All posts tagged: better future

What Was It All For?

What Was It All For?

Four months after the October 7 massacre by Hamas, Israel says it is continuing to pursue the total defeat of the Islamist group, which has ruled the Gaza Strip for 17 years. At the same time, Israel is reportedly negotiating a hostage deal built around a pause in the fighting that could extend for months—long enough to make the resumption of full-scale operations unlikely, and perhaps even to arrive at a negotiated settlement. The medium-term survival of Hamas politically and administratively now appears inevitable. If so, what has been the point of the Israeli military operation in Gaza? The conflict has, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry, claimed the lives of 27,365 Gazans and left an estimated 8,000 missing. (Israel counts some 10,000 Hamas militants among the dead.) It has produced unspeakable human suffering, including a fast-approaching famine, and rendered much of the coastal enclave uninhabitable, while setting the Middle East aflame. If Israel was inevitably going to negotiate with Hamas for the release of the remaining hostages and then pull out its troops, only …

Don’t Be a Borrower If You Can Help It

Don’t Be a Borrower If You Can Help It

Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out. Does having more money make you happier? Most Americans think so, yet economists continue to debate the question. A 2010 paper by two Nobel laureates concluded yes—but only for those earning up to about $75,000 a year. In 2021, an economist revisited the issue and found that well-being may go on increasing for much higher income levels as well. My own work argues that what matters is not how much you have, but what you do with it: Happiness doesn’t rise when you buy stuff, but rather when you use your money to pay for memorable experiences or time with people you love, or when you give it away to causes you care about. All that aside, there is one thing you can do with money that is very likely to raise your unhappiness: Borrow it without clear resources to repay it. Benjamin Franklin was onto something when he wrote in 1757, “Sleep without Supping, …

A Slightly Hotter World Could Still Be a Better One

A Slightly Hotter World Could Still Be a Better One

One of the only things we can say for certain about the future is that it will be hotter. Humanity is nowhere close to eliminating carbon emissions, meaning that even if every government on the planet went all in on tackling climate change tomorrow, temperatures would keep rising for many years. This is often taken to mean that the future will necessarily be worse for humanity than the present. Leading publications refer casually to the “climate apocalypse.” People earnestly debate the morality of bringing children into the world. A letter from a young reader to the New York Times ethics column captured the sentiment well: “Is it selfish to have children knowing full well that they will have to deal with a lower quality of life thanks to the climate crisis and its many cascading effects, like increased natural disasters, food shortages, greater societal inequity and unrest?” This attitude—that a world with 1.7 degrees Celsius of warming will be worse than one with 1.6 degrees, which will be worse than one with 1.5 degrees, and …

The New ‘The Color Purple’ Finds Its Own Rhythm

The New ‘The Color Purple’ Finds Its Own Rhythm

Steven Spielberg’s 1985 adaptation of Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Color Purple, was a serious-minded prestige drama. The film simplified the story but faithfully rendered the book’s emotional weight through Spielberg’s vibrant direction, Quincy Jones’s sweeping score, and a strong ensemble cast. The movie became a classic that, despite notoriously failing to win any of the 11 Oscars it was nominated for, made more than five times its budget at the box office, inspired a Tony-winning Broadway musical, and made stars of Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey. That’s a high bar for the new The Color Purple, in theaters today, to clear. Good thing, then, that the film aims for a slightly different goal: As an adaptation of the stage show, it further streamlines Walker’s prose in favor of illustrating sentimental intensity through spectacle. That may sound counterintuitive; movie musicals have recently been vehicles for pure whimsy or, well, whatever you want to call Cats. With The Color Purple, however, the medium is a good match for the heroine’s interiority, producing a sensual and …

Lest darkness fall – The Atlantic

Lest darkness fall – The Atlantic

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Democracies overseas are under siege, and some Americans think the United States should stay out of those struggles. But supporting our friends and allies against barbarism is both in our national interest and part of our identity as a people. First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic: Wars of Conquest and Extermination Last week, I mentioned the field of counterfactual history, the intriguing what-ifs about how great events could have turned out differently. One of the most celebrated of all such stories is a 1941 novel by the prominent science-fiction writer L. Sprague de Camp titled Lest Darkness Fall, in which a 20th-century archeologist named Martin Padway finds himself suddenly transported to sixth-century Rome. Padway knows he has arrived just before the final Gothic War, after which Europe would descend into the Dark Ages, and he uses …

‘Be absolutely quiet. Not a word.’

‘Be absolutely quiet. Not a word.’

The Israeli journalist Amir Tibon and his family were trapped inside a safe room in their house on the Israel-Gaza border when they heard gunshots outside. Tibon speaks Arabic, so he knew what was happening. Hamas terrorists had somehow made it into their Israeli village. Tibon spoke with me and my colleague Yair Rosenberg about the experience, and in this episode of Radio Atlantic we hear Tibon’s story—hiding out with his two young children, their improbable rescue—and his first, raw thoughts about why this happened to them. Listen to the conversation here: The following is a transcript of the episode: Amir Tibon: Saturday, six in the morning, and we hear a very familiar sound: the sound of a mortar about to explode. It’s like a whistle. It’s almost like this [whistles]. Hanna Rosin: Amir Tibon lives in a community in Israel, right near the Gaza border. Mortars fly overhead once in a while, but the family has a routine for that. Amir, his wife, and their two young girls go to a reinforced safe room …