All posts tagged: media outlets

Why Everyone Is a Kate Middleton Truther Now

Why Everyone Is a Kate Middleton Truther Now

Published by skeptic

There was a time, not that long ago, when mainstream-news consumers pitied people who had succumbed to the sprawling conspiracies of QAnon. Imagine spending your days parsing “Q Drops,” poring over cryptic utterances for coded messages. Imagine taking every scrap of new information and weaving it into an existing narrative. Those poor, deluded, terminally online saps. What a terrible modern affliction. And then some of my friends became Kate Middleton truthers. In January, the British Royal Family announced that Catherine, Princess of Wales, had needed surgery for unspecified, noncancerous abdominal issues, and that her recovery would take longer than originally expected. She would therefore not resume public duties until after Easter. For several weeks, that explanation sufficed. But by late February, half the internet seemed to be speculating over her whereabouts, using the favored format of conspiracists everywhere: just asking questions. An absence is filled with puzzlement—what aren’t we being told?—and then larded with a garnish of suspicion. Why are they hiding the truth from us? In the past few weeks, my WhatsApp groups have …

How the Steele Dossier Broke the Media

How the Steele Dossier Broke the Media

Published by skeptic

The parallel was striking—but perhaps no one wanted to see it. Last week, corruption allegations that underpinned the House GOP’s push to impeach President Joe Biden collapsed after federal prosecutors charged Alexander Smirnov, the informant who’d brought them forward, with lying to the FBI. The Biden impeachment was never about the substance of the allegations against him; it was revenge for what former President Donald Trump’s allies view as witch hunts against him. After Trump was impeached twice, Republicans were always going to search for some cause to impeach Biden—preferably one that involved just the kind of untoward foreign dealings of which Trump was accused. Instead, the conservative media and House Republicans seem to have blundered into their own version of the Steele dossier, the infamous collection of allegations against Trump gathered before the 2016 election. Both stories involve dubious dealings in the hall of mirrors that is the former Soviet Union, an FBI informant with sketchy intelligence ties, and accusations that Russian intelligence planted false information. And in both cases, the underlying information has …

Take a Vacation From Therapy

Take a Vacation From Therapy

Published by skeptic

About four years ago, a new patient came to see me for a psychiatric consultation because he felt stuck. He’d been in therapy for 15 years, despite the fact that the depression and anxiety that first drove him to seek help had long ago faded. Instead of working on problems related to his symptoms, he and his therapist chatted about his vacations, house renovations, and office gripes. His therapist had become, in effect, an expensive and especially supportive friend. And yet, when I asked if he was considering quitting treatment, he grew hesitant, even anxious. “It’s just baked into my life,” he told me. Among those who can afford it, regular psychotherapy is often viewed as a lifelong project, like working out or going to the dentist. Studies suggest that most therapy clients can measure their treatments in months instead of years, but a solid chunk of current and former patients expect therapy to last indefinitely. Therapists and clients alike, along with celebrities and media outlets, have endorsed the idea of going to therapy for …

Can Netanyahu outlast this war?

Can Netanyahu outlast this war?

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. “It’s hard to remember at this point, but before the Hamas slaughter on October 7, Israel was embroiled in the worst civic unrest since its founding,” my colleague Yair Rosenberg wrote earlier this month. Most Israelis have since shifted their focus from that unrest, which was caused by the government’s attempt to subordinate Israel’s judiciary to its politicians. At the same time, many Israeli citizens remain at odds with the government’s hard-right factions over the country’s future, and Gaza’s—and those tensions are only ramping up as the Israel-Hamas war continues. I talked with Yair about what could be next for the Israeli government, Netanyahu’s profound failure, and how to stay informed about the war while avoiding misinformation. First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic: A Democracy in Crisis Isabel Fattal: You wrote a few weeks after the …

My Hope for a Better Future in Gaza

My Hope for a Better Future in Gaza

Published by skeptic

On July 1, 2005, as I was getting into a taxi leaving my family’s home in Gaza City and heading to the United States as a 15-year-old exchange student, I poked my head out of the car’s window and told my dad to keep my room nice for when I came back. He replied, “Inshallah, it’ll be better than when you left it.” I’ve never been back to Gaza. My dad, a former United Nations physician in the Jabalia refugee camp, died in 2020; the medical care that might have saved his life was not available in Gaza. In October, an Israeli air strike destroyed my family’s home. Last month, a different air strike destroyed the building in Rafah that housed much of my mother’s family, killing dozens, and wiping out what was effectively my second home. The Israeli military operation launched in response to Hamas’s horrific October 7 attacks has done far more than degrade the group’s fighting capability. It has killed thousands of people, leveled entire neighborhoods, destroyed cities, decimated civilian infrastructure, and …

What Hamas Wants – The Atlantic

What Hamas Wants – The Atlantic

Published by skeptic

“Did Israel Avert a Hamas Massacre?” That was the question posed by the headline of a Vanity Fair exposé published in October 2014. The investigative report laid out a sophisticated plot by the Islamist terror group to kill and kidnap Israelis on the Gaza border. The plan: to use underground tunnels to infiltrate nearby civilian enclaves on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, when the communities would be at their most vulnerable. As one intelligence source put it, the operation had two goals: “First, get in and massacre people in a village. Pull off something they could show on television. Second, the ability to kidnap soldiers and civilians using the tunnels would give them a great bargaining chip.” The Israel Defense Forces subsequently confirmed this reporting to other media outlets, but not the specific date. The tunnels were real. But at the time the massacre-that-wasn’t received little additional media coverage. It seemed too cinematic and convenient. Maybe it was a Hamas pipe dream that was never operational. Or maybe it was a worst-case scenario concocted …

15 Readers on Trust in American Institutions

15 Readers on Trust in American Institutions

Published by skeptic

“My trust is more fragile than 10 years ago,” one reader writes, “because I can see very easily how our institutions could be completely destroyed in a matter of months.” Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Samuel Corum / Getty September 20, 2023, 4:27 PM ET Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here. Last week, I asked readers, “Do you trust America’s institutions more than, less than, or as much as you did a decade ago? Why?” Replies have been edited for length and clarity. Judith sees distrust as a sign of cultural maturity: I believe that the widespread loss of trust in institutions is a combination of two equally strong forces. The first is our culture’s maturing beyond facile acceptance of what we are told by those institutions into a more confident posture of questioning what we are told based on what we know and believe. The second force …