Tag: good fortune
James Fallows: Jimmy Carter Was a Lucky Man
Life is unfair, as a Democratic president once put it. That was John F. Kennedy, at a press conference early in his term.
Jimmy Carter did not go through as extreme a range of the blessings and cruelties of fate as did Kennedy and his family. But I think Carter’s long years in the public eye highlighted a theme of most lives, public and private: the tension between what we plan and what happens. Between the luck that people can
The Woman Who Made Online Dating Into a ‘Science’
The anthropologist and famed love expert Helen Fisher seemed ready to dash into oncoming traffic. We were on a sidewalk in Manhattan, opposite the American Museum of Natural History, and nowhere near a safe place to cross the street. She wanted me to stare down the yellow cabs and charge off the curb, though she knew I wouldn’t do it: I’d recently taken the personality questionnaire she wrote 17 years ago for a dating website, which produced the insight
10 Reader Views on the Varieties of Anti-racism
This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Last week I wrote, “A child born today will turn 18 in 2040. What attitudes and actions toward race and ethnicity would we adopt today if we had the best interests of that rising generation in mind?”
Bekke writes, “We … Read more
How I Found Sympathy for COVID Skeptics
The call is one we’ve been expecting, so when it comes we’re jolted but not surprised. It’s from my wife’s sister, who lives in Arizona. She and her husband are both proudly unvaccinated—predictably enough, since their chief sources of information are Fox News and social media. They’ve believed from the beginning that the coronavirus has been overblown by mainstream media, and that doctors are in on it because they somehow get paid more when they record the death of
Gamers Are Better Than Scientists at Catching Fraud
In the competitive pursuit of speedrunning, gamers vie to complete a given video game as quickly as humanly possible. It’s a sport for the nerdier among us, and it’s amazingly popular: Videos streaming and recording speedruns routinely rack up seven-figure view counts on Twitch and YouTube. So when one very prominent speedrunner—a U.S. YouTuber with more than 20 million subscribers who goes by the nom de game “Dream”—was accused in December 2020 of faking one of his world-record runs of