Author: Michelle Korhonen
To avoid today’s eye-popping verdict, he just needed to stop talking about E. Jean Carroll.Charly Triballeau / AFP / GettyJanuary 26, 2024, 6:24 PM ETA jury in New York today put a price on Donald Trump’s inability to keep his mouth shut, awarding the writer E. Jean Carroll $83.3 million in damages in a defamation lawsuit.It’s the second time a jury has ordered Trump to pay Carroll. She alleged in 2019 that Trump raped her in a department-store dressing room in the 1990s. When Trump denied it, Carroll sued him for defamation and battery. Last May, a jury found Trump…
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.For me, playing squash is not about achievement. That’s what makes it so much fun.First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic: The genocide double standard The escalating cost of Trump’s lies Caffeine’s dirty little secret No Hope of GloryAt a squash tournament in Grand Central Terminal last weekend, I watched the players in a women’s match move with elegant command of their bodies…
On January 2, at about 5:30 p.m., as I was reading at my desk in my Beirut apartment and contemplating a busy start to the year, I was jolted out of my focus by a loud blast. The first question that came to my mind was: Has it started?An explosion had ripped through an apartment block in the southern suburbs, just a 10-minute drive from where I live, killing Saleh Arouri, a senior leader of Hamas, along with at least six others. These suburbs are a Hezbollah bastion; Hamas leaders must have felt, wrongly, that they were safe there.City streets…
Waiting to obtain justice from an international tribunal is a bit like waiting for the messiah: You are not likely to find what you’re looking for anytime soon, but the pastime remains popular. Today the International Court of Justice announced its first ruling in a case brought by South Africa against Israel, alleging genocide in Gaza. South Africa had sought a preliminary ruling that would force Israel to stop fighting while a full case could be heard. The ICJ agreed, in effect, that Israel’s war in Gaza looks like genocide, if one squints and cocks one’s head. The ICJ declined…
Until last month, nobody outside of YouTube had a solid estimate for just how many videos are currently on the site. Eight hundred million? One billion? It turns out that the figure is more like 14 billion—more than one and a half videos for every person on the planet—and that’s counting strictly those that are publicly visible.I have that number not because YouTube maintains a public counter and not because the company issued a press release announcing it. I’m able to share it with you now only because I’m part of a small team of researchers at the University of…
Britain’s King Charles III attends a ceremony in Paris on Sept. 20, 2023. The monarch was admitted to a private London hospital on Friday to undergo a “corrective procedure” for an enlarged prostate, Buckingham Palace said. Yoan Valat/Pool via AP hide caption toggle caption Yoan Valat/Pool via AP Britain’s King Charles III attends a ceremony in Paris on Sept. 20, 2023. The monarch was admitted to a private London hospital on Friday to undergo a “corrective procedure” for an enlarged prostate, Buckingham Palace said. Yoan Valat/Pool via AP LONDON — King Charles III is doing well after undergoing a “corrective…
The International Court of Justice in The Hague today made an initial ruling, four weeks after an application from South Africa that accused Israel of committing genocide against Palestinians. The court ordered Israel to ensure that its military does not commit acts of genocide against Palestinians, to immediately improve humanitarian aid to Palestinians, and to prevent and punish genocidal incitement against Palestinians.However, the court stopped short of ordering Israel to end its military operations against Hamas, a nod to Israel’s right to respond in self-defense after the deadly Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7. South Africa had hoped the…
All of a sudden, the U.S. has become the biggest liquid-natural-gas exporter in the world. Supplied by a souped-up hydraulic-fracturing industry, and spurred by Russia’s war on Ukraine, which has hampered European gas access, LNG export terminals are being built on a monumental scale throughout the U.S. Gulf Coast, in places so beset by climate disasters that homes there are now deemed uninsurable.Shipping LNG abroad could be its own climate disaster, with questionable benefits: Recent research found that it may be worse for the environment than burning coal; other reports suggest that the build-out will quickly outpace future European demand…
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.Alex Kotlowitz’s There Are No Children Here, published in 1991, helped define an entire genre of writing. Its immersive story of two brothers growing up in a housing project in Chicago was also the story of an American underclass contending daily with violence, drug abuse, and poverty. Kotlowitz allowed his subjects’ lives to unfold as if they were in a realist novel. He was attuned to character and narrative and the smallest, most intimate detail. In the decades since,…
A few years ago, I stopped thinking of horror as a genre about fear. Fear is a linchpin of horror’s methods and imagery, of course. Every grotesque creature, anguished final girl, and geyser of blood and viscera is meant to incite individual and collective terrors, and maybe to help us process them in harmless and fun ways. But even in my favorite works of the genre, horror scenarios generally intrigue rather than scare me; I’m more likely to ponder than to scream. This is why I believe that the true bedrock of the genre is mood.No other genre is as…