Author: Michelle Korhonen
Now that the frenzy of the holidays has spat you out into the harsh light of the new year, you might be tempted to look around your disheveled home and decide that it’s time to get your life together. Maybe your fridge is empty, or your pantry is full of the stuff you bought for Christmas baking projects you never quite got around to, or the laundry from your family’s trip to visit Grandma and Grandpa still isn’t done. The internet is full of suggestions on exactly how you might rectify this domestic chaos, but if you go looking for…
When Google Translate was released, in 2006, I was an eighth grader stumbling through introductory Spanish, and my teacher had little reason to worry about her students using it to cheat. It’s almost hard to remember now, but early machine-translation systems were laughably poor. They could give you the general thrust of, say, a Portuguese website, but they often failed at even basic tasks. In one case from 2010, a Google-translated summons reportedly instructed a defendant to avoid court instead of showing up there.Machine translation didn’t become the juggernaut we know until 2015, when Baidu released its large-scale neural machine-translation…
Free school lunches, a pillar of Brazil’s anti-poverty efforts, are now one of its main weapons against surging post-pandemic hunger. And that’s not the only benefit.(Image credit: Tuane Fernandes for NPR)
Time can feel like a subjective experience—different at different points in our lives. It’s also a real, measurable thing. The universe may be too big to fully comprehend, but what we do know could help inform the ways we approach our understanding of ourselves, our purpose, and our time.Theoretical physicist and black-hole expert Janna Levin explains how the science of time can inspire new thinking and fresh perspectives on a much larger scale.Listen and subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Google Podcasts | Pocket CastsThe following transcript has been edited for clarity:Janna Levin: “The one sense in…
One common stumbling block to sticking with a New Year’s resolution is setting an unrealistic goal. Westend61/Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Westend61/Getty Images One common stumbling block to sticking with a New Year’s resolution is setting an unrealistic goal. Westend61/Getty Images Aiming to eat better, move more or optimize rest? Most resolutions focus on better health. From Gen Z to baby boomers, the sweeping consensus across all generations is that good health is the absolute top priority in life, outranking money, education and career. But good health isn’t a gift. We have to work for it, and the older…
Hosting awards shows is a truly thankless job.Rich Polk/Golden Globes /GettyJanuary 8, 2024, 12:48 AM ETHere are some things I saw while tuning in to last night’s Golden Globes that made me laugh harder than anything the ceremony’s host, the comedian Jo Koy, said on stage: this video of Oppenheimer’s Cillian Murphy looking lost on the red carpet; the moment The Bear star Ayo Edebiri remembered to acknowledge her “real family also” after thanking her castmates; this tweet.Which is to say, well, Koy bombed. His opening monologue began poorly—“We all dreamt of this moment!” he declared enthusiastically to silent, apparent…
Donald Trump is well on his way to becoming history’s greatest litigation loser ever. But in the multifront war of Trump v. Seemingly Everyone Else, he has just prevailed in one small skirmish: The Battle of the Questions Presented.Late Friday afternoon, the Supreme Court of the United States agreed to review the Supreme Court of Colorado’s decision that held Trump ineligible to serve again as president under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, the provision barring insurrectionists from public office. That came as no surprise.The nation’s high court also ordered an unusually fast schedule, with oral argument to be held…
Fan support is a big reason the University of Washington Huskies and the University of Michigan Wolverines will play in college football’s championship game tomorrow night in Houston. That support isn’t just emotional; it’s also financial.For decades, college athletes received only scholarships as compensation, until legal changes forced the NCAA to let them profit from their own name, image, and likeness. The new NIL era allows individual athletes to accept endorsement deals. But at colleges and universities all around the country, something else has happened: Fan-supported “collectives” have sprouted up to help teams stay competitive by providing broad categories of…
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 reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Cullen Murphy, an editor at large at The Atlantic who has written about a night in the Sistine Chapel and the Chagossians’ struggle to return to their island homes.Cullen admires the willowy presence of Bill Nighy, the engineering genius of binder clips, a…
In late July 1980, a five-month-old Doberman pinscher puppy in Washington, D.C., started throwing up blood. It died the next day at an animal hospital, one of many pets that suffered that year from a new illness, parvovirus. “This is the worst disease I’ve ever seen in dogs,” a local veterinarian told The Washington Post, in an article describing the regional outbreak. It killed so fast that it left pet owners in disbelief, he said.The world was in the middle of a canine pandemic. The parvovirus, which was first recognized in 1978, can live for months outside the body, spreading…