Author: Michelle Korhonen
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.Republicans need to recover their senses about the dire moral and strategic tests Ukraine and the West face in Europe.First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:A Test of Will and CommitmentWars test people and weapons on a battlefield, but eventual victory rests on much more than combat. Wars also stress-test political institutions, ideas, and the courage of entire societies. At this moment, the…
Drugmaker Biogen is pulling the plug on its controversial Alzheimer’s drug Aduhelm, following disappointing sales. It had been expected to be a blockbuster product.
There’s something fundamentally excessive about winter sports. Instead of curling up with a book or Netflix when the weather turns cold, winter athletes wrestle with inordinate layers and high-tech gear just to make it through the day without frostbite. They sprint across ice with knives strapped to their feet and hurtle down mountains at speeds generally reserved for interstate highways. They fall off ski lifts—or are trapped overnight in them. Show me an experienced winter recreationalist, and I’ll show you someone who has slipped, skidded, and crashed their way to a broken tailbone or torqued knee, and more likely than…
This 1966 microscope photo made available by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows a tissue sample with the presence of numerous, corkscrew-shaped, darkly-stained, Treponema pallidum spirochetes, the bacterium responsible for causing syphilis. Skip Van Orden/AP hide caption toggle caption Skip Van Orden/AP This 1966 microscope photo made available by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows a tissue sample with the presence of numerous, corkscrew-shaped, darkly-stained, Treponema pallidum spirochetes, the bacterium responsible for causing syphilis. Skip Van Orden/AP The number of syphilis cases in the U.S. are on the rise. According to a new report from the…
When Donald Trump was impeached, and then impeached again, some Republicans warned that repeated uses of the process would lead to it being degraded and meaningless. House Republicans are now determined to prove that was true.Early Wednesday morning, the House Homeland Security Committee narrowly voted, along party lines, to advance articles of impeachment against Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of homeland security. The full body is expected to consider the impeachment next week.The entire thing is a fantasy. The impeachment is based on differences in policy, rather than any misconduct. Even as they move it forward, House Republicans are avoiding actual…
The critic Harold Bloom once declared that former President Jimmy Carter, the author of a book of verse titled Always a Reckoning, was “literally the worst poet in the United States.” Bloom wisely died in 2019, thereby avoiding having to read the poetry of another politician, Representative Jamaal Bowman of New York, a member of the “Squad.” Bowman’s selected poetic works came to light yesterday. He apparently kept a blog in the 2010s, before his election to Congress in 2020. The Daily Beast recently discovered it and published a “composition” in free verse, which at times seems to endorse nutty…
This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.“People seem really happy, and they think San Francisco is beautiful,” London Breed proclaimed last November. Breed, the mayor of San Francisco, was praising what had been criticized by many as a last-minute cleanup before the 2023 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) conference. Ahead of President Joe Biden, Xi Jinping, and others gathering in the city, a swath of San Francisco had undergone a rapid revitalization. Homeless encampments? Cleared. Sidewalk feces? Scrubbed. Pedestrian plazas? Beautified.Governor Gavin Newsom of California, who himself previously served as San…
One of the stranger political crusades of the past few years has been the Republican war on so-called woke capital, which has led GOP politicians across the country to adopt a kind of anti-corporate, pro-regulatory rhetoric that one normally associates with the left wing of the Democratic Party. And among the GOP’s favorite targets in this war has been ESG investing—investment funds that take “environmental, social, and governance” considerations into account.For Republicans, ESG funds are a Trojan horse, designed to smuggle progressive attitudes toward climate change, and diversity and inclusion, into executive suites and corporate boardrooms, all under the guise…
In the summer of 2014, I joined a group of journalists in an organized visit to a Border Patrol warehouse in Nogales, Arizona. My daughter had just turned 5 the day before. As I walked out the door, I remember using my hands to smooth out the wrinkles on her school uniform as tenderly as if I were waking her up from sleep. I remember writing my daily note to her in our shared language—Eu te amo—with an extra dose of guilt; leaving her in her father’s care was always safe and convenient, but never easy.That goodbye would have hurt…
Is sexism the Republican Party’s big-tent strategy? Republican Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, appearing recently on the right-wing network Newsmax, dismissed the party’s losses among women voters by insisting, in language laced with stereotypes, that Black and Hispanic men would cross over to vote Republican in their place.“This is the blue-collar realignment of the Republican Party, and what I can tell you is for every Karen we lose, there’s a Julio and a Jamal ready to sign up for the MAGA movement,” Gaetz told Newsmax. “That bodes well for our ability to be more diverse and to be more durable…