All posts tagged: next day

NFL, Meet Taylor Swift – The Atlantic

NFL, Meet Taylor Swift – The Atlantic

Published by skeptic

Has Taylor Swift ever been more popular, more all-powerful, more white Beyoncé than she is right now? She’s in the middle of an era-defining tour that is literally called the Eras Tour. A concert-film version of the show is about to arrive in theaters nationwide—she dropped the news a few weeks ago, and within hours, Hollywood studios were scrambling to get their movies out of her way. The bracelets are everywhere. And now, to her vast dominion, she has added untold millions of football-loving (mostly) men, thanks to her escalating flirtations with the Kansas City Chiefs’ sexy goofus tight end, Travis Kelce. Quick recap: On the July 26 episode of his popular podcast, New Heights—which he co-hosts with his brother, a star offensive lineman with the Philadelphia Eagles—Kelce lamented that he’d gone to Swift’s concert at Arrowhead Stadium, in Kansas City, and was hoping to pass along a bracelet with his number on it, but she blew him off. (Actually, it’s unclear if she blew him off or just had no idea who he was.) …

The Books Briefing: Susie Boyt, ‘Loved and Missed’

The Books Briefing: Susie Boyt, ‘Loved and Missed’

Published by skeptic

This is an edition of the revamped Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here. When my children were very young, friends standing on the precipice of parenthood would ask me to reveal what it was like, what I could report from a country that was still exotic to them. I’d look through eyes rimmed red from sleep deprivation and utter some well-worn cliché. The drudgery of it all was easy enough to explain, I’d say, understandable even to someone who didn’t have children: You repeat a million little tasks in service of a tiny, ungrateful human being, and then the next day you have to do it all over again. You feel slightly obliterated by this. But—and here my eyes would widen as much as they could—it’s harder to convey the joy. Novels about parenting seem to agree; in book after book, raising children seems akin to living in a “penal colony of toy-straightening and carrot-steaming,” Hillary Kelly writes in an essay this week. What a …

Why Women Are Drinking More

Why Women Are Drinking More

Published by skeptic

More than a decade ago, when Holly Whitaker worked a director-level job at a Silicon Valley start-up, insecurities haunted her. She feared never being enough, never getting ahead. “There was just an inability to be with myself,” she told me, “and that manifested as fear.” She often sought comfort in alcohol. The relief would start even as she anticipated drinking; at the first sip, she began to feel warm and right; numb, but also energized. In her 2019 book, Quit Like a Woman, Whitaker describes drinking alone after a night out, feeling proud to have had “only” a bottle of wine in a day, and carrying airplane shots of liquor around in her purse. Sometimes, she would start drinking in the morning and go until she passed out. “Anytime I felt anything I didn’t want to feel, I used outside things to manage that, and alcohol was very effective,” she said. The next day, she would feel shaky and even more stressed—and still be facing the demons she drank to avoid. Now sober, Whitaker views …

Jenisha From Kentucky – The Atlantic

Jenisha From Kentucky – The Atlantic

Published by skeptic

Ms. Brown didn’t tell me where we were going. I knew we would be visiting someone important, a literary figure, because we took a gypsy cab instead of the subway. It would probably be someone I should have known, but didn’t. A brownstone in Harlem. It was immaculate—paintings of women in headscarves; a cherry-colored oriental rug; a dark, gleaming dining-room table. Ms. Brown led me toward a woman on the couch. She knew that I would recognize her, and I did, despite the plastic tube snaking from her nostrils to an oxygen tank. Maya Angelou’s back was straight. Her rose-pink eyeshadow sparkled. Explore the October 2023 Issue Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. View More My mind called up random bits of information from I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Canned pineapples—she loved them. Bailey—her brother’s name. What she felt when she heard someone read Dickens aloud for the first time—the voice that “slid in and curved down through and over the words.” And that, like me, …

Vivek Ramaswamy’s Truth – The Atlantic

Vivek Ramaswamy’s Truth – The Atlantic

Published by skeptic

Vivek Ramaswamy leaned forward in his leather seat aboard the Cessna 750. He was fiddling with his pen, talking about Donald Trump. It was the final Friday in July. In several hours he’d join his fellow Republican presidential contenders at the Iowa GOP Lincoln Dinner. Ramaswamy—not even 40, zero political experience—was the second-to-last speaker on the bill. Trump, of course, was the headliner. Ramaswamy is the author of Woke, Inc., a book-length takedown of corporations that champion moral causes along with profits. The treatise was a New York Times best-seller and is now part of the American culture-war canon. His first company, Roivant Sciences, netted him hundreds of millions of dollars by bringing a Wall Street ethos to biotech: Drug patents were prospective assets. Another Ramaswamy venture, Strive Asset Management, markets itself as a place where return-on-investment outweighs all else, including concerns about social issues or the environment. That afternoon’s flight was a short hop, Columbus to Des Moines. As the private jet barreled west, Ramaswamy sipped a Perrier and scribbled his thoughts in a …

The British Left Makes a Sharp Turn on Gender

The British Left Makes a Sharp Turn on Gender

Published by skeptic

When Keir Starmer wanted to change the Labour Party’s stance on sex and gender, he didn’t give a set-piece speech or hold a press conference. Instead, the leader of Britain’s main opposition party stayed in the background, leaving Anneliese Dodds, a shadow minister with a low public profile, to announce the shift in a short opinion column in The Guardian. In just over 800 words, she made three big declarations. One was that “sex and gender are different.” Another was that, although Labour continues to believe in the right to change one’s legal gender, safeguards are needed to “protect women and girls from predators who might abuse the system.” Finally, Labour was therefore dropping its commitment to self-ID—the idea that a simple online declaration is enough to change someone’s legal gender for all purposes—and would retain the current requirement of a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria. Dodds supplemented her article with a few explanatory tweets, but didn’t go on television to reiterate the message. The next day, Labour declined to provide a spokesperson for comment …