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