What Madonna Knows
The artist is always one step ahead—and has a unique power to scandalize each generation anew.
Sophie Gilbert
Sophie Gilbert is a staff writer at The Atlantic. She won the 2024 National Magazine Award for Reviews and Criticism and was a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Criticism. She is the author of On Womanhood: Bodies, Literature, Choice, and the forthcoming Girl on Girl, an analysis of 21st-century popular culture's influence on women. Before joining The Atlantic in 2014, she was the arts editor at Washingtonian.
Featured
Latest
The 13 Best TV Shows of 2024
The year’s most essential series
Illustration by Joanne Joo The Movie That Mattered Most in 2024
Blink Twice anticipated the culture shift that defined the year.
MGM Studios Misogyny Comes Roaring Back
Donald Trump will return to Washington flanked by an entourage intent on imposing its archaic vision of gender politics on the nation.
Illustration by Ben Hickey Cher Has a History Lesson for Us All
The singer has long stood for a brassy, strutting kind of survival. Her new account of her early life explains how that came to be.
Christopher Anderson / Magnum The Silliest, Sexiest Show of the Year
Rivals brims with absurd excess, but is deeply serious about pleasure.
Robert Viglasky / Disney / Hulu MomTok Is the Apotheosis of 21st-Century Womanhood
On reality TV, motherhood is turning into a jumble of feminist ideals and branded domesticity.
Illustration by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic. Source: Pamela Littky / Disney / Hulu. Melania Really Doesn’t Care
Her new memoir is a master class in how selective attention and empathy can insulate someone from the pains that trouble the rest of us.
Illustration by Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic. Source: Jonathan Ernst / Reuters. Not All Men, but Any Man
The mass-rape trial in France exposes a case that’s both wholly unprecedented and dully familiar.
Marc Asensio / NurPhoto / Getty The Most Vital Marvel Series Yet
Disney+’s Agatha All Along is great fun—and fits almost too neatly with 2024’s key plotlines.
Chuck Zlotnick / Marvel Nicole Kidman’s Perpetual Trick
The actor has excelled at embracing female artifice—and then demolishing it from the inside out.
Illustration by Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic. Sources: Seacia Pavao / Netflix; Paramount / Everett Collection; Mike Hill / Getty.
