Author: Michelle Korhonen
NPR’s Ayesha Rascoe speaks with Kimberly Van Orden of the University of Rochester Medical Center about persistently high suicide rates among elderly men.
Plus: A deliciously deceptive movie about liarsIllustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani. Source: Getty.December 3, 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.The holiday season is upon us—but before you power through your to-do list, decompress with these seven stories, selected by our editors.A Sunday Reading ListSome of the below stories have narrated versions, if you prefer to listen to them; just click the link and scroll to the audio…
In La Paz, a low-income neighborhood on the outskirts of Santa Marta, Colombia, water service from the local utility can be erratic or nonexistent. Pictured: Neighborhood kids stand next to a rain barrel positioned under a corrugated roof. Ben de la Cruz/NPR hide caption toggle caption Ben de la Cruz/NPR In La Paz, a low-income neighborhood on the outskirts of Santa Marta, Colombia, water service from the local utility can be erratic or nonexistent. Pictured: Neighborhood kids stand next to a rain barrel positioned under a corrugated roof. Ben de la Cruz/NPR SANTA MARTA, Colombia — For as long as…
Three years ago, President E. Gordon Gee of West Virginia University had a terrific idea—a career capper. As he neared retirement, he would embrace the “academic transformation” of public higher education and streamline his university.For too long, as Gee told anyone who would listen, public universities had tried to be everything to everyone and keep up with elite private colleges. When the coronavirus pandemic shut down American universities in 2020, Gee embraced its disruptions as a gift—a “black swan moment,” as he put it, that forced educational leaders to ask questions “rather than pretend to have answers.” And that December,…
Major flooding has hit Kenya in November. The disasters are likely intensified by climate change, and are causing ongoing health issues across the region. World leaders are discussing the health impacts of climate change at the COP28 climate meeting in Dubai this month. AFP via Getty Images/LUIS TATO hide caption toggle caption AFP via Getty Images/LUIS TATO Major flooding has hit Kenya in November. The disasters are likely intensified by climate change, and are causing ongoing health issues across the region. World leaders are discussing the health impacts of climate change at the COP28 climate meeting in Dubai this month.…
George Santos, the former Republican representative from New York, seemed like he stepped out of an episode of the HBO political-comedy show Veep. His reality-TV antics and ostentatious fabrications about his life, and the criminal allegations swirling around him, made him a surreal character in an already surreal Congress.Today he became only the sixth member of the House to be expelled, following a House Ethics Committee investigation and his indictment on federal charges of fraud and conspiracy for allegedly stealing donors’ identities and using their credit-card numbers to “ring up tens of thousands of dollars in unauthorized charges,” as the…
Ever since a terror attack by Hamas triggered a war in Israel and Gaza in October, many commentators have presumed that the United States can in some way manage the course of the crisis—either by supporting Israel emphatically or by demanding greater restraint from that country’s leaders. Successive American administrations, including Joe Biden’s, have encouraged this belief in American control of events in the Middle East and around the world. Just days before the Hamas attack, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan boasted in an article in a Foreign Affairs article that the Biden administration had “de-escalated crises in Gaza.” The…
The week I started working at Sports Illustrated, in April 1984, the issue on newsstands featured a glowering Georgetown power forward named Michael Graham dunking on two flat-footed Houston Cougars in the NCAA championship, won by the Hoyas. Filing the gamer that night was Curry Kirkpatrick, a gonzo genius whose pyrotechnical run-on sentences left one winded and smiling. But the story that stuck with me from that issue was shorter and angrier. Frank Deford needed only 587 words to eviscerate Robert Irsay, the then-owner of the Baltimore Colts, who’d hired 15 Mayflower trucks the previous week and moved the team…
Confession: The Beyoncé concert I attended this past summer was pretty good but not, as Oprah described it, “the most extraordinary thing I’ve ever seen.” Naturally, the expectations are high for any show by the most spectacular artist of my lifetime. Beyoncé’s previous solo arena tour, in 2016, made for a peak concertgoing experience: Even from the nosebleeds, she seemed huge, and impossibly important. I felt like I was watching the Statue of Liberty come alive, declare herself empress of Earth, and twerk.Sitting in equally remote seats to see her in New Jersey this past July, I squinted to make…
First came the concrete markers engraved in multiple languages. Naval aviators from the Philippines would spot them during surveillance flights in the mid-1990s and dispatch forces to remove them. Then came the huts—small, wooden structures teetering on stilts on uninhabited islands, fit maybe for fishermen to take shelter during storms. They looked innocuous enough, one of the pilots, Alberto Carlos, recalls thinking.Only later did Carlos understand that he was witnessing the initial phases of China’s conquest of the South China Sea. On rocky, barren islands, Beijing installed intelligence-gathering equipment, long-range surface-to-air missile systems, and stealth fighter jets. Over the past…