Author: Michelle Korhonen
In the summer of 1940, when Great Britain was fighting Nazi Germany alone, Winston Churchill asked to borrow a few dozen aging American destroyers to defend the English coast from imminent invasion. Churchill wrote to Franklin D. Roosevelt: “Mr. President, with great respect, I must tell you that in the long history of the world, this is a thing to do now.”Today Ukraine is fighting Russia alone. American aid—never timely or sufficient, but enough to help keep Ukraine alive and Russian invaders at bay—is about to run out. U.S. shipments will stop in the next few weeks. Without American artillery,…
Sophia Moreno (Apsáalooke/Laguna Pueblo/Ojibwe-Cree) plants crops in the Indigenous gardens outside American Indian Hall on the Montana State University campus in Bozeman, Montana. Adrian Sanchez-Gonzalez/Montana State University hide caption toggle caption Adrian Sanchez-Gonzalez/Montana State University Sophia Moreno (Apsáalooke/Laguna Pueblo/Ojibwe-Cree) plants crops in the Indigenous gardens outside American Indian Hall on the Montana State University campus in Bozeman, Montana. Adrian Sanchez-Gonzalez/Montana State University BOZEMAN, Mont. — Behind American Indian Hall on the Montana State University campus, ancient life is growing. Six-foot-tall corn plants tower over large green squash and black-and-yellow sunflowers. Around the perimeter, stalks of sweetgrass grow. The seeds for…
It’s about how you dress but also how you think.Jose Luis Pelaez / GettyDecember 9, 2023, 8 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 January 2021, a time when many of us were returning from halfhearted outdoor hangouts with freezing fingers, my colleague Marina Koren revealed herself as a lover of winter. Well, within reason: “I do not ski. I believe a ‘polar plunge’ is appropriate only when you’re…
The FDA approved the first gene-editing treatment for a human illness — the first genetic therapy for the brutal blood disorder sickle cell disease.
This article was originally published in Knowable Magazine.Thirty years ago, a botanist in Germany had a simple wish: to see the inner workings of woody plants without dissecting them. By bleaching away the pigments in plant cells, Siegfried Fink managed to create transparent wood, and he published his technique in a niche wood-technology journal. The 1992 paper remained the last word on see-through wood for more than a decade, until a researcher named Lars Berglund stumbled across it.Berglund was inspired by Fink’s discovery, but not for botanical reasons. The materials scientist, who works at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, in…
Dozens of makeshift centers were built and now stand empty. Now authorities want to revive a stagnating economy and attract young workers to cities by turning the structures into affordable housing.(Image credit: Aowen Cao/NPR)
This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.In the last spring of the Obama administration, Michelle Obama was delivering her final commencement address as first lady, at City College of New York. Then, as now, the specter of Donald Trump had become the inescapable backdrop to everything. He’d spent the past year smashing every precept of restraint, every dignified tradition of the supposedly kindhearted nation he was seeking to lead. Obama couldn’t help but lob some barely cloaked denunciations of Trump’s wrecking-ball presidential campaign—the one that would soon be ratified with…
There were times, during the first two years of the Biden presidency, when I came close to forgetting about it all: the taunts and the provocations; the incitements and the resentments; the disorchestrated reasoning; the verbal incontinence; the press conferences fueled by megalomania, vengeance, and a soupçon of hydroxychloroquine. I forgot, almost, that we’d had a man in the White House who governed by tweet. I forgot that the news cycle had shrunk down to microseconds. I forgot, even, that we’d had a president with a personality so disordered and a mind so dysregulated (this being a central irony, that…
Fudgy and delicious, these are the best gluten-free brownies! They’re actually the best brownies ever, gluten-free or not! I’m so excited to share the recipe with you and hope you love them as much as I do! This is an older post that got a little photo refresh.. and we got to eat a ton of brownies. The Best Gluten-Free Brownies Gluten-Free Brownie Recipe Print Best Gluten-Free Brownies 2/3 cup brown rice flour mix (see below) OR 1/6 tapioca flour + 1/6 potato starch + 1/3 brown rice flour 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/2 teaspoon baking powder 1/2 teaspoon xanthan gum…
The presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT testified in front of Congress this week. Their performance was a disaster.The three leaders of these prestigious institutions seemed coached, presumably by a team of lawyers and PR consultants, to give hedging answers, and they doggedly stuck to their talking points. As a result, their responses were robotic, betrayed a lack of empathy, and never made a serious attempt to defend the larger mission that their universities supposedly serve. Throughout the hearing, the three presidents perfectly encapsulated the broader malaise of America’s most elite universities, which excel at avoiding lawsuits…