All posts tagged: first question

Celebrating the Holidays, Waiting for War

Celebrating the Holidays, Waiting for War

On January 2, at about 5:30 p.m., as I was reading at my desk in my Beirut apartment and contemplating a busy start to the year, I was jolted out of my focus by a loud blast. The first question that came to my mind was: Has it started? An explosion had ripped through an apartment block in the southern suburbs, just a 10-minute drive from where I live, killing Saleh Arouri, a senior leader of Hamas, along with at least six others. These suburbs are a Hezbollah bastion; Hamas leaders must have felt, wrongly, that they were safe there. City streets emptied quickly. People rushed home, checked on their loved ones, and waited. Will Hezbollah’s response be immediate? Will it be big? Will there be war? The following day was a big travel day for the tens of thousands of expatriates who’d returned to Lebanon for the holidays and were heading back to their lives abroad. Now the planned departures took on an added urgency. [Read: Hezbollah watches and waits] “We’re leaving just in …

The Supreme Court Doesn’t Just Decide Cases

The Supreme Court Doesn’t Just Decide Cases

One must feel for the fishermen of Cape May, New Jersey. They had a fair grievance and took it to court—all the way to the Supreme Court. But along that journey their lawsuit became something else: a way to possibly remake administrative law. They just want to make a living catching herring, but the justices are more interested in using their case to weigh in on a different legal question entirely. This is the story of Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, one of the blockbuster cases on the Court’s docket this year. The case involves a federal law requiring fishermen to “carry” government inspectors as observers on their fishing boats in order to monitor compliance with a federal agency’s rules. That regulator—the National Marine Fisheries Service—recently interpreted carry to mean “pay for” and began charging fishermen roughly 20 percent of their revenue to pay the monitors’ wages. A group of fisheries sued but lost in the D.C. Circuit, which said that because of what’s known as the Chevron doctrine, the court was obligated to defer …

The Nikki Haley Debate – The Atlantic

The Nikki Haley Debate – The Atlantic

The fourth Republican presidential debate featured lots of attacks on Haley—not Donald Trump. Justin Sullivan/Getty December 6, 2023, 11:14 PM ET Anyone watching the fourth Republican primary debate tonight would be forgiven for thinking Nikki Haley was the favorite to win the GOP presidential nomination next year. Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy sure were acting like it. Neither man had finished answering their first question before they began attacking the former South Carolina governor and U.N. ambassador. “She caves any time the left comes after her, anytime the media comes after her,” warned DeSantis, the Florida governor. Ramaswamy went much further. He called Haley “corrupt” and “a fascist” for suggesting that social-media companies ban people from posting anonymously on their platforms. The broadsides continued throughout the two-hour debate in Tuscaloosa, Alabama: DeSantis and Ramaswamy used every opportunity to go after Haley, even when they were prodded to criticize the Republican who is actually dominating the primary race, Donald Trump. “I’m loving all the attention, fellas,” Haley said at one point. What she’d love even more …

Three Ways to Find Yourself

Three Ways to Find Yourself

Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out. At business schools, scholars of entrepreneurship generally follow one of two basic theories of how enterprises start. The first, called the discovery theory, holds that the universe is filled with opportunities, and that entrepreneurs are the ones who discover and exploit them. The second is called the creation theory, and holds that opportunities are created by the actions of the entrepreneurs themselves. So either a pocket-size computer always existed in theory and Steve Jobs discovered it and called it the iPhone, or Apple’s development-and-experimentation process was what created it. This might sound like an esoteric debate, but it is actually extremely useful for anyone looking at the enterprise that matters most: life. Probably all of us at some point have felt the pull to “find yourself,” to ascertain your essence: who you are, what your life means, what you are supposed to do with it. To find yourself, you first need to decide if at …

Doug Burgum Knows You Don’t Know Him

Doug Burgum Knows You Don’t Know Him

The phrase one percent could be used to describe Doug Burgum’s socioeconomic status and, less gloriously, his national-polling average. On a recent Thursday night in New Hampshire, the North Dakota governor squared up to the reality of his presidential campaign: “The first question I get is ‘When are you going to drop out?’” He was speaking to about 100 people in a private back room at Stark Brewing Company, in downtown Manchester. Republicans had come together to celebrate the state GOP’s 170th birthday, sheet cake and all. Burgum was the biggest star on the program, along with former Representative Will Hurd, who was a no-show after ending his own campaign three days earlier. The next-biggest name? Perry Johnson, a businessman who attempted to deliver his remarks by phone and, about a week later, would also drop out. Burgum is an affable midwestern guy with virtually zero national name recognition. He spins his long-shot bid for the Republican nomination as “an entrepreneur’s dream”—huge market potential. Like another one-percenter, Succession’s Connor Roy, Burgum is fighting for his …

Streaming Has Reached Its Sad, Predictable Fate

Streaming Has Reached Its Sad, Predictable Fate

The first question plaguing omnivorous, content-hungry humans with a spare hour or two is this: What should I watch? In recent years, a second question has come to dominate our evening streaming rituals: How do I watch it? Drenching your eyeballs in sweet television can be surprisingly tricky, requiring some amount of research to determine which streaming platform has whatever you want to watch and, crucially, whether you pay for it already. Netflix and Amazon Prime Video and Hulu are still sometimes not enough to watch the most popular shows, especially if you want to see Idris Elba attempt to outfox plane hijackers (you’ll need Apple TV+ for that). Most evenings, I find myself stuck in this phase, during which time I am likely to cycle through something resembling the five stages of grief. There’s Denial (I swear I had a Paramount+ account); Anger (I cannot believe I have to pay for Paramount+); Bargaining (I promise I will cancel my subscription after the one-week Paramount+ trial period ends); Depression (I cannot believe I didn’t remember …

Can the M.F.A. Survive ChatGPT?

Can the M.F.A. Survive ChatGPT?

No question is more dreadfully pretentious than “What is art?” except possibly “Can you come see my one-person show?” Yet I’ve accepted that at some point in the course of a life, both will need to be answered. Because I’m a writer facing the advent of ChatGPT, the time for the first question is now. Most people (including some writers themselves) forget that creative writing is an art form. I suspect that this is because, unlike music or painting or sculpture or dance—for which rare natural aptitude straight away separates practitioners from appreciators—writing is something that everyone does and that many people believe they do well. I have been at parties with friends who are dancers, comedians, visual artists, and musicians, and I have never witnessed anyone say to them, “I’ve always wanted to do that.” Yet I can scarcely meet a stranger without hearing about how they have “always wanted to write a novel.” Their novel is unwritten, they seem to believe, not for lack of talent or honed skill, but simply for lack …