All posts tagged: good news

The weirdest presidential election in history

The weirdest presidential election in history

Published by skeptic

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. We are heading into a rematch that promises to be weirder than any presidential election we’ve ever experienced. Let’s review where things stand. First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic: Where Things Stand More than two years ago, I wrote my first newsletter for The Atlantic, titled “An Unserious Country.” I was worried. We’re facing a slew of challenges, from reinvigorated foreign enemies to a dedicated authoritarian movement at home. And yet, as a people, we and our elected officials seem unable to focus even for a nanosecond with enough seriousness and deliberation to muster the cooperative, can-do perseverance that once characterized the American spirit. I wrote this 10 months after the January 6 insurrection, around the same time we learned that thousands of people had died due to their refusal to accept the lifesaving vaccines against …

Groundhog Day 2024: Punxsutawney Phil Does Not See His Shadow

Groundhog Day 2024: Punxsutawney Phil Does Not See His Shadow

Published by Sam

Groundhog Punxsutawney Phil did not see his shadow on Groundhog Day 2024, meaning an early spring is on the way. Like most Feb. 2s in the past 137 years, crowds gathered at Gobbler’s Knob to hear Punxsutawney Phil make his prediction. Phil, the groundhog and purported weather sage, emerged before 7:30 a.m. to show the world what to expect for the rest of winter. He didn’t see his shadow, so that means an early spring is likely. Phil largely favors predicting six more weeks of winter, so this is unusual. The ceremony is run by the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club, which takes care of Phil and even maintains his Cameo page – where, for only $199, you can buy a video wishing your loved ones a happy Groundhog Day. Groundhog Day is a huge tourism draw for Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, a town in Jefferson County about a 90-minute drive northeast of Pittsburgh.  What time did Punxsutawney Phil look for his shadow?   Phil emerged sometime after 7 a.m. Eastern. What does it mean if Phil the groundhog …

The Israeli Quotes That the Press Got Wrong

The Israeli Quotes That the Press Got Wrong

Published by skeptic

In late November, the NPR reporter Leila Fadel interviewed the international-law scholar David Crane about a disquieting subject: potential genocide in Gaza. Crane was uniquely qualified to opine on this fraught topic, having served as the founding chief prosecutor for the UN’s Special Court for Sierra Leone, where he indicted the president of Liberia for war crimes. On air, he explained why he did not think Israel’s actions met the criteria. “If I was charged with investigating and prosecuting genocide,” Crane said, “I would have to have in large measure a smoking gun,” which he characterized as “a rebel group, a person, a head of state” explicitly directing those under their control to destroy a people in “whole or in part.” Precisely because genocide is the highest crime, proving it demands the highest standard of evidence. What is required, in relation to the current conflict, is not simply documentation of destruction or war crimes, and not just incendiary statements from individual soldiers or politicians with no role directing military operations, but rather a declaration of …

Long COVID Is Now the Biggest Pandemic Risk for Most People

Long COVID Is Now the Biggest Pandemic Risk for Most People

Published by skeptic

Compared with the worst days of the pandemic—when vaccines and antivirals were nonexistent or scarce, when more than 10,000 people around the world were dying each day, when long COVID largely went unacknowledged even as countless people fell chronically ill—the prognosis for the average infection with this coronavirus has clearly improved. In the past four years, the likelihood of severe COVID has massively dropped. Even now, as the United States barrels through what may be its second-largest wave of SARS-CoV-2 infections, rates of death remain near their all-time low. And although tens of thousands of Americans are still being hospitalized with COVID each week, emergency rooms and intensive-care units are no longer routinely being forced into crisis mode. Long COVID, too, appears to be a less common outcome of new infections than it once was. Read: The future of long COVID But where the drop in severe-COVID incidence is clear and prominent, the drop in long-COVID cases is neither as certain nor as significant. Plenty of new cases of the chronic condition are still appearing …

Is Economic Pessimism the Media’s Fault?

Is Economic Pessimism the Media’s Fault?

Published by skeptic

The jobs report released last October was a thing of beauty. Over the previous month, the U.S. economy had added 336,000 jobs. It was one of the largest gains of the year and nearly double the amount that most analysts had expected—the kind of numbers that traditionally might occasion some celebratory champagne-popping. Here’s how the press covered it: “Jobs Gains Surge, Troubling News for the Federal Reserve,” read a New York Times headline. “Don’t Get Too Comfortable With a Good Job Market,” warned The Wall Street Journal. “September Jobs Report May Be Last Good One Before Sharp Slowdown,” according to Bloomberg. Journalists have long gravitated toward calling out problems rather than highlighting feel-good stories. Exposing wrongdoing and injustice is, after all, part of the job description. (More cynical readers will point out that audiences have long rewarded the press for doomerism.) But according to new research from the Brookings Institution, when it comes to economic news, this proclivity for negativity has lately gotten even more pronounced. For the study, the economists Ben Harris and Aaron …

Trump’s Cuisinart Strategy With the Supreme Court

Trump’s Cuisinart Strategy With the Supreme Court

Published by skeptic

Donald Trump is well on his way to becoming history’s greatest litigation loser ever. But in the multifront war of Trump v. Seemingly Everyone Else, he has just prevailed in one small skirmish: The Battle of the Questions Presented. Late Friday afternoon, the Supreme Court of the United States agreed to review the Supreme Court of Colorado’s decision that held Trump ineligible to serve again as president under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, the provision barring insurrectionists from public office. That came as no surprise. The nation’s high court also ordered an unusually fast schedule, with oral argument to be held in 34 days—on February 8. That, too, came as no surprise. All parties to the case agreed that the Court should hear the case, and do so expeditiously, so that states and voters could know before the presidential-primary season ends whether Trump was eligible for office. What was unusual was the Court’s choice to grant review without specifying the particular legal issues it intends to decide. George T. Conway III: The Colorado ruling …

Extremism in the military is a problem

Extremism in the military is a problem

Published by skeptic

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. The United States has long been blessed with a civil-military relationship that is a model of democratic and civic stability. Extremism in the ranks, however, is growing—and dangerous. First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic: Small but Growing Last month, the U.S. Department of Defense finally released a report on extremism in the American military after a long delay. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin had commissioned the study in early 2021, four months after the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol, and a contractor, the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), completed its work in the spring of 2022—but the report wasn’t published for more than a year. The study wasn’t much of a bombshell. It confirmed what many observers of the military—including me, based on decades of teaching military officers—already knew: that political extremism in the U.S. …

How to Worry Less and Be Happier

How to Worry Less and Be Happier

Published by skeptic

Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out. Everybody has worries. In early 2023, according to the market-research firm Ipsos, the five most common worries of people worldwide were inflation, poverty and social inequality, crime and violence, unemployment, and corruption (financial and political). Such surveys ask respondents to choose from a list of typical global problems. In that regard, they no doubt diverge from your personal worries, which might be even greater: a perceived change in your partner’s affections, perhaps, or your child’s rather mixed performance in school, or that sore spot on the back of your leg. Although worrying a bit is normal, for some people, worrying can be a dominant element of a generalized anxiety that steals their peace and sucks up valuable time. “I have been worrying and fretting myself, and I don’t know what I am doing,” says Rodion Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment. “Yesterday and the day before yesterday and all this time …

How to Be Happy Growing Older

How to Be Happy Growing Older

Published by skeptic

Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out. Next to one’s birthday, the passing of the calendar year induces us to reflect on the march of time in our life. This is not a welcome subject for many—which is perhaps why a lot of people simply redefine old age virtually out of existence. When Americans were asked in 2009 what “being old” means, the most popular response was turning 85. Yet the average life span in the United States in 2022 was only 76. Apparently, then, the average American dies nine years before getting old. The impulse to define old age as “older than I am now” is not surprising, given all the ways our culture worships youth—its beauty, vitality, and entrepreneurial energy—and offers us any number of options for spending time and money to stop or slow down the clock of aging. And as if the adulation of youth weren’t enough, the stigmatization of seniors is always at hand, through overt discrimination, …

How Gas Prices Get in Our Heads

How Gas Prices Get in Our Heads

Published by skeptic

One of the defining characteristics of the second half of 2023 has been the gloominess of American consumers. Even as the economy remained unexpectedly robust—growing at a 5.2 percent clip in the third quarter—and inflation cooled, consumer sentiment as measured by the University of Michigan’s Consumer Sentiment Index dropped steadily from the summer through the fall, and its rating hit a low of 61.3 in November. But then something surprising happened. In the December survey, released last week, consumer sentiment spiked upward by 13 percent, rising to 69.4, making up pretty much all the ground it had lost since August. Even more striking, consumers’ expectations of inflation over the year ahead fell dramatically, tumbling from 4.5 percent all the way to 3.1 percent. That finding ambushed analysts, who had forecast a trivial bump in sentiment. And Americans’ new, better mood could not be explained by the decline in overall inflation, which fell just a tenth of a percentage point last month. One change could account for why people might be feeling more buoyant: Gasoline prices …