Tag: lot of work
Why Don’t Biden’s Political Wins Register With Voters?
Objectively speaking, President Joe Biden has presided over some significant, even historic, accomplishments: a massive vaccine rollout, the biggest infrastructure investment since the Eisenhower administration, the lowest unemployment rate in over 50 years. Yet, when voters are asked about these things, their responses are perplexing. Poll after poll show that voters have never heard of these programs, are annoyed the media isn’t reporting about them more, or they just don’t care. Why don’t Biden’s political and legislative victories penetrate the
Could Ozempic Derail the Body-Positivity Movement?
The medical story about Ozempic is straightforward and satisfying. A drug designed to treat diabetes had a game-changing application for weight loss. But it has plenty of caveats: You have to take it indefinitely. It doesn’t work for everyone. It has side effects. It’s at the moment unbelievably expensive and rarely covered by insurance. But it works. People can lose a significant percentage of their body weight and keep it off—safely. In the history of spotty and dubious weight-loss drugs,
A Hamlet for Our Age of Racial Reckoning
In 2018, Oskar Eustis, who runs the Public Theater, where I advise Shakespeare productions, introduced me to the theater director Kenny Leon. He was hoping to persuade Kenny to direct something for Shakespeare in the Park, and asked me to talk with him. I’m a professor with no acting or directing experience, but I am good at cutting four-hour plays down to size, can explain to actors the difference between thee and you, and have written extensively about Shakespeare’s
AI Voices Are Hilarious, Haunting, and Possibly Politically Dangerous
Is the clip stupid or terrifying? I can’t decide. To be honest, it’s a bit of both.
“I just think I would love to get Ratatouille’d,” a familiar-sounding voice begins.
“Ratatouille’d?” asks another recognizable voice.
“Like, have a little guy up there,” the first voice replies. “You know, making me cook delicious meals.”
It sounds like Joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro, two of podcasting’s biggest, most recognizable voices, bantering over the potential real-world execution of the Pixar movie’s premise
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
Liz Cheney, the Republican From the State of Reality
LARAMIE, Wyo.—Liz Cheney will probably lose her job on Tuesday, in large part due to her crusade against Donald Trump. Trump will surely taunt her as a big RINO loser, but Cheney has no plans to end her fight against him. She is already looking past her anticipated defeat here and into a future that could include—I suspect—a primary challenge to the former president in 2024.
“It’s clear that our party is really sick right now,” Cheney told me when
What Did Medieval Peasants Know?
In the foreword to her book A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, the historian Barbara W. Tuchman offered a warning to people with simplistic ideas about what life was like in the medieval world, and what that might say about humanity as a whole: You think you know, but you have no idea.
The period, which spans roughly 500 to 1500, presents some problems for people trying to craft uncomplicated stories. “No age is tidy or made of whole
Barack Obama on Disinformation and Ukraine
When they last sat down for an interview, in November 2020, Barack Obama told Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg that disinformation is “the single biggest threat to our democracy.” The threat was not a new one, he said, but it was accelerating. It has continued to accelerate since. A month and a half after that conversation, a violent mob stormed the Capitol, driven by the false belief that the election had been stolen from Donald Trump and
Chesa Boudin and Rising Crime in San Francisco
Late one recent afternoon, Chesa Boudin logged onto Zoom to have a conversation with me while his wife was in labor. His critics see the 41-year-old San Francisco district attorney as a symbol of the progressive legal-reform movement’s excesses. But Boudin has also attracted national attention because his personal story is so extraordinary: When he was barely a toddler, his parents, David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin, left him with a babysitter so they could rob a Brink’s armored car with
NEA President Becky Pringle on Vaccine and Mask Mandates
Nearly 90 percent of members of the National Education Association, America’s largest teachers’ union, self-reported in a recent survey that they have been vaccinated against COVID-19. But that still leaves a lot of unvaccinated teachers and school support staff; the union has roughly 3 million members. Becky Pringle, the NEA’s president, has strongly encouraged vaccination, but she told me that regular testing should be available as an alternative to legal mandates: “We have to make sure that school districts work