All posts tagged: past week

The Man Working to Keep the Water On in Gaza

The Man Working to Keep the Water On in Gaza

Published by skeptic

Numbers are one way to make the destruction of war legible: number of hostages, number of children killed, number of buildings destroyed, number of aid trucks that made it across the Egyptian border. For Marwan Bardawil, who lives in Gaza, the unit of peril he tracks is cubic meters per hour. Bardawil is a water engineer with the Palestinian Water Authority overseeing Gaza. And these days he is measuring, in cubic meters per hour, the quantity of water flowing through the pipes that, in prewar time, carried 10 percent of Gazans’ drinking water—pipes that are controlled by Israel. Right now, with other water sources dwindling, those pipes are Gaza’s lifeline. “The people are really in need of each drop of water,” he told me. For the past week, I’ve been checking in with Bardawil every day as he struggles to find clean sources of water. (You can hear our phone conversations on this week’s episode of Radio Atlantic). In the best of times, Bardawil’s job is difficult. Gaza sits between a desert and the Mediterranean …

Election Denialism Is the GOP’s New Litmus Test

Election Denialism Is the GOP’s New Litmus Test

Published by skeptic

One paradox of the current House Republican majority, and a sign of the deep cleavages within it, is that having sought to overturn the 2020 presidential election can be both disqualifying and essential to becoming speaker of the House. After Jim Jordan of Ohio’s campaign to become speaker flamed out, The Washington Post reported that one reason some colleagues refused to vote for him was his vocal role in trying to prevent the inauguration of Joe Biden. Following Jordan’s exit, nine Republicans announced bids for the role, seven of whom had voted not to certify the 2020 election. The next GOP nominee, however, was Majority Whip Tom Emmer of Minnesota, who voted in favor of certifying the election. That vote—on a matter for which there was no evidence of fraud and no evidence of theft—helped doom Emmer, who withdrew without even seeing a floor vote. Former President Donald Trump, along with some allies, mobilized to block Emmer, citing his certification vote, criticism of Trump after the January 6 riot at the Capitol, and perceived weak …

The Junk Is Winning – The Atlantic

The Junk Is Winning – The Atlantic

Published by skeptic

TikTok would like to sell me a brush. Or, more specifically, an UNbrush. The $18 implement, made by the hair-tool brand FHI Heat, looks like a regular paddle brush, but with its rear panel removed so that air can flow through its perforated sheet of plastic bristles. Its promise, according to the dozens of video reviews that TikTok has pushed into my feed in the past week, is simple: The UNbrush cuts through tangles like a hot knife through butter, even if your hair is highly textured or coated in salt water after a day at the beach. At times, every third or fourth video in my feed has shown the brush doing exactly that, accompanied by a coupon code—never the same one, never for the same amount—and a link to buy. The UNbrush is just one of many assorted products—mascaras, office chairs, battery-powered kitchen scrubbers—that have recently gone viral on TikTok Shop, which officially launched in the United States last month. TikTok’s endless stream of unpredictable, algorithmically selected clips has long been a powerful—if …

Trump’s Loyalty Only Goes One Way

Trump’s Loyalty Only Goes One Way

Published by skeptic

The symmetry is striking: two lawyers, two different eras of Donald Trump’s career, and two courtrooms in different regions of the country. The lessons from Jenna Ellis and Michael Cohen, however, are the same. Loyalty to Trump is seldom returned, with disastrous results for those who offer it. In an Atlanta courtroom today, Jenna Ellis, a former attorney for Trump, pleaded guilty to a single felony count of aiding and abetting false statements. She agreed to five years’ probation and will pay restitution and testify in future cases. Ellis is the third lawyer—following Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro—to plead guilty in the past week as part of the wide-reaching racketeering case over attempts to subvert the 2020 presidential election. But she is the first to make a statement in court as she entered her plea, and what she said was revealing. “As an attorney who is also a Christian, I take my responsibilities as a lawyer very seriously and I endeavor to be a person of sound moral and ethical character in all of my …

Iran Isn’t Pulling Hamas’s Strings

Iran Isn’t Pulling Hamas’s Strings

Published by skeptic

The past week in Israel and the Palestinian territories has been horrific, and the next few weeks promise only more misery and pain. Every shooting war is also a war between competing narratives—each side has its preferred way of framing the conflict—and few have been as fiercely contested in this regard as the war between Israel and the Palestinians. A week in, we should pause to interrogate some of what we have heard combatants and pundits say. Hamas is ISIS. In the aftermath of the attacks on Israel, which included atrocities such as the murder of children and the elderly, Israel and its defenders have likened Hamas to the Islamic State, the violent Islamist movement that briefly took over large swaths of Iraq and Syria before its defeat by local forces. The comparison is at once understandable and misguided. I served as the senior Pentagon official responsible for the Middle East when we created the campaign plan that eventually defeated ISIS, and I remember the reporting—both open-source and classified—that clearly outlined the group’s ruthless nature. …

American Democracy Requires a Conservative Party

American Democracy Requires a Conservative Party

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. Every nation needs parties of the left and the right, but America’s conservative party has collapsed—and its absence will undermine the recovery of American democracy even when Donald Trump is gone. First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic: The Danger That Will Outlast Trump The American right has been busy the past few days. The Republicans in Congress are at war with one another over a possible government shutdown that most of them don’t really want. Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona (channeling the warden from The Shawshank Redemption, apparently) railed about “quislings” such as the “sodomy-promoting” Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and said he should be hanged. Gosar, of course, was merely backing up a similar attack from the likely GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, who over the weekend floated the idea …

This Fall’s COVID Vaccines Are for Everyone

This Fall’s COVID Vaccines Are for Everyone

Published by skeptic

Paul Offit is not an anti-vaxxer. His résumé alone would tell you that: A pediatrician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, he is the co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine for infants that has been credited with saving “hundreds of lives every day”; he is the author of roughly a dozen books on immunization that repeatedly debunk anti-vaccine claims. And from the earliest days of COVID-19 vaccines, he’s stressed the importance of getting the shots. At least, up to a certain point. Like most of his public-health colleagues, Offit strongly advocates annual COVID shots for those at highest risk. But regularly reimmunizing young and healthy Americans is a waste of resources, he told me, and invites unnecessary exposure to the shots’ rare but nontrivial side effects. If they’ve already received two or three doses of a COVID vaccine, as is the case for most, they can stop—and should be told as much. His view cuts directly against the CDC’s new COVID-vaccine guidelines, announced Tuesday following an advisory committee’s 13–1 vote: Every American six months or older should …