Author: Michelle Korhonen
As the 2024 Republican presidential field began to stir three years ago, Fox News tried to make Ron DeSantis happen. From the week of the 2020 election through February 2021, the network invited DeSantis to appear 113 times, or almost once a day, according to the Tampa Bay Times. In an email uncovered by that newspaper, one Fox producer gushed to a member of DeSantis’s staff, “We see him as the future of the party.”Maybe, but the future isn’t now. After that early burst of attention, the DeSantis bandwagon never got out of the garage. DeSantis’s national support crested at…
NPR’s Ayesha Rascoe talks with urologist Ben Davies about the prevalence of prostate cancer, new treatments, and patients’ reluctance to discuss the disease and its aftermath.
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.Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Eleanor Barkhorn, a senior editor at The Atlantic who has edited stories about the value of sleepovers and why so many Americans have stopped going to church.Eleanor loves “earnest songs by women” (think: Joni Mitchell and Tracy Chapman). She also loves…
Pedro Cardoso/Getty Images Pedro Cardoso/Getty Images In the U.S., nearly 100,000 babies were born through assisted reproductive technology, such as in vitro fertilization, in 2021, and as people postpone parenthood to older ages, such technologies are growing in demand. IVF has the potential to realize the dreams of many would-be parents, but thousands of women of reproductive age in the U.S. may face barriers to accessing treatment — sometimes, even before setting foot in a fertility clinic. These women all have something in common: They have a body mass index that categorizes them as obese or severely obese. BMI is…
Alec Soth / MagnumJanuary 14, 2024, 6 AM ETI practice calling up the past for reassurance.That events outlast themselves. That a dayof no great personal gain or loss inscribes itselfsomewhere. The way I keep in my mindtwo snakes entwined and fallingto my feet as I walked under an oak treeone July. The way I ran down the hillas if the snakes cared enough to chase me.The way that moment stalks me, its tongueflickering even now as I pass under certainboughs and fear or feel a thudof what’s not there, which twistsaround what is: the air, the leaves,the roots that weave…
Canada’s Vasek Pospisil is a co-founder of the Professional Tennis Players Association, a players advocacy group. He says problems with tennis balls used on tour are linked to wrist, elbow and shoulder injuries among players. Pascal Guyot/AFP via Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Pascal Guyot/AFP via Getty Images Canada’s Vasek Pospisil is a co-founder of the Professional Tennis Players Association, a players advocacy group. He says problems with tennis balls used on tour are linked to wrist, elbow and shoulder injuries among players. Pascal Guyot/AFP via Getty Images You can’t play tennis without tennis balls. Yet an increasingly vocal…
This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.Over the past few years, conservatives have rapidly lost trust in higher education. From 2015 to 2023, Gallup found that the share of Republicans expressing “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education fell by 37 points, from 56 to 19 percent. As conservatives have come to look negatively at these institutions, Republicans have engaged in political attacks on the sector, most recently in the fact-finding and pressure campaign that caused Claudine Gay to resign as president of Harvard.This decline…
The Texas National Guard has taken hostage a 2.5-mile stretch of the U.S. border with Mexico. According to a shocking Supreme Court filing by the Justice Department early yesterday morning, armed soldiers and vehicles deployed by the state have repeatedly denied U.S. Border Patrol agents access to the Shelby Park area in Eagle Pass, Texas. The state did not immediately deny this; a spokesperson for Governor Greg Abbott said the state will keep “utilizing every tool and strategy to respond to President Biden’s ongoing border crisis.”It’s an ugly stunt, part of a long series of provocations by Abbott, who is…
The virtues and frustrations of being boredHulton Deutsch / GettyJanuary 13, 2024, 9:53 AM ETThis is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.In 1933, the writer James Norman Hall had a bone to pick with the concise nature of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary. It defined boredom as “being bored; ennui.” “To define [boredom] merely as ‘being bored,’ appallingly true though this may be, is only to aggravate the misery of the…
A street painting in Mumbai, India, reinforces the importance of masks amid a surge of COVID. The photo was taken on January 11. Indranil Aditya via Reuters Connect hide caption toggle caption Indranil Aditya via Reuters Connect A street painting in Mumbai, India, reinforces the importance of masks amid a surge of COVID. The photo was taken on January 11. Indranil Aditya via Reuters Connect We regularly answer frequently asked questions about life in the era of COVID-19. If you have a question you’d like us to consider for a future post, email us at goatsandsoda@npr.org with the subject line:…