Author: Michelle Korhonen
Hours after Hamas’s horrific attack on Israeli civilians on October 7, all of Iran’s parliamentarians rose from their seats to chant “Death to Israel!” and “Palestine is victorious; Israel will be destroyed!” Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei and other top Iranian officials, including the former head of the country’s military forces, expressed their support for Hamas, declaring that Iran “will stay with the Palestinian freedom fighters until the liberation of Palestine and Jerusalem.”These statements were not symbolic. Despite cleverly choreographed denials designed to avert direct military retaliation, Iran’s fingerprints were all over the October 7 operation. Hamas and Islamic Jihad in…
Listen to this articleProduced by ElevenLabs and NOA, News Over Audio, using AI narration.This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.If you’ve taken a college tour lately, either as an applicant or as the parent of an applicant, you may have noticed that at some point—usually as you’re on the death march from the aquatic center to the natural-sciences complex—the tour guide will spin smartly on her heel, do the college-tour-guide thing of performatively walking backwards, and let you in on something very important. “What’s different about College X,” she’ll say…
Conservationists can be quite conservative. It is right there in the name, after all. They like things the way they used to be, in a better past, real or imagined. Their thinking can be slow to change. One idea that has been very slowly changing in conservation science is the popular notion that “invasive species” are very bad for ecosystems—that they are apt to take over or eat native species into oblivion.For more than 20 years, conservation scientists have been debating whether this is a useful framework. Researchers in invasion biology—the subfield of conservation biology that studies the effects of…
Listen to this articleProduced by ElevenLabs and NOA, News Over Audio, using AI narration.The newest and much-hyped obesity drugs are, at their core, powerful appetite suppressants. When you eat fewer calories than you burn, the body starts scavenging itself, breaking down fat, of course, but also muscle. About a quarter to a third of the weight shed is lean body mass, and most of that is muscle.Muscle loss is not inherently bad. As people lose fat, they need less muscle to support the weight of their body. And the muscle that goes first tends to be low quality and streaked…
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 plus sign is everywhere in the world of branding. It’s cool (sort of), capacious, and wholly unoriginal. At least it’s difficult to mock.First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:The Power of the PlusThe other day, while reading an article in The Wall Street Journal about 23andMe’s glamorous rise and disappointing fall, I came across one line that I couldn’t stop thinking about:…
A series of attacks on Iranian-backed militias in Syria and Iraq appeared aimed at reestablishing deterrence without sparking a wider conflict.Roberto Schmidt / AFP / GettyFebruary 2, 2024, 5:30 PM ETThe Biden administration launched air strikes against Iranian interests in Syria and Iraq Friday, the latest volley in a growing proxy war across the Middle East.But in a policy paradox, the move appears to be an attempt to deescalate by means of powerful air strikes. The White House felt a need to respond to a drone attack this week in Jordan that killed three U.S. service members, and which the…
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.As soon as I moved from the sprawling suburbs of Tennessee to a place where the train, the bus, or my feet could take me pretty much anywhere, at pretty much any time, I became an instant urban convert. I still remember that first giddiness about living in a city, where excitement “pulses through daily life,” as Pamela Newton writes; this week, she’s assembled a list of books that capture what it’s like to experience places like New York,…
Not very long ago, the harshest thing Nikki Haley would say about Donald Trump was that “chaos follows him”—a sort of benign jab that creatively avoids causation and suggests mere correlation, like noting that scorched trees tend to appear after a forest fire.For most of the Republican-primary campaign to date, Haley adopted a carefully modulated approach toward the former president, and reserved most of her barbs for her other primary rivals. Her motto seemed to be “Speak softly about Trump and carry a sharp stick for Vivek Ramaswamy.” Recently, though, Haley has made a hard pivot.Read: What Nikki Haley (maybe)…
A liquid dose of methadone at the clinic in Rossville, Ga. The medication is only available at designated opioid treatment centers and that won’t change. But more clinicians will be able to prescribe it. Kevin D. Liles/AP hide caption toggle caption Kevin D. Liles/AP A liquid dose of methadone at the clinic in Rossville, Ga. The medication is only available at designated opioid treatment centers and that won’t change. But more clinicians will be able to prescribe it. Kevin D. Liles/AP As drug deaths surged above 112,000 a year in the U.S., driven by the spread of the synthetic opioid…
In 2018, Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, got what was potentially the most lucrative compensation package in history, an incentive-based deal that would earn him stock options worth nearly $56 billion if he hit the contract’s targets. He did exactly that, and ahead of schedule. Over the next few years, Tesla’s market capitalization rose by many multiples: Despite having fallen from its November 2021 peak, it is still worth 10 times more than its value in early 2018. That performance put Musk in line for the biggest payday ever—until Tuesday, when a Delaware judge presiding over a shareholder lawsuit threw out…