turning on Ukraine:

We should not be sending another $40 billion abroad when our own border is in chaos, American mothers are struggling to find baby formula, gas prices are at record highs, and American families are struggling to make ends meet, without sufficient oversight over where the money will go.

These excuses did not make much sense in 2022. They make even less sense in 2023.

The current aid request for Ukraine proposes $14 billion for U.S. border security, including funding for some 2,000 new asylum officers and judges. Because the great majority of asylum claims are rejected, more officers means faster removals and less incentive for border-crossers to arrive in the first place.

As for the baby-formula problem that Johnson cited, that was long ago solved. Gas prices have dropped below $3.20 a gallon nationwide (and to just $2.75 in Johnson’s Louisiana). Wages are once again rising faster than inflation, while Americans’ purchasing power (adjusted for inflation) is erasing the losses it suffered during the pandemic. The complaint about oversight was always untrue, even silly, because almost all funds for aiding Kyiv are actually spent in the U.S. to make and ship the supplies Ukraine needs.

So long as Kevin McCarthy led the House Republicans, the relationship between their leadership and Trump was one of fear and submission. Once Johnson replaced McCarthy, the relationship between the speaker and Trump shifted to active collaboration. McCarthy helped Ukraine as much as he dared; Johnson helps Ukraine as little as he can. Johnson still talks about resisting Russia, but when it comes time to act, he does as Trump wants.

[David Frum: Why the GOP doesn’t really want a deal on Ukraine and the border]

A majority of the House Republican caucus still rejects attempts to cut off Ukraine. A test vote on September 28 counted 126 pro-Ukraine Republicans versus 93 anti. Three-quarters of the whole House favors Ukraine aid. But Johnson and his team now control the schedule and the sequence of events. That group responds to the steady beat of the undernews: Ukraine = enemy of Trump; abandoning Ukraine = proof of loyalty to Trump.

As Trump nears renomination by his party in 2024, the displays of loyalty to him have become ever more obligatory for Republicans. Solidarity with Ukraine has faltered as support for Trump has consolidated. Make no mistake: If Republicans in Congress abandon Ukraine to Russian aggression, they do so to please Trump. Every other excuse is a fiction or a lie.

* Photo-collage image sources: Scott Olson / Getty; Juan Medina / Getty; Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times / Getty; Justin Sullivan / Getty.