Author: Michelle Korhonen
State abortion initiatives have proved to be major voter mobilizers since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to an abortion in 2022. Roberto Machado Noa/Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Roberto Machado Noa/Getty Images State abortion initiatives have proved to be major voter mobilizers since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to an abortion in 2022. Roberto Machado Noa/Getty Images PHOENIX — Strategists on both sides of the abortion debate are gearing up to make Arizona the next center of the fight over the contentious issue. The efforts in the swing state could have big impacts…
The same bit of wisdom gets repeated over and over and over again: If you want to reduce the carbon emissions of your diet, eat less meat. If you really care about climate change, cut out animal products, period.It’s such simple guidance! And yet it has instigated so much hand-wringing and back-bending so that people can still eat what they like to eat—which, in most places with Western tastes, includes hefty quantities of animal products. Billions of dollars have been invested in start-ups engineering plant-based replications of the juice that drips from a hamburger, the creaminess of dairy, the crunch…
It’s really, really hard to kill a large, beloved social network. But Elon Musk has seemingly been giving it his absolute best shot: Over the past year, Twitter has gotten a new name (X), laid off much of its staff, struggled with outages, brought back banned accounts belonging to Alex Jones and Donald Trump, and lost billions in advertising revenue.Opportunistic competitors have launched their own Twitter clones, such as Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads. The hope is to capture fleeing users who want “microblogging”—places where people can shoot off little text posts about what they ate for lunch, their random thoughts…
We’re in the coldest season. We’re in the shopping season. We’re in the season of hygge. All the cues point to buying yourself a new cozy sweater. Don’t do it, until you hear what Atlantic staff writer Amanda Mull has to say about the cratering quality of knitwear. For years I’ve wondered why my sweaters pilled so quickly, or why they suffocated me, or smelled like tires. And then I read Mull’s recent story titled “Your Sweaters Are Garbage.” It turns out that international trade agreements, greedy entrepreneurs, and my own lack of willpower have conspired to erode my satisfaction.In…
Early last month, and with minimal fanfare, Netflix released all eight episodes of the first season of the animated action series Blue Eye Samurai. Following a sudden and almost entirely organic rise in popularity, the show was renewed for a second season. Even the rock-star video-game designer Hideo Kojima was posting about it. Blue Eye Samurai is more than worth the hype: It deserves to be counted among the best shows of the year. The series takes the trappings of a heroic action-adventure and turns them on their head, crafting a bloody, emotional drama that is riveting from the very…
This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.Serious relationships are full of practical concerns. I’ve known loving couples who were unable to tie the knot despite their affection for each other, because of disagreements about whether to have children or about religious conversion, or because of divergent professional aspirations. Sometimes things just don’t work out the way you might like them to, and it’s no one’s fault.There are also many loving couples who get married despite significant differences. The Washington Post editorial board is concerned that this isn’t happening enough. One…
The Schweitzer brothers see John Gonsalves everywhere now.In the small towns on the eastern tip of Hawaii’s Big Island, everyone knows everyone, and if you’re not from here, you might never fit in. Everywhere the brothers go, they see Gonsalves’s truck. He’s a small man with a scraggly beard, and runs a business building fences on properties up and down the coast. Rumor has it the business isn’t doing so well. Rumor also has it he funded that business with the reward money he took for sending the Schweitzer brothers to jail.Sometimes, at traffic lights or in parking lots, Gonsalves…
The ugly news broke during the last week of November: A Florida woman alleged that the chair of the state Republican Party had raped her at her home. The assault had occurred after he and his wife had planned, according to police, to meet her for a three-way sexual rendezvous, as they had previously.These were stunning claims given the power couple involved: The GOP chair, Christian Ziegler, who has denied the assault and said the encounter was consensual, is a prominent state political consultant. His Republican-activist wife, Bridget Ziegler, is a founder of Moms for Liberty, the conservative political organization…
Like many alumni of Harvard, I have been following the misadventures of President Claudine Gay—first her coolly calibrated reflections on arguments for the genocide of Jews, and now accusations about the intellectual integrity of her published work—with appalled fascination. It is the latter topic on which I can claim some expertise.I learned about plagiarism at Harvard by an accident of academic politics. The department of government, where I had received my Ph.D., had an opening for an assistant professor in the field of international affairs, and it had (in the department’s opinion) two equally attractive candidates. With Solomonic wisdom, they…
Features such as Spotify Wrapped confirm that you’re the main character of your internet.Matteo Giuseppe Pani; Source: GettyDecember 22, 2023, 5:43 PM ETThis 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.Why are “year in review” roundups so pleasing to users?First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:The Mundanities of a Private LifeEvery December, sites and services that spend the year hoovering up personal information spit out a summary of users’ activity. Call…