Tag: recent days
Joe Biden’s Most Urgent State of the Union Priority
As President Joe Biden prepares to deliver his State of the Union address tonight, his pathways to reelection are narrowing. His best remaining option, despite all of the concerns about his age, may be to persuade voters to look forward, not back.
In his now-certain rematch against former President Donald Trump, Biden has three broad possibilities for framing the contest to voters. One is to present the race as a referendum on Biden’s performance during his four years in office.
Israel After Netanyahu – The Atlantic
It was October 7, and men with guns were hunting Nir Gontarz’s son. Amir, age 23, had been at the music festival that was ambushed by Hamas terrorists from the air. Now he was on the run, sending panicked messages to his father. A professional journalist, Nir tried calling the usual sources for help—politicians, the army, the police. He soon realized that no rescue was coming. Then, scrolling through live updates from the scene of the slaughter on
Welcome to the Age of ‘Foomscrolling’
I remember the first time I saw the floaty rock. It was the middle of night, and I was facing the insomniac’s dilemma: to reach for the phone or not. I reached and opened Twitter—this was two weeks ago; the new name hadn’t yet sunk in—on the theory that a scroll through my feed might achieve some hypnotic effect, creating an opening for sleep to take hold. That’s when I saw the blurry video. In it, a scrap of material, … Read more
Donald Trump’s Unhinged Attacks on Smith and Chutkan
In some ways, Donald Trump’s mental state is more transparent than nearly any public figure’s: He has no shame, little discretion, and ample channels to broadcast his feelings in real time. Yet his constant stream of consciousness and always elevated dudgeon make it hard to parse the finer fluctuations in his mood.
Even so, the former president’s public behavior since Special Counsel Jack Smith indicted him last week suggests a man feeling cornered. This isn’t to say that Trump is
A Brazen, Dead-Serious Attack on American Democracy
More than two and a half years after Donald Trump attempted to steal the 2020 presidential election, a grand jury in Washington, D.C., has indicted the former president on four felony counts related to the plot.
This is the third time that Trump has been charged with felonies in 2023, but it is also the most significant case against him. Although other charges allege serious misconduct, this cuts to the gravest act he committed: his lengthy, concerted effort to subvert
The Missing Data That Could Help Turn the COVID Origins Debate
Updated at 2:45 p.m. on March 21, 2023
Last week, the ongoing debate about COVID-19’s origins acquired a new plot twist. A French evolutionary biologist stumbled across a trove of genetic sequences extracted from swabs collected from surfaces at a wet market in Wuhan, China, shortly after the pandemic began; she and an international team of colleagues downloaded the data in hopes of understanding who—or what—might have ferried the virus into the venue. What they found, as The Atlantic first
What Do We Lose If We Lose Twitter?
When Elon Musk bought Twitter, the suggestion that he might run the platform into the ground was, for many, including me, a shorthand. Many supposed that Musk would roll back key moderation policies or reinstate some banned accounts, or that his ownership would be some kind of anti-woke Bat-Signal, flooding the platform with people who are attracted to social media for its capacity to alienate people.
Instead, less than a month into Musk’s tenure, he seems to be doing everything
The Battle for the Donbas Demands Impossible Choices
Soon after Russia invaded Ukraine, Pavlo Kyrylenko and Serhiy Gaidai received phone calls from men they believed to be Russians, based on their accents. Kyrylenko and Gaidai, the governors of the Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, respectively, were being enticed to defect. The pair—the top Ukrainian officials in parts of their country racked for years by conflict with Moscow-backed separatists—were offered the chance to join what the Russians were convinced would be their inevitable victory.
“This was before