All posts tagged: news reports

It Is the Best and Worst of Times for Air Travel

It Is the Best and Worst of Times for Air Travel

Published by skeptic

Somewhere over Colorado this weekend, while I sat in row 21F, my plane began to buck, jostle, and rattle. Within seconds, the seat-belt indicator dinged as the pilot asked flight attendants to return to their seats. We were experiencing what I, a frequent flier, might describe as “intermediate turbulence”—a sustained parade of midair bumps that can be uncomfortable but by no means terrifying. Generally, I do not fear hurtling through the sky at 500 miles per hour, but at this moment I felt an unusual pang of uncertainty. The little informational card poking out of the seat-back pocket in front of me started to look ominous—the words Boeing 737-900 positively glared at me as the cabin shook. A few minutes later, once we’d found calm air, I realized that a steady drumbeat of unsettling aviation stories had so thoroughly permeated my news-consumption algorithms that I had developed a phobia of sorts. More than 100,000 flights take off every day without issue, which means that incidents are treated as newsworthy anomalies. But it sure feels like …

Elise Stefanik’s Trump Audition – The Atlantic

Elise Stefanik’s Trump Audition – The Atlantic

Published by skeptic

Elise Stefanik and I had been speaking for only about a minute when she offered this stark self-assessment: “I have been an exceptional member of Congress.” Her confidence reminded me of the many immodest pronouncements of Donald Trump (“I would give myself an A+”), and that’s probably not an accident. Stefanik has been everywhere lately, amassing fans among Trump’s base at a crucial moment—both for the GOP and for her future. Stefanik spent October presiding over the leaderless House GOP’s search for a new speaker—a post that Stefanik, the chair of the conference, conspicuously declined to seek for herself. In a congressional hearing last month, she pressed three of America’s most prominent university presidents to say whether they’d allow students to call for Jewish genocide; directly or indirectly, her interrogation brought down two of them. And for the past several weeks, Stefanik has been making an enthusiastic case for Donald Trump’s return to the White House. She campaigned with him in New Hampshire last weekend, defending his mental acuity in the face of obvious gaffes …

The Poets of Palestine – The Atlantic

The Poets of Palestine – The Atlantic

Published by skeptic

Recently reading through the cookbook Jerusalem, I was struck by an observation made by its co-authors, an Israeli chef and a Palestinian chef, in their introduction. Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi write that food “seems to be the only unifying force” in Jerusalem, a city claimed as the capital of both Israel and Palestine. Despite their cuisine’s fraught history, the chefs consider preparing meals to be a uniquely human act—an unspoken language shared between two people who might otherwise be enemies. I was flipping through Jerusalem rather than scrolling through news updates about the Middle East. I found comfort in the co-authors’ attitude of community, especially when many conversations on social media, in mainstream U.S. coverage, and in real life threaten to turn the lost lives of the Israel-Hamas war into abstractions. I quietly leave the room whenever the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is casually discussed at work or among friends, because I do not want to treat death as a watercooler topic of conversation. I am the son of Palestinian immigrants, and I have …

The Forgotten Tradition of Clemency

The Forgotten Tradition of Clemency

Published by skeptic

The governor, attorney general, and chief justice of the state supreme court sat atop a wide dais at the front of the Minnesota Senate hearing room on a warm day in June of 2019. One by one, petitioners for clemency—almost always without a lawyer—came to the podium and made their pitch for a pardon, which would erase many effects of their criminal convictions. One man with a long-ago, minor drug offense told the three officials, who comprise the Board of Pardons, about his 16 years of sobriety and desire to hunt with his son. An immigrant from Laos was supported by his wife, who had been the victim of his crime. Another man sought a pardon so he could adopt a stray dog. When each petitioner finished, the board discussed the case and voted as the petitioner listened intently. It was the rawest, most transparent, and utterly thrilling legal process I had ever witnessed. It was also, on that day, frustratingly unproductive. A unanimous vote was required to receive clemency, and that did not happen …

A Bizarrely Online Word of the Year

A Bizarrely Online Word of the Year

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. For the second consecutive time, the Oxford English Dictionary crowned an internet-slang term its word of the year. This year’s choice—rizz—is meaningful only to the extent that it reminds us of the dictionary’s role as a responsive, living object. First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic: ‘Here Lies Rizz’ The reason I know what rizz means is so inane, it’s not even worth getting into. It involves a TikTok video, and a tweet about the video, and an explainer article I read to try to decrypt the meaning of the sentence “Livvy rizzed him up; Livvy even hugged Baby Gronk” over the summer. Rizz, which refers to someone’s ability to flirt by being charismatic, was never a word I thought all that much about. But the fact that it was just crowned the word of the year …

Did the Carpal Tunnel Epidemic Ever Really End?

Did the Carpal Tunnel Epidemic Ever Really End?

Published by skeptic

Diana Henriques was first stricken in late 1996. A business reporter for The New York Times, she was in the midst of a punishing effort to bring a reporting project to fruition. Then one morning she awoke to find herself incapable of pinching her contact lens between her thumb and forefinger. Henriques’s hands were soon cursed with numbness, frailty, and a gnawing ache she found similar to menstrual cramps. These maladies destroyed her ability to type—the lifeblood of her profession—without experiencing debilitating pain. “It was terrifying,” she recalls. Henriques would join the legions of Americans considered to have a repetitive strain injury (RSI), which from the late 1980s through the 1990s seized the popular imagination as the plague of the modern American workplace. Characterized at the time as a source of sudden, widespread suffering and disability, the RSI crisis reportedly began in slaughterhouses, auto plants, and other venues for repetitive manual labor, before spreading to work environments where people hammered keyboards and clicked computer mice. Pain in the shoulders, neck, arms, and hands, office drones …