Elizabeth Bruenig

Atlantic writers have long meditated on these two fates of all living things.

After submitting Kenneth Eugene Smith to a failed lethal-injection execution in 2022, the state is now preparing to try again, this time with a novel method.

What death-row inmates said as they prepared for their execution

Why I put my tree up before I carve the Thanksgiving turkey

Christmas, Thanksgiving, and the Fourth of July commemorate events. Halloween memorializes the occasion of death.

The president of the United Auto Workers is part of a tradition that was once far more visible in American public life: the Christian left.

A man’s sincere jailhouse conversion met the indifference of the capital-punishment system.

After a year of botched executions, the state is eager to prove that it can kill someone without incident.

James Barber killed Sarah Gregory’s grandmother in 2001. What connects them now?

But don’t execute them in secret, either.

How America became a violent society

No law and no regulation yet has been ambitious enough to solve the problem of rich and unaccountable men.

If the pandemic ought to have given us anything, it should have been a more universal empathy toward the condition of illness.

Pleasure is vast, cheap, kaleidoscopic. Lent is the time to forgo it—and seek peace.

He saw the magnitude of the damage the Catholic Church had inflicted, and his retreat came nearest to acknowledging it.

After a series of botched executions, the state is choosing a path of technical, rather than moral, innovation.

Texas must have taught me what beauty is, because I still search for it everywhere I look.

Why does Alabama keep botching executions?

The death-sentence trial of the Parkland shooter was an exercise in finding explanations where none existed.

A Texas prisoner fought for the right to have his pastor pray over him and lay hands on him during his execution. Now his pastor reflects.

What happened when Alabama tried and failed to kill Alan Eugene Miller

What did the state of Alabama do to Joe Nathan James in the three hours before his execution?

A Florida jury will have to render a judgment only heaven can make.

Summer in Texas is a tense, precarious time, and it always seems to build inevitably toward a catharsis that doesn’t arrive.

It’s time the pro-life movement chose life.

Living like this is unbearable.

A visual record of the artifacts that accumulate after school shootings.

He was once the weed kingpin of the Pittsburgh metro area. Now he’s serving five years in federal prison.

Where was their courage? Why were there no heroes?

That’s how long police say they left children locked in a classroom with a gunman as they repeatedly called 911, begging for help.

An America vacillating between violent struggle and idle nihilism is shuddering toward its end.

Parenthood itself seems poised to become a victim of America’s toxic politics.

Neither plan went off precisely as expected.

A set of lawsuits is pushing the country to find better ways to kill those on death row, with potentially perverse results.

Being anti-war isn’t naive, but a serious, considered, and humane position.

How a Mississippi inmate became an advocate for his own execution

In liberalism, as in life, children throw things into chaos and uproar.

Lauren Boebert is using her family Christmas portrait to provoke liberal hysteria. But the photo reveals something much more significant about how America has changed.

In the pursuit of killing its own citizens, this country has created a bestial regime.

Medicine has never been about certainty, but odds.