In Praise of Clarity

Elon Musk will be traveling on President-elect Donald Trump's plane, a source said.

Barrymore sews her sweatpants when they start to rip apart.

President-elect Donald Trump is expected to soon appoint a Ukrainian peace envoy to lead negotiations on ending the war with Russia, multiple sources told Fox News Digital.

From sadness to joy, our emotions can bring on tears. Dr. Gail Saltz explains the science behind our tears and what causes us to cry.

More communities across the U.S. are voting to remove fluoride from water, with Lebanon, Oregon, being the latest location to take action. As Robert F. Kennedy Jr. raises concerns over fluoride's safety, Dr. Aaron Yancoskie of Touro College of Dental Medicine joins "CBS Mornings Plus" to look at the debate.

This is equal to 85 million damaged parcels in the last 12 months, which would fill the equivalent of more than 45,000 Olympic swimming pools. 

President-elect Trump is pushing to end diversity training in the military and has pledged to fire generals he believes support a "woke" agenda. A new board of retired military officials could help identify leaders deemed unfit. Vivian Salama, the national politics reporter with The Wall Street Journal who helped break this story, has more.

Glen Powell addressed rumors that he could replace Tom Cruise in the "Mission Impossible" franchise. Powell said that his mother "would never let" him star in the "death trap" movies.

One month to the day before the 2024 presidential election, The New York Times reported on a new analysis of how Americans spend their time. More and more of the average American’s day is being spent at home: one hour and 39 minutes more in 2022 than in 2003. For each extra hour at home, a bit of it was spent with family—7.4 minutes. More of it, 21 minutes, was spent alone.Obviously, because of the coronavirus pandemic, time at home spiked in 2020. Some of this homebody impulse may well be the stubborn persistence of habits formed during the isolating early days of lockdown. But this trend is more than just a pandemic hangover. For years before COVID-19 hit, time spent alone had been increasing as time spent socializing had been decreasing. Though solitude and loneliness are not the same, this downturn in social connection happened alongside a rise in loneliness so pronounced that the surgeon general called it an epidemic.And now this: the reelection to the nation’s highest office of Donald Trump, a man who has attacked the very idea of a communal, democratic form of government, and who has indicated that he aspires to move the United States toward autocracy—auto, of course, meaning “self,” and autocracy being the concentration of power for and within the self. Self over others is one of Trump’s defining principles. In his first term as president, he used an office intended for public service to enrich himself. He has vowed to use it this time to take revenge on his enemies and—“within two seconds” of taking office—to fire the special counsel overseeing criminal cases against him.Yet self over others, or at the very least self before others, has long been a prominent aspect of American culture—not always to Trumpian levels, certainly, but individualism for better and worse shapes both the structure of society and our personal lives. And it will surely shape Americans’ responses to the election: for the winners, perhaps, self-congratulation; for the losers, the risk of allowing despair to pull them into a deeper, more dangerous seclusion. On Election Day, the Times published an article on voters’ plans to manage stress. Two separate people in that story said they were deliberately avoiding social settings. To extend that strategy into the next four years would be a mistake.[Read: Don’t give up on America]In 1831, the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville traveled to the United States. He observed and analyzed its people and culture, and published his thoughts in a massive two-volume report called Democracy in America. Alongside his praise for the country’s professed value of equality—which he wrote “possesses all the characteristics of a divine decree”—he warned of the individualism he saw as baked into American society and the isolation it could cause. “Each man is forever thrown back on himself alone,” he wrote, “and there is danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart.”More than a century and a half later, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, a sociological book by five scholars, followed explicitly in Tocqueville’s footsteps, examining how individualism affects institutions and personal relationships in the United States. Published in 1985, it reads today as wildly prescient. The authors feared that the danger Tocqueville described had already come to pass. “It seems to us,” they wrote, “that it is individualism, and not equality, as Tocqueville thought, that has marched inexorably through our history. We are concerned that this individualism may have grown cancerous … that it may be threatening the survival of freedom itself.”Tempering American individualism, in Tocqueville’s view, was Americans’ propensity to form associations and participate in civic life. “These he saw as moderating the isolating tendencies of private ambition on one hand and limiting the despotic proclivities of government on the other,” the authors of Habits of the Heart wrote. But American associational life began hollowing out starting in the 1960s and ’70s, as people became less and less likely to attend any kind of club, league, church, or other community organization (a shift that Robert Putnam documented in his 2000 book, Bowling Alone). Since the late ’70s, faith in large-scale institutions such as organized religion, organized labor, the media, and the U.S. government has also been dwindling; in 2023, Gallup declared it “historically low.”A few months ago I spoke with Ann Swidler, one of the authors of Habits of the Heart. “We obviously did not succeed in having things go the direction we might have hoped,” she told me. “I would say that every horrible thing we worried about has gotten worse.” Americans are spending measurably more time shut up in the solitude of their homes, and perhaps in the solitude of their own hearts as well.It might be difficult to imagine the renaissance of many civic associations—the kind that could be good for both democracy and our relationships—given that a majority of Americans just voted for a man who has little interest in or respect for institutions beyond what they can do for him. If autocracy is indeed where the country is headed, Tocqueville’s prediction regarding our relationships is not a positive one. As he wrote in The Old Regime and the Revolution, his book on the French revolution: Despotism does not combat this tendency [toward individualism]; on the contrary, it renders it irresistible, for it deprives citizens of all common passions, mutual necessities, need of a common understanding, opportunity for combined action: it ripens them, so to speak, in private life. They had a tendency to hold themselves aloof from each other: it isolates them. They looked coldly on each other: it freezes their souls. If individualism is, as the authors of Habits of the Heart wrote, “the first language in which Americans tend to think about their lives,” it makes sense that people would reach for their mother tongue in times of upheaval. In the days after the 2016 election, for example, searches for the term self-care spiked. Caring for yourself takes different forms, of course, though in mainstream culture, self-care is commonly used to mean treating yourself, by yourself. Self-soothing, alone. (One can see in this echoes of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance”: “Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.”)But caring for yourself doesn’t always have to breed isolation. Among activists and in the helping professions, self-care is often talked about as a way to restore people so that they don’t burn out and can continue their altruistic work. Some in these circles critique a focus on self-care as distracting from the need for institutional support. But the overall conception at least shows an understanding of the two types of care as having a symbiotic relationship: Care for the self so that you can show up for others.[Read: Focus on the things that matter]What’s more, caring for others is a form of self-care. Research shows that doing things for other people leads to greater well-being than trying to make yourself happy or indulging yourself. This is not to say there is no place for self-soothing or solitude, or for buying yourself a little treat. But it is to challenge the cultural message that turtling up alone is the most appropriate response to difficult feelings.Under an administration for which (to paraphrase my colleague Adam Serwer) cruelty, not care, is the point, it falls to people to care for one another on scales small and large. This task is made harder not just by the cultural pressure for Americans to rely only on themselves but also by the slow, steady atrophying of the muscles of togetherness. “American individualism resists more adult virtues, such as care and generativity, let alone wisdom,” the authors of Habits of the Heart wrote. The inverse, I hope, is true too: that care and generativity—working to make contributions to a collective future—are the path to resisting hyper-individualism and isolation.Even if turning inward is a big-picture trend, it is, of course, not the only development happening. As isolating as the pandemic lockdown was, those years saw the rise of mutual-aid groups determined to care for the vulnerable whether the government did or not. During the first Trump administration, mass protests broke out; people fought for women’s rights and an end to racist police brutality. People are always showing up for one another in quiet, everyday ways too. Building networks of support and commitment could provide some small buffer against the effects of a self-serving president-elect’s policies while keeping people from drifting further apart.Americans’ skills of connection and care are not lost. But they are rusty. And all of us will need those skills if we are to find a way to turn toward one another instead of inward. I’m not even talking about overcoming political polarization or reaching out to build bridges with strangers who voted differently than you did. Those are tasks that people won’t be equipped to tackle if they’re struggling to show up for the loved ones already in their life. For now, it is enough of a challenge to attempt to reverse the isolationist inertia of decades. It is enough of a challenge to resist what has become a cultural tendency to withdraw, while also processing the stress of an election that has left many people exhausted and deeply afraid for the future. How do we proceed over the next four years? Not alone. How do we proceed over the next week, hour, minute? Not alone.​​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Yale University announced Friday that it would offer a new course on Beyoncé’s “breakthroughs and innovations" in the music industry for next semester.

While the glow of the World Series title remains, the Dodgers have to turn their attention to who will be on next season's team.

The Black Parade marches into MetLife Stadium on Aug. 9.

Recipes and tips for making the turkey, mashed potatoes, mac and cheese and more in advance.

We also break down Louis' Miss Congeniality poster.

Sign up with a BetMGM bonus code for a great welcome offer, available for Wednesday’s NBA slate featuring 11 games, including the Knicks hosting the Bulls at Madison Square Garden.

The friendships between the men took center stage.

Googling seems harmless, but what you google could actually put you at risk of falling victim to a hacker.

The Rubell Museum’s “American Vignettes: Symbols, Society and Satire” reveals a national ambivalence that long predates any particular election result.

Inflation ticked back up to 2.6% in October. Here's what that rise could mean for mortgage rates.

Strahan faced backlash last weekend when he did not place his hand over his heart during the national anthem on the "Fox NFL Sunday" Veterans Day broadcast.

President-elect Donald Trump is in Washington Wednesday for the first time since winning the election. He'll meet with Republican congressional leaders on Capitol Hill and President Biden at the White House. CBS News campaign reporter Libby Cathey has the latest.

"I hear all the criticism of him is that he's not the expected Washington pick. And I'm just saying to you that the American people just voted against the expected Washington pick,” CNN analyst Scott Jennings said.

The House Committee on Oversight and Accountability is set to hold a hearing at 11:30am EST titled “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth.” According to the committee’s website, the purpose of the hearing is to “attempt to further pull back the curtain on secret UAP research programs conducted by the U.S. government, and undisclosed findings...

When a mother of two is found dead in her home, her father obtains death scene photos that help solve the case. "48 Hours" contributor David Begnaud reports Saturday, Nov. 16 at 9/8c on CBS and streaming on Paramount+.

Democrat Ruben Gallego beat Trump ally and Republican Kari Lake in Arizona's Senate race. He drew suport from Hispanic men, a group that drifted toward President-elect Donald Trump in Arizona and nationwide during this election. Gallego spoke with Ed O'Keefe about immigration, Trump and what the Democratic party needs to do going forward.

On Wednesday, President Biden will host President-elect Donald Trump in the Oval Office as Trump continues to build his administration. Trump says billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will head a new agency to cut what he sees as waste in the federal government. He also announced he is nominating Pete Hegseth to serve as defense secretary. The Fox News host and Army veteran has blasted diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in the military.

A new docuseries challenges half a century's worth of received wisdom about the influential social psychology study.

Rep. Brandon Williams, R-N.Y., is on the short list to become Labor Secretary in President-elect Donald Trump's new administration, Fox News Digital is told.

President-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly said he plans to fire special counsel Jack Smith.

The mother of four's remains have still not been found.

He's baaaa-aaaaaack.

Jacques Audiard’s operatic musical stars Zoe Saldaña's, Karla Sofia Gascon, and Selena Gomez in an act of radical imagination.

The 'kings' and 'queens' of L.A. County Board of Supervisors will have to make some room.

"The View" co-host Sunny Hostin addressed the notion that she ended Kamala Harris' campaign on Tuesday during the show's podcast with her question during their interview.

The NCCU (Netflix Christmas Cinematic Universe) just got a little bigger.

Trump's first-term expansion in space will likely increase during his second presidency.

Treat yourself with one of these holiday sales on washable silk pajamas.

Michael Strahan is opening up after he was criticized for the way he stood for the national anthem on Sunday afternoon. During Fox’s special football coverage from Naval Base San Diego, the “Star Spangled Banner” was played, and while the rest of his teammates on television were seen with their hands over their hearts, the...

The "American people clearly elected a pro-gun presidential ticket" in President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance, one gun rights advocate tells Fox News Digital.

Kouri Richins is charged with killing her husband with a lethal dose of fentanyl in 2022. She published a children's book about grief after his death. At a court hearing on Tuesday, a judge ruled the Utah mother of three poses a public threat and was ordered to remain in jail until her trial next spring.

Former MLB star catcher Jonathan Lucroy opened up on "OutKick the Morning" about his refusal to kneel during the national anthem in 2020.

A new report has found that LaGuardia and JFK are on polar opposite wavelengths in terms of reliability and pricing in the coming weeks. Simply put, one made the naughty list, and the other got top marks.

Deion Sanders jumped out of his seat when he was asked about the possibility of coaching the Cowboys.

Late Tuesday night, the movie director was named People Magazine's "Sexiest Man Alive" for 2024 during “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”

The R&B singer, who is friends with the fallen music mogul, told a new TMZ documentary that the high-profile names have been reaching out to him after alleged victims started coming forward claiming celebrities were part of Combs' so-called “Freak-Off” sex parties.

Walmart’s early deals run through November 17. Get discounts on tech, apparel, home goods, toys and wellness products.

The Biden administration says "some progress" by Israel to address civilian suffering in Gaza is enough to keep American weapons flowing.

"In my soul and in my gut, something is not right. Something is up," Chanel Maya Banks' cousin Danielle-Tori Singh said.