The Atlantic’s Favorite Images of the Year
5 min read
This year, The Atlantic’s art department created and commissioned thousands of images to support our journalism. Here are some of our favorites. From documentary photography to conceptual illustration, 3-D animation to handmade collage, the visual styles are as varied as the topics and ideas they illustrate. We hope they move you, make you think, and invite you to look (or look again) at stories we published this year.
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Max Guther
The One Place in Airports People Actually Want to Be
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Lou Benesch
Do Animals Have Fun?
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Diana Ejaita
Solidarity and Gaza
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Lynsey Addario
Seventy Miles in Hell
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Iris Legendre
A Dissident Is Built Different
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Joseph Rushmore
Fighting Talk From Republicans
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Liz Hart
Kamala Harris and the Threat of a Woman’s Laugh
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Álvaro Bernis
How to Tackle Truth Decay
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Nico Krijno
The Allure of Living a Radically Different Life
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Mark Pernice
The Weak Science Behind Psychedelics
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Karlotta Freier
Couples Therapy, but for Siblings
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Justin Chung
How Jimmy O. Yang Became a Main Character
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Ben Kothe
The Rise of Techno-Authoritarianism
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Nichole Sobecki
‘This Will Finish Us’
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Matt Eich
God’s Doctors
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Dadu Shin
How Do You Forgive the People Who Killed Your Family?
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Aldo Jarillo
Alan Hollinghurst’s Lost England
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Tyler Comrie
The New Propaganda War
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Joanne Imperio
Put Down the Vacuum
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Zack Wittman
Election Night Jubilation Outside Mar-a-Lago
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Petra Péterffy
The Real AI Threat Starts When the Polls Close
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Clay Rodery
The Lies Los Angeles Was Built Upon
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Lila Barth
How Daniel Radcliffe Outran Harry Potter
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Vivian Dehning
The Nearly Impossible Task of Describing Pain
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Jonno Rattman
What’s the Deal With Pennsylvania?
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Joanne Joo
The Female-Midlife-Crisis Novel
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Iris Wildros
Happiness
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Shira Inbar
Eight Books That Will Change Your Perspective
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Ben Jones
What Orwell Didn’t Anticipate
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Matt Huynh
If Trump Wins
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Liz Hart
Marilynne Robinson Makes the Book of Genesis New
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Damien Maloney
George Miller at the End of the World
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Paul Spella
What I Learned at the Police Academy
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Jason Andrew
The Accidental Speaker
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Akshita Chandra
Elon Musk Is Debasing American Society
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Ben Denzer
Shoplifters Gone Wild
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Pablo Delcan
The Business-School Scandal That Just Keeps Getting Bigger
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Jackie Carlise
ChatGPT Doesn’t Have to Ruin College
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Cassidy Araiza
Life in the Fever-Dream Business
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Ángel Hernández
This Is Not Your Typical Campus Novel
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Matteo Giuseppe Pani
The Great Honeybee Fallacy
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Bethany Mollenkof
‘That’s Something That You Won’t Recover From as a Doctor’
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Mark Harris
A Naked Desperation to Be Seen
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Vanessa Saba
Imagine a Drug That Feels Like Tylenol and Works Like OxyContin
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Jenna Garrett
This Influencer Says You Can’t Parent Too Gently
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Pat Thomas
Who Wants to Sit at a Communal Table?
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Stephen Ross Goldstein
Civil War Was Made in Anger
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Joanne Imperio
Why Are Baseball Players Always Eating?
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Chantel Walkes
Before Juneteenth
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Matteo Giuseppe Pani
Every Time You Post to Instagram, You’re Turning on a Light Bulb Forever
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Matteo Giuseppe Pani
Racehorses Have No Idea What’s Going On
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Ard Su
The GPT Era Is Already Ending
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Anthony Gerace
The Magic Mountain Saved My Life
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Tarini Sharma
There’s No Such Thing as a Meaningful Death
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Daniel Jack Lyons
The Loneliness of Jodie Foster
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Liana Finck
Please Don’t Make Me Download Another App
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Erik Carter
Comic Sans Got the Last Laugh
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Irene Suosalo
Chatbots Are Primed to Warp Reality
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Somnath Bhatt
A Novel That Disrupts a Fundamental Law of the Universe
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Debora Szpilman
A Ridiculous, Perfect Way to Make Friends
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James Zucco
What Orwell Really Feared
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Diana Ejaita
The Black-History Books Teachers Hope Won’t Be Banned
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Akshita Chandra
How Is It This Close?
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Jordan Gale
The Surreal Experience of Being a Republican at the DNC
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Miguel Porlan
Dear James: The Worst Insult I’ve Heard as an Opera Singer
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Aleia Murawski and Sam Copeland
Why Parents Struggle So Much in the World’s Richest Country
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Ricardo Rey
The Most Influential Climate-Disaster Thriller of All Time
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Flo Meissner
Liberals Have an Own-Goal Problem
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Sean Dong
The Mysterious, Meteoric Rise of Shein
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Joanne Joo
Best of 2024
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Daniel Stier
ElevenLabs Is Building an Army of Voice Clones
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Ricardo Tomás
The Most Controversial Nobel Prize in Recent Memory
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Akshita Chandra
The Words People Write on Their Skin
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Matteo Giuseppe Pani
America Stopped Cooking With Tallow for a Reason
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Gabriela Pesqueira
Stop Trying to Understand Kafka
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Matteo Giuseppe Pani
The YIMBYs Won Over the Democrats
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Fumi Nagasaka
The Cystic-Fibrosis Breakthrough That Changed Everything
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Matt Rota
He Was the World’s Longest-Held Death-Row Inmate. He Was Also Innocent.
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Jerome Sessini
Pressuring Israel Works
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Miki Lowe
Night Terrors
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Akshita Chandra
How the War on Terror Warped the American Left
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Joanne Imperio
How the Election-Denial Mindset Works
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Matteo Giuseppe Pani
What the Freshman Class Needs to Read
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Peter Fisher
Inside the Dangerous, Secretive World of Extreme Fishing
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Lucy Murray Willis
To Find Alien Intelligence, Start With the Mountains
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Jędrzej Nowicki
Ukraine’s Shock Will Last for Generations
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Ashley Gilbertson
What Will Become of American Civilization?
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Paul Spella
Hot AI Jesus Is Huge on Facebook
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Matteo Giuseppe Pani
Why Did Cars Get So Expensive?
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Margeaux Walter
The Most Miraculous—And Overlooked—Type of Milk
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Ben Kothe
The Tyranny of the Election Needle
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Alice Piaggio
Why Are Dogs So Obsessed With Lamb Chop?
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Lucas Burtin
A Big-Box-Store Allegory
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Allison Zaucha
Why Gossip Is Fatal to Good Writing
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Matteo Giuseppe Pani
They Ate at My Table, Then Ignored My People
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Raisa Álava
What the Band Eats
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Ben Kothe
The Apple Watch May Have a Calorie Problem
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Lucy Murray Willis
The Mysteries of Plant ‘Intelligence’
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Jenn Ackerman
‘Stop Counting Votes, or We’re Going to Murder Your Children’
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Timo Lenzen
Scripts Podcast
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OK McCausland
The Night They Hadn’t Prepared For
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Chantal Jahchan
Victims of Violence Don’t Owe the Public Anything
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Greg Kahn
The Woman Fighting Russia’s Carceral State
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Brendan George Ko
The Hawaiians who want their Nation Back
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Pablo Unzueta
Asthma Boulevard