A divide is emerging among American companies when it comes to the Trump administration’s proposed border adjustment tax. For some, the tax—which would shift taxation from where goods are produced to where goods are sold—could bode poorly, since prices for consumers would go up, … | Continue reading
When Janet Napolitano was named president of the University of California over three years ago, her appointment provoked impassioned protests by students and others upset about her role as head of the Department of Homeland Security overseeing the deportation of more than 2.5 mil … | Continue reading
“No… it’s a magic potty,” my daughter used to lament, age three or so, before refusing to use a public restroom stall with an automatic-flush toilet. As a small person, she was accustomed to the infrared sensor detecting erratic motion at the top of her head and violently flushin … | Continue reading
The opening scene of Get Out is a familiar horror-movie image—a stranger walking an unfamiliar street, in the dead of night, nervously looking over their shoulder at every rustle of sound. The setting is the suburbs, a frequent favorite of the slasher genre, only the victim is no … | Continue reading
This is not how February is supposed to feel.From D.C. to Denver, from Charlotte to Chicago, towns and cities across the United States have posted strings of record-breaking summery days in what is normally the final month of winter. Wednesday was only the third time since 1880 t … | Continue reading
Civil conversation in the comment sections of news sites can be hard to come by these days. Whatever intelligent observations do lurk there are often drowned out by obscenities, ad-hominem attacks, and off-topic rants. Some sites, like the one you’re reading, hide the comments se … | Continue reading
In 2011, I was hired, straight out of college, to work at the White House and eventually the National Security Council. My job there was to promote and protect the best of what my country stands for. I am a hijab-wearing Muslim woman––I was the only hijabi in the West Wing––and t … | Continue reading
Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill, who is up for reelection in the red state of Missouri in 2018, recently told a St. Louis radio host she may face a primary challenge. “I may have a primary because there is, in our party now, some of the same kind of enthusiasm at the base tha … | Continue reading
Myths are funny. Unlike histories, they are symbolic narratives; they deal with spiritual rather than fact-based truths. They serve as foundations for beliefs, illustrating how things came to be and who was involved, but they’re often sketchy about when or why. There’s a brief sc … | Continue reading
While she was deployed in Somalia and Iraq as a colonel in the army, Elspeth Cameron Ritchie handled her period with limited privacy, often in isolated or flooded bathrooms for five tours, sometimes as the only woman in her unit. It was “difficult and sticky and kind of embarrass … | Continue reading
—The Trump administration issued new rules last night that reversed Obama-era regulations protecting transgender students in schools. You can read The Atlantic’s Emma Green’s coverage of it here.—Government forces say they seized Mosul’s airport from ISIS, their biggest gain sinc … | Continue reading
Last month, David Galernter, the pioneering Yale University computer scientist, met with Donald Trump to discuss the possibility of joining the White House staff. An article about the meeting in the Washington Post was headlined, “David Gelernter, fiercely anti-intellectual compu … | Continue reading
Tucker Carlson is selling me hard on the swamp. It is an unseasonably warm afternoon in late January, and we are seated at a corner table in Monocle, an upscale Capitol Hill eatery frequented by the Fox News star. (Carlson, who typically skips breakfast and spends dinnertime on t … | Continue reading
On Tuesday, an Irish politician gave an impassioned speech about rhododendrons. “The rhododendron situation in Killarney National Park has gotten so bad, minister,” Michael Healy-Rae expounded from the floor of the Irish parliament, “nothing short of calling in the army is going … | Continue reading
People have been exploring the Earth since ancient times—traversing deserts, climbing mountains, and trekking through forests. But there is one ecological realm that hasn’t yet been well explored: the oceans. To date, just 5 percent of Earth’s oceans have been seen by human eyes … | Continue reading
With so many other confrontations over immigration already raging, it was easy to overlook that new skirmish that Republican Senators Tom Cotton of Arkansas and David Perdue of Georgia started last week.Just weeks into office, President Trump is embroiled in legal and political s … | Continue reading
The Trump administration issued a new letter on Wednesday: The federal government will no longer stand behind Obama-era guidelines requiring schools to accommodate transgender students based on their gender identity. The new administration is withdrawing two letters, written in 2 … | Continue reading
The U.S. Supreme Court gave a Texas death-row inmate a second chance to avoid the death penalty on Wednesday, ruling in a 6-2 decision that Duane Buck's lawyer had unconstitutionally introduced testimony suggesting he was more likely to be commit future crimes because he is black … | Continue reading
What We’re FollowingBig News in Science: Seven Earth-sized planets have been discovered in a solar system relatively close to ours. What’s more, they’re in the star’s temperate zone, where it’s neither too hot nor too cold for containing liquid water—and maybe life. Back on Earth … | Continue reading
Today in 5 LinesThe Trump administration plans to revoke Obama-era guidance that required public schools to allow transgender students to use the bathroom of their choice. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly are scheduled to meet with Mexic … | Continue reading
Nicholson Baker, the great novelist, essayist, and observer of the world’s absurdities, produces much of his work when he’s out in that world: He likes to do his writing, Baker has told interviewers, in Panera restaurants, and in Starbucks shops, and in his favorite corner booth … | Continue reading
An Italian woman kisses a Virgin Mary statue after she methodically makes her bed and begins her morning. A Nigerian migrant recounts the prayer he said while traversing the Sahara, as others in a dark room chant along with him. A boy rows in the harbor under an overcast sky. The … | Continue reading
The election of Donald Trump, and the early days of his presidency, have driven many Americans to rummage through history in search of context and understanding. Trump himself has been compared to historical figures ranging from Ronald Reagan to Henry Ford, and from Andrew Jackso … | Continue reading
Now that Republicans control Congress and the White House, the stage is set in Washington for the GOP to enact sweeping legislative change after eight years of President Obama. But for Republicans, that new-found power comes with a caveat: Republican voters tell pollsters they tr … | Continue reading
Ben Rhodes, one of Barack Obama’s top advisers, once dismissed the American foreign-policy establishment—those ex-government officials and think-tank scholars and journalists in Washington, D.C. who advocate for a particular vision of assertive U.S. leadership in the world—as the … | Continue reading
Last week, a reader who signed his email “J.” gave us a detailed critique of what he calls the “zombie rules” of grammar—the gripes against such things as split infinitives and dangling prepositions that “fuel ... people’s misconceptions (and their nervous cluelessness) about Eng … | Continue reading
For months now, protesters have lived in tents and tepees during the frigid North Dakota winter, opposing the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. In that time, construction was halted by the Obama administration, then re-started by the Trump administration. Recently, stat … | Continue reading
Over two centuries, many a novel or film has investigated the various corners of oppression in a capitalist world, issuing powerful protest on behalf of slaves, farmers, and factory workers. In the 19th century, Western literature saw the publication of the great slave narratives … | Continue reading
In 1928, the British chemist Alexander Fleming returned from a vacation in the countryside to find that his lab was a frightful mess. There was, for example, a pile of Petri dishes in his sink, each of which contained a carpet of Staphylococcus aureus—a bacterium that can cause s … | Continue reading
Katy Perry’s new video for “Chained to the Rhythm” throws shade at fossil fuels and predatory home lending, nuclear weapons and nuclear families, lines at amusement parks and space helmets worn on Earth. But in some corners of the Internet, Perry’s recently been portrayed mostly … | Continue reading
Martin Scorsese’s next project, The Irishman, is as close as you can get to a box-office guarantee for the famed director. It’s a gangster film based on a best-selling book about a mob hitman who claimed to have a part in the legendary disappearance of the union boss Jimmy Hoffa. … | Continue reading
The majority of for-profit colleges are small, but the largest and most notable bear familiar names: the University of Phoenix and ITT Technical Institute, to name two. Historically, for-profit colleges have been local, family-owned operations controlled privately, oftentimes by … | Continue reading
In late 2015, in the Chilean desert, astronomers pointed a telescope at a faint, nearby star known as a red dwarf. Amid the star’s dim infrared glow, they spotted periodic dips, a telltale sign that something was passing in front of it, blocking its light every so often. Last sum … | Continue reading
The 2016 election might seem like a death knell for liberals who dream that the United States might eventually come to resemble one of Europe’s social democracies. The Republican Party now controls the White House, both houses of Congress, and the majority of governorships and st … | Continue reading
On Monday afternoon, roughly 100 protesters swathed in European Union flags and carrying signs bearing slogans like “I am not a bargaining chip,” “EU Worker Making Britain Great Again,” and “Brexit and Trump: Sound the Alarm,” gathered quietly on Parliament Square, opposite the B … | Continue reading
There are many competing interpretations for why Hillary Clinton lost last fall’s election, but most observers do agree that economics played a big role. Clinton simply didn’t articulate a vision compelling enough to compete with Donald Trump’s rousing, if dubious, message that b … | Continue reading
As an astrophysicist, I am always struck by the fact that even the wildest science-fiction stories tend to be distinctly human in character. No matter how exotic the locale or how unusual the scientific concepts, most science fiction ends up being about quintessentially human (or … | Continue reading
Amid the tumultuous end to his first month in office, President Donald Trump got a piece of long-awaited good news: After more than a decade of hold-ups in court, his application to trademark his name in China was finally approved.Because the announcement came shortly after Trump … | Continue reading
Like Sunday school and Friday night football games, Picture Days are rituals in the South. I went to a lot of different schools in different cities and towns, and had to memorize new customs, traditions, mascots, and slogans at each one, but the anchors that made the experience o … | Continue reading
Philip Carlson was a talent agent who signed and represented the likes of Philip Seymour Hoffman, Claire Danes, Idris Elba, Viola Davis, and Liev Schreiber. His roster of acting talent is long and his career spanned decades. In this short film by Christopher Ming Ryan, Carlson re … | Continue reading
It can be easy for certain kinds of films to feel overly voyeuristic. Any work that offers a peek into a world that’s completely unfamiliar to much of its audience risks keeping viewers at arm’s length, or turning its subjects into a mere curiosity. But the new film Kiki avoids t … | Continue reading
First, listen to the story with the happy ending: At 61, the executive was in excellent health. His blood pressure was a bit high, but everything else looked good, and he exercised regularly. Then he had a scare. He went for a brisk post-lunch walk on a cool winter day, and his c … | Continue reading
Laura Bennett, a 59-year-old pediatrician in Long Island, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1997, but her symptoms consisted mostly of numbness and tingling until about six years ago. That’s when she started to have trouble walking. She went from using a cane, to a walker, … | Continue reading
—Donald Tsang, who served as Hong Kong’s chief executive from 2005 to 2012, has been sentenced to 20 months in prison for misconduct.—Malaysian authorities say they want to question a North Korean diplomat in connection with the killing last week of Kim Jong Nam, the half brother … | Continue reading
Last week, the pharmaceutical company Merck pulled the plug on a closely watched Alzheimer’s drug trial. The drug verubecestat, an outside committee concluded, had “virtually no chance” of benefit for patients with the disease.The failure of one drug is of course disappointing, b … | Continue reading
Donald Trump was elected president with the help of 81 percent of white evangelical voters. Mike Pence, the champion of Indiana’s controversial 2015 religious-freedom law, is his deputy. Neil Gorsuch, a judge deeply sympathetic to religious litigants, will likely be appointed to … | Continue reading
He was barely a teenager when he was grabbed by a Sudanese guerrilla army and forced to become a child soldier. He was made to endure weeks of walking with so little food and water that some of his fellow captives died. Four more were killed one night in a wild-animal attack. The … | Continue reading
The #DeleteUber campaign got another boost this weekend after a former Uber engineer wrote in an essay that she had reported incidents of sexual harassment at the company, and that the company had protected the alleged harasser. Uber CEO Travis Kalanick pledged to immediately loo … | Continue reading