Author: Michelle Korhonen
A roundup of some Atlantic writing that guided our readers through the year in film, TV, and sold-out stadium toursMatt Chase / The AtlanticDecember 10, 2023, 8 AM 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.Culture has a way of defining a year for even the under-rock dwellers among us: A good movie, TV show, book, or album can shape our conversations, our experiences, and even the way we think. Today’s newsletter…
Diamond Sensors Illuminate the Secrets of the Living Brain Tissue – For decades, scientists have grappled with the limitations of current methods for studying brain activity. Invasive techniques, while offering valuable insights, often damage delicate tissues and disrupt natural function, hindering our ability to observe the intricate workings of the living brain. However, a new dawn is breaking, illuminated by the innovative gleam of diamond sensors.These microscopic marvels, crafted with deliberate imperfections in their crystalline structure, harbor unique properties that make them ideal tools for probing the intricate electrical symphony of the brain. Known as “color centers,” these engineered flaws…
Kids who are dealing with grief say it really helps them to be around other children who understand what they’re going through. Camp Erin provides that experience in cities around the country.
“No one enters Slough House by the front door,” the novelist Mick Herron writes in Dead Lions, the second book in his series about an “administrative oubliette” for useless spies exiled by MI5, Britain’s domestic-intelligence agency. “Instead, via a shabby alleyway, its inmates let themselves into a grubby yard with mildewed walls, and through a door that requires a sharp kick most mornings, when damp or cold or heat have warped it.” The rest of Slough House isn’t much better: a nest of abandoned keyboards and empty pizza boxes strewn around by agents who would rather be anywhere else. On…
Brilliant, witty, and ambitious, Henry Kissinger made diplomacy the stuff of unrivaled celebrity. He thrived on attention, and would have been thrilled by the flood of coverage that marked his death last week. Whether the obituaries and commentaries put his record in a positive or negative light, almost all of them treated Kissinger as the master of events.This may be how he wanted to be remembered, but it’s not what really happened. No matter how often Kissinger is described as the Cold War’s most powerful secretary of state and a peerless elder statesman, the truth is that his tenure was…
The Trump years had a radicalizing effect on the American right. But, let’s be honest, they also sent many on the left completely around the bend. Some liberals, particularly upper-middle-class white ones, cracked up because other people couldn’t see what was obvious to them: that Trump was a bad candidate and an even worse president.At first, liberals tried established tactics such as sit-ins and legal challenges; lawyers and activists rallied to protest the administration’s Muslim travel ban, and courts successfully blocked its early versions. Soon, however, the sheer volume of outrages overwhelmed Trump’s critics, and the self-styled resistance settled into…
If Donald Trump wins the next election, he will attempt to turn the men and women of the United States armed forces into praetorians loyal not to the Constitution, but only to him. This project will likely be among his administration’s highest priorities. It will not be easy: The overwhelming majority of America’s service people are professionals and patriots. I know this from teaching senior officers for 25 years at the Naval War College. As president, Trump came to understand it too, when he found that “his generals” were not, in fact, mere employees of a Trump property.Explore the January/February…
Watch the full episode of Washington Week With The Atlantic, December 8, 2023Courtesy of Washington Week With The AtlanticDecember 9, 2023, 4:40 PM ETEditor’s Note: Washington Week with The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings or watch full episodes here.It’s been a difficult week for President Joe Biden. His agenda on funding Israel, Ukraine, and border security is stalled in Congress, and his approval ratings are nearing a record low.With just 11 months until the general election, will debate over foreign policy determine whether…
The protagonist of the new film Poor Things is no ordinary heroine. As played by Emma Stone, Bella Baxter is a corpse reanimated by a man who replaced her brain with that of her unborn child; she’s therefore a blend of juvenile innocence and adult promiscuity, shamelessly charting her own course through life because she’s never been conditioned to meet societal constraints. She has no clue what womanhood is supposed to entail or how she’s expected to behave, yet she looks full-grown—a Frankenstein’s monster dressed in frilly outfits, without a single scar in sight.Like her, Poor Things is brazenly, gleefully…
For many of us—the vitamin-D-deprived, the sugar-addled, perhaps the suddenly jobless or those dreading family gatherings—’tis the season not so much to be jolly, but just to be “in a season.” The phrase has become a common way of talking yourself through a sudden upheaval, or of explaining that you’ll be doing things a little differently for a while.Diddy is in “a season of total independence” because he has “come too far to ask somebody that isn’t where I’m from about cultural and artistic things.” The expression can fend off societal pressures (“I’m in a season of really wanting to…