All posts tagged: Provocation

The Provocation of The Pitt

The Provocation of The Pitt

Published by Sam Flores

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Josh Tyrangiel, a staff writer who has written about how America isn’t ready for what AI will do to the job market and Anthony Weiner’s comeback attempt in New York. Josh has too many great cultural recommendations to count, but I’ll give it a go. Some highlights include: The Pitt, Bluey, a two-minute segment in No Country for Old Men, one book about bear maulings, two bands that “sound best when they’re furious,” and three upcoming movies to look out for. — Stephanie Bai, senior associate editor The television show I’m most enjoying right now: The Pitt. Smart, skilled, hardworking people gracefully put up with all manner of tragedy, stupidity, and institutional rot. I’m not …

Jordan Wolfson’s Newest Provocation Is a Creepy Prada Ad Campaign

Jordan Wolfson’s Newest Provocation Is a Creepy Prada Ad Campaign

Published by José Betancourt

Prada‘s current ad campaign for its Spring/Summer 2026 collection is an unsettling affair, and no surprise its maker is an artist known for disturbing video art and sculptures: Jordan Wolfson, whose past works have featured a gyrating cyborg, chained-up puppets, and other terrors. Wolfson’s art is famous—and, in some cases, notorious—for its depictions of violence, both of the physical and emotional variety. A VR work that he produced for the 2017 Whitney Biennial, for example, allowed visitors to witness a man being bludgeoned by a version of Wolfson himself wielding a baseball bat. Another VR work made last year for the Fondation Beyeler, a museum just outside Basel, Switzerland, body-swapped its participants, without much warning to viewers in advance that this would happen. Related Articles Mercifully, the Prada campaign includes no such instances of carnage, but it does maintain Wolfson’s ongoing fascination with bizarre digital avatars. Its still images feature a range of models—including the actors Carey Mulligan, Nicholas Hoult, and Damson Idris—standing beside larger-than-life birds that seem more than a little menacing. Wolfson first …

The Provocation That Helped Create America

The Provocation That Helped Create America

Published by José Betancourt

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here. Thomas Paine may have exaggerated when he said his pamphlet Common Sense was the most successful publication “since the invention of printing,” but only by a little. Published 250 years ago last week, Common Sense is perhaps the most consequential piece of political writing in American history. At a moment when hostilities with Britain had already commenced but many still entertained hopes of reconciliation, it made a forceful and seemingly irrefutable argument for independence. As the Atlantic writer Frederick Sheldon wrote in an 1859 portrait of Paine, many Americans “stood shivering on the banks of the Rubicon” at the beginning of 1776. Common Sense helped them cross it. Reading it now, Paine’s words are a kind of portal back to the Revolutionary moment. Although Common Sense is an 18th-century text with 18th-century language and preoccupations, a live current still runs through it. To revisit what Paine captured as a turning point in human history is …