Author: Michelle Korhonen
Advocates say the federal government no longer views long COVID with urgency. Private donors are funding research, bringing an unprecedented level of collaboration. (Story aired on ATC on 2/6/24.) Science Long COVID research goes private
“A Fierce Storm Parks Over L.A. Area,” read the lead story in the Los Angeles Times yesterday. I liked the use of that word, park, to make it sound like some average thing everyone does all the time in L.A. However, according to our mayor, Karen Bass, this is not your usual parking job. On Sunday, she held a news conference to let us know that the storm was “a serious weather event. This has the potential to be a historic storm—severe winds, thunderstorms, and even brief tornadoes.”I shrugged, I admit. Bad weather in L.A. is so rare that all…
More than seven inches of rain fell on Los Angeles over Sunday and Monday, making it the wettest two-day period in decades—about half of the region’s average yearly rainfall poured down in 48 hours. The second storm in a long-duration atmospheric river brought high winds, flooding, and mudslides that have destroyed houses and cut power to more than 1 million people across Southern California.
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.The Magnificent Seven—a nickname for the highest-flying tech stocks—have lately been buoying the S&P 500. Fun cowboy name aside, the stocks’ outsize impact on the market is raising eyebrows.First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:Flying Too HighThe Clash’s great song “The Magnificent Seven” follows a worker schlepping through his seven-hour workday, waiting to be set free for lunch and then for a drink…
This is The Trump Trials by George T. Conway III, a newsletter that chronicles the former president’s legal troubles. (Sign up here.)On July 24, 1974, when the Supreme Court issued its decision in United States v. Nixon, ordering President Richard Nixon to produce the Watergate tapes, the president turned to his chief of staff, Alexander Haig, to understand what had just happened. He later recounted the exchange in his memoirs:“Unanimous?” I guessed. “Unanimous. There’s no air in it at all,” he said. “None at all?” I asked. “It’s tight as a drum.”These words echoed through my mind today, nearly 50…
Advocates say the federal government is no longer viewing long COVID with the urgency it deserves. Private donors are now funding research bringing an unprecedented level of collaboration.
Science fiction, when revisited years later, sometimes doesn’t come across as all that fictional. Speculative novels have an impressive track record at prophesying what innovations are to come, and how they might upend the world: H. G. Wells wrote about an atomic bomb decades before World War II, and Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel, Fahrenheit 451, features devices we’d describe today as Bluetooth earbuds.Perhaps no writer has been more clairvoyant about our current technological age than Neal Stephenson. His novels coined the term metaverse, laid the conceptual groundwork for cryptocurrency, and imagined a geoengineered planet. And nearly three decades before the…
Godzilla Minus One is a rare beast: a viscerally arresting monster flick with legitimate emotional stakes.Toho StudiosFebruary 6, 2024, 3:11 PM ETNext month, Hollywood’s latest Godzilla movie will hit theaters. Titled Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, it will join Warner Bros.’ “MonsterVerse,” a glitzy American spin on a formula that Toho Pictures began in 1954 with the original Godzilla. The film features a fearsome monster doing battle with King Kong and other beasts, while an all-star cast looks on in horror. But although Hollywood’s approach to translating the monster has relied on pure silly spectacle—understandable for a series about…
The U.S. Census Bureau says it’s no longer moving ahead with proposed changes to how an annual survey produces estimates of how many people with disabilities are living in the country. smartboy10/Getty Images hide caption toggle caption smartboy10/Getty Images The U.S. Census Bureau says it’s no longer moving ahead with proposed changes to how an annual survey produces estimates of how many people with disabilities are living in the country. smartboy10/Getty Images The U.S. Census Bureau is no longer moving forward with a controversial proposal that could have shrunk a key estimated rate of disability in the United States by…
People across an angry and divided nation were given a magical, unifying moment on Sunday. We needed it.The singer-songwriter Tracy Chapman, 59, returned to the Grammy Awards 35 years after she won the Grammy for Best New Artist. Her working-class ballad “Fast Car” was nominated for both Record and Song of the Year. At the Grammys in 1989, Chapman performed her song solo, playing her acoustic guitar. This year, she was joined onstage by the country singer Luke Combs, 33, for a mesmerizing rendition of “Fast Car.” It was a phenomenal musical moment.But there’s a backstory that makes it even…