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  • The Atlantic

    Life in Prison, or the Death Penalty?

    What Chekhov has to tell us about capital punishment
    by Graeme Wood Jul 31, 2019 4 minutes
    Source: Leah Millis / Reuters

    The Anton Chekhov short story “The Bet” opens with a morbid dinner conversation. The guests debate which is worse—to rot in prison forever, or to be killed swiftly? The attorney general, Bill Barr, weighed in last week on the side of Chekhov’s banker, a rich man who favors capital punishment. (Barr that the federal government will resume killing those convicted of capital offenses, a practice it had stopped nearly 20 years ago.) At the banker’s table, a younger man disagrees. They make a bet: If the young man spends 15 years in the rich man’s guest cottage, with food and reading material of his choice slipped under

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