Tag: given time
The Uncanniest Influencers on the Internet
In 1973, the writer Arthur C. Clarke formulated an adage meant to capture the relationships humans were building with their machines: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
The line became known as Clarke’s Third Law, and it is regularly invoked today as a reminder of technology’s giddy possibilities. Its true prescience, though, lay in its ambivalence. Technology, in Clarke’s time, encompassed cars and dishwashers and bombs that could take millions of lives in an instant. Technology could be
Blinken on Zelensky: ‘Right Man, Right Place, Right Time’
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One year ago, Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, escalating aggression that began in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has been at the center of the U.S.’s involvement in the war, relaying intelligence to President Volodymyr Zelensky and working with allies to provide aid to the Ukrainian military. Today, Blinken spoke with The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey
The Maryland Politician Who Is Arguing for a Four-Day Workweek
The Maryland State Capitol building is older than America. It is the only state capitol to have also served as the nation’s capital; in the country’s earliest days, Congress met in its chambers. To work in Annapolis is to operate in the shadow of history. So maybe that explains why, 246 years into the American project, one state lawmaker sees his four-day-workweek bill as carrying on in the tradition of the ideals of the Declaration of Independence. That, or it’s
Shadowbanning Is Big Tech’s Big Problem
Sometimes, it feels like everyone on the internet thinks they’ve been shadowbanned. Republican politicians have been accusing Twitter of shadowbanning—that is, quietly suppressing their activity on the site—since at least 2018, when for a brief period, the service stopped autofilling the usernames of Representatives Jim Jordan, Mark Meadows, and Matt Gaetz, as well as other prominent Republicans, in its search bar. Black Lives Matter activists have been accusing TikTok of shadowbanning since 2020, when, at the height of the George
The Most Haunting Truth of Parenthood
Do we ever really understand our parents? Certainly not when we’re children. If we’re lucky, we begin to understand them later. We might one day realize, for example, that they carried burdens we couldn’t see. Sometimes I wonder if I might have learned something important about what was to come in adulthood had I been paying closer attention when I was little, but no, I couldn’t have related then. It is only in recent years, when the most maddening, haunting
Why Europe Can’t Shut Off Russian Gas
No fossil fuel is more important to understanding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine than natural gas. Russia sells gas to Europe via pipelines; Europe relies on it to heat its buildings, power its industry, and generate electricity. This interdependent relationship has gone on for decades, and although it may soon come to a close, it has limited the West from imposing harsher sanctions on Russia than it might have otherwise: The sanctions were “specifically designed to allow energy payments to continue,”
You Can Get COVID and the Flu at the Same Time
In late February 2020, only a couple of weeks after the pandemic coronavirus disease had even received a formal name, a man with a terrible cough and fever showed up at one of the ProHealth Urgent Care centers in Queens, New York. At that point, no COVID-19 cases had yet been confirmed in New York City, but numbers were on the rise in spots across the country, and the man had recently been at a conference.
An ER-trained physician donned