Author: Michelle Korhonen
Roller skates and all, the R&B veteran’s performance underscored the value of showmanship.Kevin Mazur / GettyFebruary 11, 2024, 11:46 PM ETDesigning a Super Bowl halftime performance is, in many ways, an exercise in sacrificial concision: Artists must whittle decades of songs into a crowd-friendly, roughly 13-minute reprieve from athletics and multimillion-dollar commercials. It’s no wonder that many sets end up feeling like lackluster interruptions of the main events.But during tonight’s Super Bowl LVIII halftime show, the veteran R&B singer Usher breathed life into the annual musical diversion. Just a mile away from the Park MGM Las Vegas, where he spent…
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 or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Katherine J. Wu, a staff writer at The Atlantic who has reported on what we still don’t know about long COVID, the devastation of the bird flu, and the mysteries of fetching behavior in cats.Katherine recently started watching Chad, a show…
A special Sunday event: our eighth annual photo collection celebrating the magnificent birds of prey. These nocturnal hunters hail from Europe, Asia, North America, and South America, and are depicted here in photos from recent years. If you have some time today before the big game (or are skipping the event entirely), we invite you to take a look.
Thirty minutes into Godzilla Minus One, the 33rd film in Japan’s most famous movie series and the first to be nominated for an Oscar, the writer-director Takashi Yamazaki throws the equivalent of a historical-revisionist curveball. Whizzing by in less than 60 seconds, a black-and-white montage flashes at us with the urgent impatience of a newsreel cut for TikTok—classified documents and nautical charts, blipping radar screens and faceless military personnel set to a garbled, quasi-unintelligible voice-over in English and Japanese—all to deliver a jarring message that is nonetheless bracingly clear.A giant, irradiated monster is racing across the seas toward the Japanese…
“Divisive,” “corrupt,” and “messy.” That’s how Americans described the state of our politics when asked to do so by Pew last year. Other popular answers included “polarized” and “dysfunctional.”Those of us who feel that way may be tempted to tune out this election year. To participate in politics is to encounter many otherwise lovely people at their most upset, angry, and uncharitable. To withdraw from it is, for many, to avoid stress, annoyance, and maybe even negative psychological outcomes associated with daily political engagement.Opting out sounds sensible in that telling. But if affable, pragmatic, constructive sorts opt out of civic…
When can a person be declared dead? The question can be hard to answer. skaman306/Getty Images hide caption toggle caption skaman306/Getty Images When can a person be declared dead? The question can be hard to answer. skaman306/Getty Images Benjamin Franklin famously wrote: “In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” While that may still be true, there’s a controversy simmering today about one of the ways doctors declare people to be dead. The debate is focused on the Uniform Determination of Death Act, a law that was adopted by most states in the 1980s.…
Thinkin’ on the many times I near singed both of my feet drinkin’ milkshakes, any kitchen, binged on decks with Kelis sinkin’ in, that subtle itchin’, hinged on valves for release, tinkerin with thermostats, switchin’ to dad: conserve heatOh now, here we go, holdin’ on for the ride, trying to keep breakfast down, time to swallow my pride I’d prefer it if you didn’t press my pass to imbibe Coercion is, in sum, a very bad vibeHum all you truly meant, to change the air in the room Is it the summer of your discontent, a son light, on fumes…
SEOUL, South Korea — For Kim Ji-yeon, a 31-year-old Seoul resident, the pandemic was a chance to escape isolation. He had spent much of his 20s at home, shunning people. He lived with his family, but they rarely talked. His only social interactions happened online, with fellow gamers. He thought he needed to change but didn’t know where to start. Then he learned about food delivery on foot. Delivery platforms were expanding options to meet soaring demand during the coronavirus pandemic. “That’s how I started going outside again. It was all contact-free, so I could just drop the food at…
At a rally on Saturday, the former president announced he would tell the Russians “to do whatever the hell they want” to states delinquent in their bills.Win McNamee / GettyFebruary 10, 2024, 10:40 PM ETDonald Trump, the 45th president of the United States and the presumptive Republican nominee, said earlier today that he would side with Russia against NATO and encourage Russian President Vladimir Putin to brutalize our allies. Not so long ago, many Americans—and especially most Republicans—would have considered anyone supporting such a view to be little more than a deranged and hateful anti-American fanatic.Trump issued this unhinged threat…
Marilynne Robinson’s novels always leave me with a visceral impression of celestial light. Heavenly bulbs seem to switch on at climactic moments, showing a world as undimmed as it was at Creation. “I love the prairie! So often I have seen the dawn come and the light flood over the land and everything turn radiant at once,” writes John Ames, the narrator of Gilead, an elderly preacher approaching death as if returning to the birth of being. “And God saw the light, that it was good,” the Bible says, and Ames sees that it’s good, too: “that word ‘good’ so…