On October 7, Hamas terrorists crossed the border into Israel and massacred more than 1,100 Israelis. The depths of Hamas’s sadism are almost too sickening to comprehend. Babies and children butchered. Parents murdered in front of their children. Families bound together and then burned alive. Others were tortured, and their bodies mutilated while both alive and dead.

Even the harshest opponents of Israel’s subsequent military campaign in Gaza acknowledge, albeit often half-heartedly, that Hamas acted with brutality on October 7 in killing innocents. But many of those same critics refuse to acknowledge the widespread sexual assaults against Israeli women that day.

Since allegations of sexual violence first appeared in the fall, a contingent of anti-Israel activists have sought to disprove them. “Believe women” and “Silence is violence” have been rallying cries of progressive feminist organizations for decades. But the same empathy and support have not been shown for Israeli victims.

Many prominent feminist and human-rights groups—including Amnesty International and the National Organization for Women—said little about the sexual-violence allegations. International organizations tasked with protecting women in wartime kept their powder dry. UN Women waited until December 1, nearly two months after the Hamas attack, to issue a perfunctory statement of condemnation.

Israel’s critics have insisted that a lack of firsthand accounts from rape survivors or forensic evidence undercut Israel’s accusations—and have dismissed claims that systematic sexual violence occurred as “unsubstantiated.” Others have accused the Israeli government of “weaponizing” accusations of rape to justify Israel’s “genocide” in Gaza, as an open letter from dozens of feminist activists put it in February. The letter has since been signed by more than 1,000 others.

News outlets that reported on the violence were fiercely attacked. For example, in late December, The New York Times published an investigation that thoroughly detailed the evidence of mass, systematic sexual violence. The story drew an immediate response from Hamas, in language echoing that used by Western activists. “We categorically deny such allegations,” Basem Naim, a Hamas leader, said in a statement, “and consider it as part of the Israeli attempt to demonize and dehumanize the Palestinian people and resistance, and to justify the Israeli army war crimes and crimes of genocide against the Palestinian people.”

Stridently anti-Israel independent journalists and activists immediately tried to pick apart the Times story, which culminated in late February with the publication of a more-than-6,000-word exposé by the left-wing outlet The Intercept that accused the Times of flawed reporting. The left-wing magazine The Nation accused the Times of “the biggest failure of journalism” since the paper’s reporting in the run-up to the Iraq War; the leftist YES! magazine claimed, “There is no evidence mass rape occurred.”  

Considering the vitriolic attacks against Israel since October 7, none of this should come as a surprise. The bloodied and dismembered bodies of dead Israelis had barely been collected before accusations of genocide were being levied by anti-Israel activists. Six months later, such denouncements are routine.

Across the United States and Western Europe, criticism of Israel’s actions quickly and predictably veered into rank anti-Semitism, with Jewish organizations, cultural institutions, artists, and individual Jews targeted by pro-Palestine activists because of Israel’s actions.

[From the April 2024 issue: The Golden Age of American Jews is ending]

But rape denialism falls into its own separate and bewildering category. Why have so many of Israel’s critics—and pro-Palestine activists—chosen to fight on this hill?

Many insist, like the feminists who signed the open letter, that they are questioning claims used to justify a war they oppose. But there is also a disquieting sense that pro-Palestine activists believe they must defend Hamas. Accusations of systematic rape and sadistic sexual violence not only tarnish the terrorist group, but also undermine the notion that October 7 was legitimate “armed resistance” against Israeli occupation.

Instead of believing women, these activists have chosen to take the word of a terrorist organization that is responsible for the deaths of thousands of Israelis and Palestinians and that has constantly denied that any sexual assaults occurred on October 7.

Six months into the war in Gaza, many pro-Palestine activists in the United States are so fully invested in the cause of Palestinian liberation, for which Hamas claims to be fighting—and so steeped in their hatred of Israel—that they are casting aside the progressive ideals that they regularly invoke when castigating Israel. In doing so, they are exposing themselves as hypocrites whose ideology is not forged in a set of universal values but rather is situational and dependent on ethnicity or skin color.

Rape denialism also feeds the widely held belief among Israelis that non-Jews refuse to acknowledge the horrors of October 7—and that the world is hopelessly biased against them. At the same time, it excuses Hamas’s actions and perpetuates the notion that Palestinians have little agency or responsibility for the continuation of a 75-year-old conflict with no end in sight. It pushes both sides to retreat to their respective corners, unwilling to see the humanity in the other, and makes the long-term goal of peaceful coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians that much more difficult to achieve.

Orit Sulitzeanu is the director of the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel, an NGO that serves as a coordinating body for the country’s nine rape-crisis centers. As she tells every reporter who calls her, ARCCI does not work for or receive money from the Israeli government.  

In the days and weeks after October 7, ARCCI began getting “trickles of information” from doctors and therapists who were encountering survivors of sexual violence. “Everyone talks to us, and the community of therapists in Israel is small,” Sulitzeanu told me. The calls were intended not to alert ARCCI but rather to ask, “What do we do?”

As Sulitzeanu told me, Israel has virtually no experience with rape during wartime: “No one could imagine what happened, actually happened.” Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, the former vice chair of the United Nations’ Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women and a law professor at Bar-Ilan University, told me that Israel was so unprepared for the onslaught of sexual-abuse cases on October 7 that during the intake process in Israeli hospitals, women who survived the Hamas massacre were not even asked if they had been sexually assaulted.  

Quickly, ARCCI began holding webinars to help therapists understand the special characteristics of sexual violence in wartime. And as time went on, Sulitzeanu and her staff noticed that the stories they were hearing were remarkably consistent.  

The group put together a report combining the information it was receiving (mainly from eyewitnesses and first responders) with media reporting in Israel and around the world. “Hamas’s attack on October 7th included brutal sexual assaults carried out systematically and deliberately against Israeli civilians,” it concluded. “Hamas terrorists employed sadistic practices aimed at intensifying the degree of humiliation and terror inherent in sexual violence.”

The report’s section titles tell the story in even more vivid and disturbing detail:

“Systematic Use of Brutal Violence to Commit Rape”

“Multiple Abusers/Gang Rape”

“Rape in the Presence of Family/Community Members”

“Sexual Offenses of Males”

“Execution During or After the Rape”

“Binding and Tying”

“Mutilation and Destruction of Genital Organs”

“Insertion of Weapons in Intimate Areas”

“Destruction and Mutilation of the Body”

The next month, the Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict reached similar conclusions, although without using the word systematic. After a two-and-a-half-week mission to Israel, the UN body concluded that “there are reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred during the 7 October attacks.”

The UN report does not ascribe responsibility to Hamas and relies on careful, qualified, legalistic language. But Halperin-Kaddari believes the UN report should be applauded. It is, she says, the “most accurate and comprehensive” accounting of the sexual violence that took place that day—and she praised it, in particular, for verifying accounts when possible but also debunking allegations that were not true.  

Halperin-Kaddari noted that investigators “found the same pattern of violence and sexual assault combined with an extreme degree of cruelty and humiliation, and it occurred in several locations in a relatively short period of time.”

This systematic nature of the abuse is obvious from both reports. For example, ARCCI recounts the eyewitness testimony of one survivor who said that the Nova music festival was an “apocalypse of bodies, girls without clothes.” In addition, it notes that “several survivors of the massacre provided eyewitness testimony of gang rape” as well as accounts from first responders of bodies unclothed and bleeding heavily from the pelvic area, and genital mutilation.

[Graeme Wood: A record of pure, predatory sadism]

The UN report draws a similar conclusion, finding “reasonable grounds to believe” that rape, gang rape, and the sexual abuse of female corpses occurred at the Nova festival.

At Kibbutz Kfar Aza and Kibbutz Be’eri, the UN found evidence that female victims had been undressed, bound, and killed (though the mission team “was unable to establish whether sexual violence occurred in kibbutz Be’eri”). In its investigation at Kibbutz Re’em, the UN said there were “reasonable grounds to believe that sexual violence occurred … including rape.” On Road 232, a key escape route from the music festival, the UN found “reasonable grounds to believe that sexual violence occurred,” including “the rape of two women.” In addition, “along this road, several bodies were found with genital injuries, along with injuries to other body parts.”

At an Israel Defense Forces base overrun by Hamas terrorists, there were, according to media stories cited in the ARCCI report, dead soldiers shot in the genitals and as many as 10 female soldiers with clear evidence of sexual assault. The UN report is more circumspect on this issue, saying that reports of genital mutilation are “inconclusive.” But Halperin-Kaddari told me that she saw documentation showing that victims had had weapons fired into their sexual organs.

Both reports also agree that hostages released from Hamas’s captivity had been, in the words of the UN special representative, subjected to “sexual violence, including rape, sexualized torture, and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.” The UN report also concluded that violence may be “ongoing” against the approximately 100 hostages, including young women, still held in Gaza. In its response to the Times story, Hamas pointed to the treatment of Israeli hostages, whom they insisted were being well cared for: “If the Hamas resistance fighters held such ideas of sex violence, they would mistreat those who were in their captivity,” a Hamas representative wrote in a lengthy Telegram post at the time. Recently, however, The New York Times published a firsthand account of sexual assault and torture from an Israeli hostage released from Hamas captivity in November.

For Shelly Tal Meron, a member of the Israeli Knesset for the opposition Yesh Atid party, the indifference of once-former feminist allies to the sexual violence on October 7 has been acutely painful. “I sent letters to UN Women, as well as #MeToo and human-rights organizations,” she told me. The response was “complete silence. I was astonished.”

“Before the war,” she said, “I was a member of the Knesset’s women’s-rights movement. I would fight for gender equality and I would work with international organizations. Whenever [attacks on women] happened in other countries like Ukraine or Syria, I felt solidarity.” In the aftermath of October 7, she said, “I felt completely betrayed.”

What is most galling about the pushback on allegations of mass rape is that it is precisely the lack of firsthand accounts and forensic evidence—as well as the initial fog of war—that has opened the door to rape denialists. As Dahlia Lithwick, the senior legal correspondent at Slate, told me, denialists are “capitalizing on the stigma and shame of sexual assault—and often frustrating lack of evidence in these situations.”

That, according to the feminist author Jill Filipovic, is hardly an unusual circumstance. “Sexual violence in conflict is virtually never documented the way sexual violence might be documented on the cop shows you’ve seen,” Filipovic wrote on her Substack last December. “The Israeli recovery and medical teams treated the places where people were attacked on Oct. 7 as war zones and the aftermath of terror attacks, not as standard crime scenes in which a primary goal is to identify a perpetrator.”

Complicating matters further is the particular emphasis in Jewish law on expeditious burial. Sulitzeanu told me that those at the army base who were preparing bodies for burial had “no capacity to keep the evidence from those killed.” The “first priority,” she said, “was to save living people. Second, to collect bodies. Third, identify them and prepare for burial.” Everything else, including proving that widespread rapes had taken place, was secondary.

There is also the distressing reality that so few of Hamas’s rape victims survived. Some were dispatched with a bullet to the head after they’d been assaulted.  

The handful of survivors of rape during the attacks on October 7 have, so far, been unwilling to speak publicly. ARCCI has been so adamant in safeguarding them that Sulitzeanu refused to confirm that her association had spoken with them or that their stories were included in the group’s report. The survivors refused multiple requests to meet with the UN mission team, which the UN report chalked up in part to “the national and international media scrutiny of those who made their accounts public.”

The latter fear is almost certainly a direct by-product of the response to the New York Times story—headlined “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.” Buttressed by interviews with more than 150 “witnesses, medical personnel, soldiers, and rape counselors,” as well as “video footage, photographs,” and “GPS data from mobile phones,” the story features allegations of sexual violence, including eyewitness accounts. It was the most authoritative investigation by a major American news outlet and should have dealt a major blow to the efforts at denialism and deflection.

But as soon as the Times article appeared, so, too, did the pushback. Much of it came from journalists with a long track record of animosity toward Israel, but it reached a crescendo in late February when The Intercept published its story.

What is most striking about the exhaustive Intercept article is the apparent dearth of original reporting. There is little indication that the authors made any serious effort to contact Israeli government officials, the leaders of Israeli NGOs, or—with three exceptions—even the specific individuals who are named in their story and whose credibility they malign. Instead, The Intercept focuses its inquiry on a freelance Israeli journalist who helped report the story, Anat Schwartz, scrutinizing her social-media activity and parsing a Hebrew-language podcast interview to attack her credibility and, by extension, the credibility of the story as a whole.

The Intercept also sought to chip away at the Times article by focusing on alleged inconsistencies—a process that is easier than it seems when it comes to reporting on sexual violence. After a terrorist attack that killed more than 1,100 Israelis over multiple locations, misinformation ran rampant. False stories, one infamously alleging that multiple babies had been beheaded and another claiming that babies had been strung up on a clothesline, proliferated. In cases of sexual violence, Halperin-Kadderi told me, “it’s not unusual for misinformation to spread,” and beyond trauma-related inaccuracies and memory failures, there could be a tendency “to exaggerate and amplify,” which she links to the high levels of trauma associated with sexual violence—both for survivors and for eyewitnesses. She also noted that exaggerated accounts of sexual violence can be “instrumentalized by leaders to portray their enemy in the darkest way possible.” Even Jeremy Scahill, one of the co-authors of the Intercept article, noted in an interview that inconsistencies in eyewitness accounts do “not necessarily mean that they didn’t witness something.”

[Read: Hamas’s genocidal intentions were never a secret]

But The Intercept, in its effort to undermine the credibility of witnesses to sexual violence on October 7, painted with a broad brush, creating an inaccurate picture. The flaws in its approach are perhaps best illustrated by the complicated case of Shari Mendes, an IDF reservist who served in the army unit responsible for preparing female bodies for burial and whose testimony Schwartz said helped convince her that there had been widespread sexual violence on October 7.

In the weeks after the attack, Mendes worked 12-hour shifts cleaning and preparing bodies for burial. In an emotional and graphic speech delivered at the United Nations on December 4, Mendes related what she and her team saw: women shot so many times in the head, sometimes after death, that their faces were practically obliterated; multiple women with gunshots in their vagina and breasts; faces permanently cast in distress and anguish.

In an interview in October, though, Mendes told the Daily Mail that “a baby was cut out of a pregnant woman and beheaded, and then the mother was beheaded.” That was not true. However, Mendes was neither the first person nor the only person to make this allegation. A video falsely claiming to show such an atrocity had made the rounds on social media in the days before the interview was published, and similar claims were promoted by a first responder.

Ryan Grim, another co-author of the Intercept article, told me that such “demonstrable fabrications” had “thoroughly discredited” Mendes, and the article notes that “she has no medical or forensic credentials to legally determine rape” (a point that Mendes has publicly acknowledged). The Intercept story questions why the Times would “rely on Mendes’s testimony,” and in an interview last month, Scahill suggested that Mendes is among the Times’ “premiere witnesses.” But in fact, Mendes is quoted a single time in “Screams Without Words,” relaying her account of having seen four women “with signs of sexual violence, including some with ‘a lot of blood in their pelvic areas.’” Mendes’s claims are backed up by a second witness, an army captain working at the same facility, who added the horrifying detail that “she had seen several bodies with cuts in their vaginas and underwear soaked in blood.”

The Intercept story fails to mention any of this, and it provides no indication that its reporters attempted to speak with Mendes. (I reached out to Mendes, who declined to comment.) Instead, it criticizes the Times for quoting “witnesses with track records of making unreliable claims and lacking forensic credentials.”

The Intercept has applied useful scrutiny to some specific claims within the Times story. One of the accounts of apparent sexual assault relayed by the Times came from a paramedic in an Israeli commando unit who said he had discovered the bodies of two teenagers at Kibbutz Be’eri. A March 4 article in The Intercept concluded that two victims “specifically singled out by the New York Times … were not in fact victims of sexual assault,” and the Times has since updated its story to note that a video of the scene appears to contradict the paramedic’s account.

But that skepticism is not limited to individual witnesses or accounts. The Intercept concedes that “individual acts of sexual assault may have occurred” but is quick to add that “rape is not uncommon in war.” It raises doubts about the extent to which Hamas members were responsible for attacks, noting that “there were also several hundred civilians who poured into Israel from Gaza that day.” (It is not usually the left that tries to blur the distinction between Palestinian terrorists and Palestinian civilians.) The central question, The Intercept contends, is whether the Times “presented solid evidence” to back the claim that, as the newspaper put it, “the attacks against women were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence on Oct. 7.” And it devotes more than 6,000 words to calling into doubt that it did.

Yet The Intercept made no mention of independent efforts to answer this question. There is no reference to the ARCCI report—published a week before The Intercept’s story—which relied on 26 separate media reports from the Israeli press, The Guardian, the BBC, The Times of London, and other outlets, as well as confidential sources, eyewitnesses, and interviews with first responders. Neither does it mention a November 2023 report by Physicians for Human Rights, which concluded that “widespread sexual and gender-based crimes” had taken place on October 7. (Asked for comment, Grim dismissed these reports as “derivative of Western news reports and based on the same sources.”)

The Times published a follow-up story on January 29, addressing many of the questions raised by critics of its article. Even in light of criticisms of the piece, the Times said in a recent statement that it continues to stand by its coverage “and the revelations of sexual violence and abuse following the attack by Hamas.”

The UN mission team similarly concluded that the existence of a few false allegations did not undermine the other evidence of sexual violence in “at least three locations” on October 7. Nor did it limit its inquiry to searching for inconsistencies, paying attention only to those claims it had some reason to doubt. Instead, the investigators took pains to carefully review the scenes, to talk to eyewitnesses and first responders, and to assess the evidence in its totality before presenting the conclusion that “there are reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred.”

Semafor’s Max Tani recently reported that The Intercept “is running out of cash,” and that Grim and Scahill had suggested that its board resign and turn operations over to them and the remaining staff. But the publication’s skeptical coverage of the war has apparently been a bright spot for its financial health. “The Intercept’s unapologetically hostile view of Israel’s post-Oct. 7 military operation in Gaza has galvanized its readers and supporters,” Tani wrote, “who have responded by helping the publication set internal records for small-dollar donations.”

Grim refused to say whether he believes that Israeli women were raped on October 7 and, if so, whether any of these assaults were committed by Hamas members. (His two co-authors did not respond to any questions.) Instead, he said he had “addressed these questions repeatedly” and pointed to an interview in which he had said that “the idea that there would be no sexual assault is not taken seriously by pretty much anybody who understands war and violence.”  

Considering the overwhelming evidence that sexual assault took place, despite the inherent challenges in collecting such evidence in wartime, it’s difficult to fathom why so many on the anti-Israel left continue to deny that it occurred or cast doubt on its significance.

The most obvious explanation is that by questioning what happened on October 7, activists hope to undercut the rationale for Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. Showing that systematic sexual abuse didn’t happen would, they believe, demonstrate that Israel is engaged in a mass public deception to justify killing Palestinians.

But some experts I spoke with see other factors at play.

The charge that Jews have exaggerated and weaponized their suffering has long been the basis for Holocaust denialism, said Amy Elman, a professor of political science and Jewish studies at Kalamazoo College who has written extensively on anti-Semitism and women’s rights. Now that same claim is being used by anti-Semites to portray efforts at justice for October 7 as “part of a larger nefarious scheme to harm Palestinians.” “Rape denialism is absolutely consistent with Holocaust denialism,” Elman said, and “this rape denialism is another form of anti-Semitism.”

One of the more troubling aspects of the left’s response to October 7 has been to cast the struggle between Israelis and Palestinians in simplistic terms: Palestinians are the oppressed, dark-skinned minority population; Israelis are the white oppressors. Never mind that Israel is a diverse, multiethnic society. (Most American Jews trace their origins to immigrants from Europe, but the majority of Israeli Jews descend from those who came, most often as refugees, from the Middle East and North Africa.) This reductionist binary has also made it easier to explain the conflict to a younger generation unfamiliar with Arab-Israeli history but well versed in the American civil-rights movement.

Natalia Melman Petrzela, a historian at the New School, says that this black-and-white framing has led to a distorted view of what happened on October 7—one that is informed by a reductive view of modern feminism. “There is a very powerful and understandable resistance on the left,” she told me, “to centering ‘white feminism’ or white womanhood in understanding the experiences of women and the purpose of feminism, domestically and internationally.” By this logic, white feminism is inherently “problematic”—and because many on the left see Israelis as white, she says, they “see any defense of Israeli women as some sort of capitulation to ‘white feminism.’”

Moreover, claims of sexual assault against white women have historically been used to justify racial violence, which has, according to Elman and Petrzela, led some pro-Palestine activists to compare Hamas to Emmett Till, who was accused of whistling at a white woman in the Jim Crow South before his brutal murder. It’s “unhinged,” Petrzela said, “but in some ways totally predictable.”

Jonathan Freedland, a columnist for The Guardian, suggested to me that left-wing rape denialism is, in effect, a refusal to believe that Hamas could stoop so low as to engage in sexual violence. On the surface, this sounds bizarre. Hamas massacred more than 1,100 Israelis, the majority of whom were civilians, and has a long history of massacring Jewish civilians, including children. How could any crime be considered worse than murder? But Freedland says that there are leftists who are prepared to countenance “armed resistance” but cannot do the same for sexual violence. “You can see why it would be essential for them to say that Hamas was ‘only’ guilty of killing and not guilty of rape.”

Freedland noted that Hamas itself has consistently denied that its fighters committed sexual crimes, perhaps in an effort to retain its standing among devout Muslims. “Hamas would be nervous of being seen not as warriors for Palestine but as a bunch of rapists who bring shame on Islam,” he said. Indeed, as Sulitzeanu pointed out to me, some Israeli Arabs who have stood in solidarity with the victims of October 7  have also refused to accept that their Palestinian brethren could commit such heinous, un-Islamic crimes.

Frankly, none of these efforts to whitewash the carnage of October 7 makes much sense. You can acknowledge Hamas’s barbarism while still condemning Israel’s military response or criticizing Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Indeed, many have done precisely that, including the Biden administration and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. You can raise questions about specific rape allegations—as the UN report did—while still accepting the overall weight of the evidence.

[Read: Netanyahu is Israel’s worst prime minister ever]

Instead, many on the left seem determined to justify what happened on October 7 as a legitimate act of Palestinian resistance. “The images from October 7 of paragliders evading Israeli air defenses were for many of us exhilarating,” one American professor recently wrote. But acknowledging Hamas’s atrocities doesn’t invalidate Palestinian demands for self-determination. You can still embrace Palestinian nationalism and, unlike Hamas, advocate for a two-state solution while also acknowledging that Hamas’s actions on October 7—including the systematic rape of Israeli women and girls—are simply not defensible. Leftists who genuinely support Palestinian statehood do that cause, and themselves, no favor by denying the overwhelming evidence of sexual violence.

The rape denialists might think they are winning a near-term public-relations battle against Israel, but denying Palestinians agency, and accusing Israel of fabricating allegations of mass rape, does far more harm than good.

Above all, it denies reality, perpetuates misinformation, and feeds the empathy gap that separates the two sides. When Israelis and Palestinians look beyond the walls—both real and metaphorical—that separate them, few see fully formed individuals with legitimate grievances and fears that are worthy of their sympathy. Instead, they glimpse caricatures.

As pro-Palestinian activists rightly demand that Israel come to grips with how its policies breed humiliation and desperation among Palestinians, so too must supporters of the Palestinian cause face the reality that rejectionism and terrorism have contributed to Israeli fears that peaceful coexistence is not possible.

When such activists surrender their ideals and dismiss the evidence that sexual violence took place on October 7, they feed the already overwhelming belief among Israelis and Diaspora Jews that those who advocate for the Palestinians and witheringly criticize Israel’s actions are simply not interested in their humanity.

Any solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict must start by recognizing not just the lived reality of Jews and Palestinians, but the abundant feelings of trauma and fear that have made reconciliation so difficult to achieve. Rape denialism pushes Israelis and Palestinians further apart. It isn’t just wrong; it doesn’t just diminish the trauma experienced by Israeli women on October 7—it makes the pursuit of peace and genuine reconciliation impossible.

This is Atlantic Intelligence, a limited-run series in which our writers help you wrap your mind around artificial intelligence and a new machine age. Sign up here.

Computers may have seemed magical to you once, portals to an unpredictable expanse of knowledge and entertainment. Then they became ubiquitous, perhaps a little boring, and occasionally horrifying. Artificial intelligence, though laced with plenty of its own troubles, has managed to rekindle some of the excitement that has been absent from digital technology in recent years—and not just in its highest-profile applications.

Take dictation, for example. As my colleague Caroline Mimbs Nyce wrote in a recent article, AI has recently enabled drastic improvements in voice recognition, advancing a technology that researchers have historically struggled with. “For a long time, we were making gradual, incremental progress, and then suddenly things started to get better much faster,” Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told her.

Try activating your phone’s dictation feature and speaking your next message instead of typing it. You might just pick up a helpful new habit—and you’d have AI to thank.

— Damon Beres, senior editor

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

You Don’t Have to Type Anymore

By Caroline Mimbs Nyce

As a little girl, I often found myself in my family’s basement, doing battle with a dragon. I wasn’t gaming or playing pretend: My dragon was a piece of enterprise voice-dictation software called Dragon Naturally Speaking, launched in 1997 (and purchased by my dad, an early adopter).

As a kid, I was enchanted by the idea of a computer that could type for you. The premise was simple: Wear a headset, pull up the software, and speak. Your words would fill a document on-screen without your hands having to bear the indignity of actually typing. But no matter how much I tried to enunciate, no matter how slowly I spoke, the program simply did not register my tiny, high-pitched voice. The page would stay mostly blank, occasionally transcribing the wrong words. Eventually, I’d get frustrated, give up, and go play with something else.

Much has changed in the intervening decades. Voice recognition—the computer-science term for the ability of a machine to accurately transcribe what is being said—is improving rapidly thanks in part to recent advances in AI. Today, I’m a voice-texting wizard, often dictating obnoxiously long paragraphs on my iPhone to friends and family while walking my dog or driving. I find myself speaking into my phone’s text box all the time now, simply because I feel like it. Apple updated its dictation software last year, and it’s great. So are many other programs. The dream of accurate speech-to-text—long held not just in my parents’ basement but by people all over the world—is coming together. The dragon has nearly been slain.

Read the full article.

What to Read Next

Why a cognitive scientist put a head cam on his baby: The perspective of a child could help AI learn language—and tell us more about how humans manage the same feat, Sarah Zhang writes. A tool to supercharge your imagination: “New technologies for making pictures can be prosthetics for your mind,” Ian Bogost writes. Don’t talk to people like they’re chatbots: “AI could make our human interactions blander, more biased, or ruder,” Albert Fox Cahn and Bruce Schneier write.

P.S.

Earlier this week, The Atlantic published an article by the writer S. I. Rosenbaum exploring implants that allow the human brain to interface with computers. AI plays a substantial role, translating neural signals into commands that allow a mouse cursor to move, for instance. Another encouraging use of the technology, perhaps—though as Rosenbaum reports, there are still major challenges to overcome.

— Damon

The horror of Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley, to me, isn’t that he’s a killer, or an aspirant, or even a literary version of the parasitic wasp that nests gruesomely inside the zombified form of its prey. Rather, it’s that he’s that most familiar of contemporary monsters: an incurable narcissist. At the beginning of the 1955 novel The Talented Mr. Ripley, as Ripley is moldering in poverty in New York and scraping together a living via petty mail scams, he’s sustained by an illogical faith in his own superiority. The “crummy bums” he socializes with aren’t really his friends; the grime in his borrowed tenement apartment is not his dirt. Ripley is pathetic, but we can’t escape him as readers, mired as the novel is in his interiority. We suffer the physical pain he feels when he’s forced to have conversations not focused on himself. We’re steeped in the envy, the self-pity, and the crippling status anxiety that drive him to murder. (It’s not all dark—at one point Ripley feels so pathetically validated when someone sends him a fruit basket that he breaks into sobs.)

Are we supposed to like Tom Ripley? I don’t think so. Nor are we supposed to hate him, nor even find him particularly evil. “Ripley isn’t so bad,” Highsmith once reportedly observed, for her part. “He only kills when he has to.” He’s a pragmatic villain more than a psychopath, although the consequence is that he’s rarely all that surprising. Anthony Minghella’s 1999 movie adaptation of the novel tried determinedly to humanize him, casting Matt Damon as an insecure sad sack who’s driven to a crime of desperate passion when he’s sent to Europe to bring home—and is promptly humiliated by—Jude Law’s wealthy, callous Dickie Greenleaf. The film’s visual splendor, with its bluest blue skies and sun-dappled Neapolitan coast, offered relief from Ripley’s claustrophobic mind and relentless grudgery; it also placed him in the long lineage of sympathetic American strivers who go just a tiny bit too far.

Ripley, a new eight-part adaptation on Netflix by the writer and director Steven Zaillian (Schindler’s List, The Night Of) is resolutely different, almost to the point of inversion. Shot in striking black and white—it’s the most beautiful series I’ve ever seen on the platform—it is emotionally spare, deliberate in its pacing, and morbidly funny. This Ripley, played with a malevolent flourish by Andrew Scott (Sherlock, All Of Us Strangers), is a void, an emptiness where the soul should be. The show’s lack of color turns it into a chiaroscuro meditation on light and dark, as Zaillian cuts moodily from Caravaggios to gargoyles to endless shots of staircases. What a piece of work is man! the series seems to sigh, encouraging us to mull the depths of human depravity, and the possibility art offers for ascension.

You could be forgiven, watching television lately, for wondering whether we’re in a new mini-era of Difficult Men, after a stretch defined by complicated female characters. Sullen, brooding heroes and antiheroes have returned to the small screen, paying homage to European New Wave and Old Hollywood alike. On Apple TV+’s Sugar, a different show with a vexing protagonist that leans heavily on dreamy cinematography and the innate brutality of life, a private detective played by Colin Farrell searches for a missing girl while clips of film-noir classics flash erratically through his head. Late last year, the most fun I had watching television was with Reacher, Amazon’s kinetic adaptation of the Lee Child potboiler series, starring Alan Ritchson as the phlegmatic, solicitous, intensely violent giant.

In his 2013 book, Difficult Men, a history of television’s second Golden Age and the troublesome characters who embodied it, the writer Brett Martin argues that “the most important shows of [that] era were … largely about manhood—in particular the contours of male power and the infinite varieties of male combat.” The current state of masculinity on TV, by contrast, is one of alienation. These shows are steeped in nostalgia and pay homage to bygone eras but offer up heroes who feel resolutely other, isolated and disconnected and driven to acts of baroque violence that they don’t want to inflict and can’t enjoy.

The decision to shoot Ripley in black and white works on multiple levels: It evokes the heft and visual symbolism of classic film while keeping pleasure manifestly at bay. We are in Ripley’s world, and something is missing. The lush florals and endless summer of Minghella’s film offered consolation for what the hero himself lacked, but Zaillian wants us to experience life the way Ripley does, as something cold and sharp. When he’s tasked in the first episode by the wealthy American shipbuilder Herbert Greenleaf to bring home his feckless son, who’s gallivanting off the proceeds of a trust fund, I half expected the show to bloom into color once Ripley landed in Europe, as if to signify the opening up of his gloomy world. Instead, things stay monochrome. His travels, his new friends and experiences, will not bring him any relief.

Ripley could be grimly ponderous—each episode runs close to an hour, and one is spent in intensely close quarters with the hero as he labors to get rid of a dead body. Strangely though, it’s not. There’s so much to look at on-screen, so much that draws the viewer’s eye, that the series is intensely absorbing, and the rhythm of the later episodes, whose dialogue is largely in Italian, feels almost musical. Ripley’s sense of humor is also a surprise. Dickie (played by Johnny Flynn) is a nonentity whose paintings are so bad that they bring to mind the botched “Monkey Christ”; Marge (Dakota Fanning), his American “friend”—sexuality is as ambiguous here as in Highsmith’s novel—is prim and self-serious, toiling diligently away at writing a very dull book. These are Bad Art Friends, which gives Ripley, a natural if untrained aesthete, the moral high ground. His murderous dedication to self-improvement isn’t wholly original (Constance Grady has labeled the genre he belongs to “striver gothic”), but he does, like Hannibal Lecter, appreciate beauty infinitely more than capital.

[Read: 20 undersung crime shows to binge-watch]

This latest Ripley has been interpreted as an antihero for the current moment, a scammer and confidence trickster who, in the present day, would surely have a gallery under investigation by the IRS and a hugely popular Instagram. (The 2023 movie Saltburn, which followed a working-class student drawn into the circle of an aristocratic friend, borrowed heavily from Highsmith, heaping on homoerotic melodrama, bodily taboos, and Millennial kitsch.) But Scott plays Ripley in a way that feels chilly to the touch—his grand ambitions and desires, if he has them, are hard to determine. When he first gets to Italy, we see him sweating and huffing his way up ancient cliffside stairs, recognizably vulnerable, without a grasp of the language or a clue how to behave. As the series progresses, though, he hardens like a flint. Scott’s eyes betray no emotion beyond boredom or malice: The more comfortable his Ripley gets, the more sinister he feels—and the more operatic as a character.

The performance doesn’t quite match the nuance of the show. On Sugar, it’s the other way around: Farrell is giving us something so poignantly human that it transcends the heightened, sometimes absurd plot points he has to navigate. The series, created by Mark Protosevich (I Am Legend, Thor), has been billed as “genre-bending,” spanning film noir, sci-fi, and Westerns, with some global gangster intrigue thrown into the mix. What it really is, though, is a surprisingly good crime drama with an awful lot of unnecessary adornment. John Sugar (Farrell) is an oddball private detective working for a clandestine agency; he abhors violence but is very good at deploying it, is an ardent cinephile, and cares deeply about vulnerable people and dogs. Watching it, I’d heard a twist was coming, which still didn’t quite prepare me for how erratically the show upends itself. It’s obvious that Sugar isn’t what he seems, and he appears to have based his personality whole cloth on gruff cinematic legends and Raymond Chandler novels. And yet he’s manifestly good—too good for this seedy realm.

In the first episode, Sugar is commissioned to find a missing girl, the granddaughter of a storied Hollywood film director, Jonathan Siegel (James Cromwell), and the former stepdaughter of a rock star, Melanie Mackintosh (Amy Ryan). The series uses a fair amount of voice-over, requiring Farrell to spout clichés as pat as “Sometimes a thing is just a thing that happened,” and “We all have our secrets. Even me. Especially me.” Sugar’s car (a vintage Corvette), his suits (“Savile Row”), and the specific affliction he has of seeing life crosscut with scenes from Humphrey Bogart films all suggest he’s nostalgic grist for Apple’s key dad demographic. So why couldn’t I stop watching?

Maybe because the performances are extremely good—Farrell, yes, and Ryan’s softening punk edges, as well as Eric Lange playing a terrifyingly charismatic criminal and Anna Gunn as a scheming mother. Sugar also looks extraordinary, casting Los Angeles in shades of coral and green without sanitizing its seamier side. The episodes, running about half an hour each, are tightly plotted, and the central mystery is an enticing one. (Not the one about Sugar himself, which will be better the less I acknowledge it.) Really, though, the detective himself is a lovely puzzle, more interesting for what he doesn’t say than for what his labored interior monologue spells out. What is a man? How can Sugar try to retain his humanity and integrity in a landscape of abjection? And the most difficult question of all: Are the stories we love the most actually serving us? This, to me, is what makes John Sugar so compelling: He loves the movies, and the lessons of light and dark that they impart. He’s just not always sure that he can trust them.

What happens when a smart TV becomes too smart for its own good? The answer, it seems, is more intrusive advertisements.

Last week, Janko Roettgers, a technology and entertainment reporter, uncovered a dystopian patent filed last August by Roku, the television- and streaming-device manufacturer whose platform is used by tens of millions of people worldwide. The filing details plans for an “HDMI customized ad insertion,” which would allow TVs made by Roku to monitor video signals through the HDMI port—where users might connect a game console, a Blu-ray player, a cable box, or even another streaming device—and then inject targeted advertisements when content is paused. This would be a drastic extension of Roku’s surveillance potential: The company currently has no ability to see what users might be doing when they switch away from its proprietary streaming platform. This is apparently a problem, in that Roku is missing monetization opportunities!

Although the patent may never come to fruition (a spokesperson for Roku told me that the company had no plans to put HDMI ad insertion into any products at this time), it speaks to a dispiriting recent trend in consumer hardware. Internet-connected products can transform after the point of purchase in ways that can feel intrusive or even hostile to users. Another example from Roku: Just last month, the company presented users with an update to its terms of service, asking them to enter a pre-arbitration process that would make it harder to sue the company. On one hand, this isn’t so unusual—apps frequently force users to accept terms-of-service updates before proceeding. But on the other, it feels galling to be locked out of using your television altogether over a legal agreement: “Until I press ‘Agree’ my tv is essentially being held hostage and rendered useless,” one Roku customer posted on Reddit. “I can’t even change the HDMI input.”

A Roku spokesperson confirmed that a user does have to agree to the latest terms in order to use the company’s services but said that customers have the option to opt out, by sending a letter, in the actual mail, to the company’s general counsel (though the window to do so closed on March 21). “Like many companies, Roku updates its terms of service from time to time,” the spokesperson told me. “When we do, we take steps to make sure customers are informed of the change.”

Back in the day, a TV was a TV, a commercial was a commercial, and a computer was a computer. They have now been mixed into an unholy brew by the internet and by opportunistic corporations, which have developed “automatic content recognition” systems. These collect granular data about individual watching habits and log them into databases, which are then used to serve ads or sold to interested parties, such as politicians. The slow surveillance colonization of everyday electronics was normalized by free internet services, which conditioned people to the mentality that our personal information is the actual cost of doing business: The TVs got cheaper, and now we pay with our data. Not only is this a bad deal; it fundamentally should not apply to hardware and software that people purchase with money. One Roku customer aptly summed up the frustration recently on X: “We gave up God’s light (cathode rays and phosphorus) for this.”

And this phenomenon has collided with another modern concern—what the writer and activist Cory Doctorow evocatively calls “enshittification.” The term speaks to a pervasive cultural sense that things are getting worse, that the digital products we use are effectively being turned against us. For example: Apart from its ad-stuffed streaming devices, Roku also offers a remote-control app for smartphones. In a Reddit post last month, a user attached a screenshot of a subtle ad module that the company inserted into the app well after launch—gently enshittifying the simple act of navigating your television screen. “Just wait until we have to sit through a 1 minute video ad before we can use the remote,” one commenter wrote. “Don’t give them any ideas,” another replied.

[Cory Doctorow: This is what Netflix thinks your family is]

Part of Doctorow’s enshittification thesis involves a business-model bait and switch, where platforms attract people with nice, free features and then turn on the ad faucet. Roku fits into this framework. The company lost $44 million on its physical devices last year but made almost $1.6 billion with its ads and services products. It turns out that Roku is actually an advertising company much like, say, Google and Meta. And marketing depends on captive audiences: commercial breaks, billboards that you can’t help but see on the highway, and so on.

Elsewhere, companies have infused their devices with “digital rights management” or DRM restrictions, which halt people’s attempts to modify devices they own. I wrote last year about my HP inkjet printer, which the company remotely bricked after the credit card I used to purchase an ink-cartridge subscription expired. My printer had ink (that I’d paid for), but I couldn’t use it. It felt like extortion. Restrictive rights usage happens everywhere—with songs, movies, and audiobooks that play only on specific platforms, and with big, expensive physical tech products, such as cars. The entire concept of ownership now feels muddied. If HP can disable my printer, if Roku can shut off my television, if Tesla can change the life of my car battery remotely, are the devices I own really mine?

[Read: My printer is extorting me]

The answer is: not really. Or not like they used to be. The loss of meaningful ownership over our devices, combined with the general degradation of products we use every day, creates a generally bad mood for consumers, one that has started to radiate beyond the digital realm. The mass production and Amazon-ification of cheap consumer goods is different from, say, Boeing’s decline of quality in airline manufacturing allegedly in service of shareholder profits, which is different from televisions that blitz your eyeballs with jarring ads; yet these disparate things have started to feel linked—a problem that could be defined in general by mounting shamelessness from corporate entities. It is a feeling of decay, of disrespect.

In some areas, it means that quality goes down in service of higher margins; in others, it feels like being forced to expect and accept that whatever can be monetized will be, regardless of whether the consumer experience suffers. People feel this everywhere. They feel it in Hollywood, where, as the reporter Richard Rushfield recently put it, the entertainment industry is full of executives “who believe the deal is more important than the audience”—and that consumers ultimately “have no choice but to buy tickets for the latest Mission Impossible or Fast and Furious—because they always have and we own them so they’ll see what we tell them to see.” People feel it in unexpected places such as professional golf: Recently, I was surprised to read an issue of the Fried Egg Golf newsletter that compared NBC Sports’ weak PGA Tour broadcasts to the ongoing debacle at Boeing. “Is there a general lack of morale amongst people right now?” the author wrote. “Does anyone take pride in their work? Or are we just letting quality suffer across all domains for the sake of cutting costs?”

These last two examples aren’t Doctorowian per se: They are merely things that people feel have gotten worse because companies assume that consumers will accept inferior products, or that they have nowhere else to go. In this sense, Doctorow’s enshittification may transcend its original, digital meaning. Like doomscrolling, it gives language to an epochal ethos. “The problem is that all of this is getting worse, not better,” Doctorow told me last year when I interviewed him about my printer-extortion debacle. He was talking about companies locking consumers into frustrating ecosystems but also about consumer dismay at large. “The last thing we want is everything to be inkjet-ified,” he said.

Doctorow’s observation, I realize, is the actual reason I and so many others online are so worked up over a theoretical patent that might not come to fruition. Needing to do a hostage negotiation with your television is annoying—enraging, even—but it is only a small indignity. Much greater is the creeping sensation that it has become standard practice for the things we buy to fail us through subtle, technological betrayals. A little surveillance here, a little forced arbitration there. Add it up, and the real problem becomes existential. It sure feels like the inkjets are winning.

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.

“I wish I knew some young men!” the writer Eliza Orne White declared in The Atlantic’s July 1888 issue. “I am fully aware how heterodox this sentiment is considered, but I repeat it boldly, and even underline it—I should like to know some interesting men!”

White, a fiction author, was writing in the voice of her 20-year-old protagonist May, but her story had plenty to do with the romantic truths of the day. A 19th-century woman couldn’t just make a Tinder account and message a strapping stonemason two towns over. If she wanted a suitor, she had to choose one from a limited supply of options and then charm him—just enough to encourage interest but not so much that she’d seem like she was trying. When I spoke with Beth Bailey, the author of From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America, she told me that this had long been the classic tale of American courtship: Because women couldn’t conventionally initiate or steer a relationship themselves, all they could hope for was to subtly influence men to act in a certain way. (Even if they weren’t straight, they probably had few options besides marrying a man.) Poor May had to pretend she enjoyed reading Robert Browning’s poetry to catch the attention of her crush, who was leading a club on the poet’s oeuvre; after going through all that trouble, she was deemed a “flirt” by the haughty ladies of the neighborhood.

When you’re struggling in love, it’s easy to feel like you were simply born at the wrong time. Today, media outlets have amply covered “dating-app fatigue”; some polls have found that the majority of online daters say they experience “burnout” from all that swiping. But courtship has always been hard. Moira Weigel, the author of Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating, told me that for much of early American history, your relatives likely arranged or at least surveilled your budding relationships. Before the Industrial Revolution, the point of marriage was often to unite families so they could share agricultural work, so your dating life was, in fact, their business. That meant little freedom for your own personal canoodling.

Once young people started living and working in cities, it became more common for them to pair up on their own. But that presented its own challenges. As marriage became, more and more, an arrangement of love rather than of logistics, the pressure to find the perfect mate was cranked up and up. “Marriage was not designed as a mechanism for providing friendship, erotic experience, romantic love, personal fulfillment, continuous lay psychotherapy, or recreation,” the sociologist Mervyn Cadwallader argued in a 1966 Atlantic article titled “Marriage as a Wretched Institution.” (Please, Cadwallader, tell us how you really feel.) Perhaps a mere practical contract was enough when people could lean on their family and their neighbors. But in a fractured, urbanized nation, the stakes were higher. “Cut off from the support and satisfactions that flow from community,” Cadwallader wrote, “the confused and searching young American can do little but place all of his bets on creating a community in microcosm, his own marriage.”

For decades, it was hard to know where to even start looking for such a bond. Once more women began attending college in the early 20th century, one clear answer emerged: Young couples more commonly met in school. (Perhaps if May had had that opportunity, she wouldn’t have been so afraid of becoming one of the dreaded “maiden ladies”—single women—in her town, left wandering around with a “resigned expression” and meddling in the affairs of eligible bachelorettes like herself.) But academia wasn’t possible for everyone, nor did it grant all who took part a soulmate. And as the world kept changing, courtship, and its inevitable frustrations, shifted yet again.

In her book, Why There Are No Good Men Left, the historian Barbara Dafoe Whitehead wrote that as women were encouraged more and more to develop their own career, many of them sought to settle down at a later age. But it was harder, by then, to find a partner. “The large pool of eligible young men to which they had access in college—with backgrounds and ambitions similar to their own—has disappeared,” Sage Stossel wrote in a 2002 review of the book. Where were people meant to meet anymore?

In the years that followed, dating apps provided a solution to that problem and created another: the issue of too many options. It’s fair that people feel exhausted by the labor of scrolling and swiping on repeat; I do too. But, of course, we’re also lucky to have a way to access new possibilities—and the agency to pursue them at all.

Love is trying not just because of historical circumstance but also because of human nature. People are complex; finding someone who brings out the best in you couldn’t possibly be simple. In that sense, as much as times have changed, they’ve also stayed quite the same. We keep searching and hoping and failing, pleading and misreading, getting obsessed and getting hurt and getting the ick—and, eventually, starting all over again. Until, if we’re very lucky, we don’t have to.

For the third consecutive year, The Atlantic was awarded the top honor of General Excellence for a News, Sports, and Entertainment publication at the 2024 National Magazine Awards, the most prestigious category in the annual honors from the American Society of Magazine Editors.

The Atlantic also won reporting awards for “Inside the Meltdown at CNN,” by staff writer Tim Alberta; “The Ones We Sent Away,” the September cover by staff writer Jennifer Senior; and cultural reviews and criticism by staff writer Sophie Gilbert. It also was a finalist for “Jenisha From Kentucky,” the October cover story by senior editor Jenisha Watts; and “To Reconstruct the Nation,” a special issue in December that reexamined Reconstruction and the enduring consequences of its failure.

Editor in Chief Jeffrey Goldberg said: “Once again, our team has shown themselves to be the best in the business. It is deeply gratifying to receive this recognition again.”

More on the winners and finalists follows:

Staff writer Tim Alberta won in Profile Writing for “Inside the Meltdown at CNN,” an in-depth profile of CNN’s former CEO Chris Licht. Alberta had been meeting with Licht throughout the course of his tenure, and for this story spoke with nearly 100 CNN staffers. The report was explosive and dominated news cycles.

In Reviews and Criticism, staff writer Sophie Gilbert won for three articles: “The Death of the Sex Scene,” “Porn Set Women Up From the Start,” and “Madonna Forever.” Gilbert was also a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Criticism, and is the author of the recent Atlantic Edition title On Womanhood: Bodies, Literature, Choice, which is a timely, probing essay collection of her writings exploring womanhood in pop culture.

Staff writer Jennifer Senior won in the Columns & Essays category for “The Ones We Sent Away,” which was the cover of the September 2023 issue. Senior unraveled the story of her aunt Adele, who was born in 1951 with various intellectual disabilities and was sent away to an institution when she was younger than 2 years old. Senior then explored the ways in which the improved care and facilities in the latter part of Adele’s life helped restore her humanity and identity––defying the expectations that were placed on her as a child.

Staff writer Jenisha Watts was a finalist for Feature Writing. In “Jenisha From Kentucky,” which was the cover of the October 2023 issue, Jenisha wrote with remarkable candor about growing up in a crack house, and how she survived it. Watts writes that she was always a “collector of words,” and found solace and escape in her deep love of books; she eventually found her way to the literary and journalistic world of New York, where she tried to hide her past. It is, as Goldberg said in an editor’s note, “one of the most heartbreaking, insightful, and emotionally resonant stories in recent memory.”

Nominated for Single-Topic Issue was “To Reconstruct the Nation,” from December 2023. The centerpiece of the issue, which was led by senior editor Vann R. Newkirk II, was a new feature-length play by the actor, playwright, and Atlantic contributing writer Anna Deavere Smith, which appears along with essays by writers, historians, and scholars including Secretary of the Smithsonian Lonnie G. Bunch III, Jordan Virtue, Peniel E. Joseph, Drew Gilpin Faust, and Eric Foner.

For the second straight year, The Atlantic earned the honor for Best Print Illustration, this year for the October cover portrait of Jenisha Watts by Didier Viodé.

In the past year, The Atlantic’s journalistic excellence has driven growth across the company, including the recent announcement that the company surpassed 1 million subscriptions and is profitable. Last month, it published “The Great American Novels,” an ambitious project collecting the most consequential novels of the past 100 years. The April cover story, “The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending,” by Franklin Foer, looks at how the rise of anti-Semitism on both the right and the left threatens to end an era of unprecedented safety and prosperity for Jewish Americans.

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