Tag: coming years
The Women Who Saw 9/11 Coming
One day toward the end of the 20th century, John Rizzo, a career lawyer at the Central Intelligence Agency, found himself chatting with Jack Downing—a former Marine and stalwart Cold Warrior who had been brought out of retirement to oversee the clandestine service.
The two men were talking about an analyst named Michael Scheuer, the cerebral but polarizing leader of a team focused on a terrorist group called al-Qaeda. Skeptical that Scheuer was up to the job, Downing
Red States Are Rolling Back the Rights Revolution
The struggle over the sweeping red-state drive to roll back civil rights and liberties has primarily moved to the courts.
Since 2021, Republican-controlled states have passed a swarm of laws to restrict voting rights, increase penalties for public protest, impose new restrictions on transgender youth, ban books, and limit what teachers, college professors, and employers can say about race, gender, and sexual orientation. Some states are even exploring options to potentially prosecute people who help women travel out of
Open Your Mind to Unicorn Meat
The chef presents me with a nugget of raw meat, tinged yellowish gray, then takes it back and drops it in a pan. “Today, you’re going to be having our whole-muscle chicken filet,” Daniel Davila tells me, searing the morsel. He lets it rest, chars some tomatoes and scallions, and throws together a beurre-blanc sauce. “Kind of a classic,” Davila says.
Davila works for Upside Foods, a start-up disrupting the world of animal proteins from its base in Berkeley,
We Still Need Judy Blume
Like tens of thousands of young women before me, I wrote to Judy Blume because something strange was happening to my body.
I had just returned from visiting the author in Key West when I noticed a line of small, bright-red bites running up my right leg. I was certain it was bedbugs—and terrified that I’d given them to Blume, whose couch I had been sitting on a few days earlier.
The States Have Never Been United
Is it news that people are angry with Marjorie Taylor Greene?
This week, the Georgia Republican took advantage of Twitter’s newly liberalized character restrictions to do what she does best: suggest something unhinged, and sit back while her political opponents’ heads explode in white-hot rage.
“We need a national divorce,” she tweeted. “We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government. Everyone I talk to says this.” The next day, she followed up
What the Longest Study on Human Happiness Found Is the Key to a Good Life
Turn your mind for a moment to a friend or family member you cherish but don’t spend as much time with as you would like. This needn’t be your most significant relationship, just someone who makes you feel energized when you’re with them, and whom you’d like to see more regularly.
How often do you see that person? Every day? Once a month? Once a year? Do the math and project how many hours annually you spend with them.
No One Really Knows Why People Stutter
Okay, here comes our waiter. I stare at the silverware. He clicks his pen. I’m always the last to order. Sometimes my mom tries to help me by tossing out what she thinks I want.
“Cheeseburger, John?”
“… Yyyy-uhh … yyyueaah,” I force out.
If I’m lucky, there are no follow-up questions. I’m rarely lucky.
“And how would you like that cooked?” the waiter asks.
“… … … … Mmm-muh … mmm-edium.”
His face changes. I want it medium
The People Cheering for Humanity’s End
“Man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.”
With this declaration in The Order of Things (1966), the French philosopher Michel Foucault heralded a new way of thinking that would transform the humanities and social sciences. Foucault’s central idea was that the ways we understand ourselves as human beings aren’t timeless or natural, no matter how much we take them for granted. Rather, the modern concept of “man” was invented in the 18th century, with
Climate Anxiety Simmers in These 11 Books
Our stories about environmental catastrophe used to be set in distant futures: the desolate endlessness of The Road, or the hopeless, cutthroat scrounging in the Parable of the Sower. But that kind of far-off storytelling feels like it was made for a time when the repercussions of changing climate and the inequity of natural-resource use were, in fact, far off. Must have been nice.
Ecological disaster and long-term fallout are no longer rare or surprising, and they’re not
Why 2021 Was So Hot in the West
After this summer’s first searing heat wave baked the Pacific Northwest, the environmental scientist Robert Rohde posted an unusual observation on Twitter.
Looking through a report that analyzed temperature patterns for the region over the past 70 years, he noted, “the heatwave was statistically ‘impossible.’” Obviously, the heat wave wasn’t literally impossible, given that, after all, it happened. But the broiling temperature that the Northwest reached—108 degrees Fahrenheit at one point in Seattle, 121 degrees in British Columbia—was so