All posts tagged: recent years

TikTok Should Be a Global Success Story. Beijing Has Made Sure It’s Not.

TikTok Should Be a Global Success Story. Beijing Has Made Sure It’s Not.

Published by skeptic

By all rights, TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, should be one of the world’s most respected companies. The technology start-up has created an innovative social-media platform with global appeal—an achievement that puts ByteDance in the elite ranks of Facebook and X. There’s a single reason the company doesn’t get that respect: It’s Chinese. On March 13, the House of Representatives passed a bill with unusually wide bipartisan support that will ban TikTok from the United States unless ByteDance divests its stake in the short-video app to a non-Chinese investor. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo recently said she supports the legislation, adding that “TikTok presents serious national-security risks to the people of the United States.” The bill still needs to clear the Senate, but if it does, TikTok will most likely be barred from the world’s largest economy. The Chinese government has already signaled that it will oppose a forced sale of TikTok, apparently out of concern that its technology will fall into foreign hands. That’s tragic, not only for TikTok’s millions of avid American fans, but also …

I Watched This Island Wash Away in a Decade

I Watched This Island Wash Away in a Decade

Published by skeptic

This article was originally published by Hakai Magazine. Before the sea started taking house-size bites out of Nyangai, this small tropical island off the coast of Sierra Leone hummed with activity. I first visited in 2013 while documenting the construction of a school on a neighboring island. It was a cloudless day in April. A group of teenagers was busy setting up a sound system for a party. Old men chatted and smoked in the shade of palm trees. Children chased one another through the maze of sandy lanes while a constant traffic of roughly hewn wooden boats plied the surrounding waters. The silhouettes of coconut palms and June plum trees dominated the island’s profile, and beneath them stood clusters of neat mud-and-thatch homes. The beach that ringed the island was so white, it hurt the eyes, the water a limpid green. I couldn’t stay for long, but Nyangai left a deep impression. In December of the following year, I caught another glimpse of the island, this time while flying over it in a United …

The meaning of trees in a warming world

The meaning of trees in a warming world

Published by skeptic

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here. Trees can seem like timeless beings. Many a giant sequoia has racked up three millennia on this Earth. A pine in California’s White Mountains is estimated to be nearly 5,000 years old. A colony of aspens in Utah may well have originated during the Stone Age, and to this day, its leaves glitter gold in the autumn sun. A tree’s life span, undisturbed by axe or fire, is utterly divorced from the scales on which human affairs operate. And yet, throughout history, people have seen themselves reflected in trees. One of those people was James Russell Lowell, a poet who served as The Atlantic’s first-ever editor. “I care not how men trace their ancestry / To ape or Adam; let them please their whim; / But I in June am midway to believe / A tree among my far progenitors,” Lowell wrote in The Atlantic’s June 1868 issue. He even suggests …

Does a Houseplant Need to Glow for You to See It as Alive?

Does a Houseplant Need to Glow for You to See It as Alive?

Published by skeptic

The gallon pot of white petunias I held on an otherwise ordinary subway train, on an otherwise ordinary Thursday in March, would have looked to anyone else like an ordinary houseplant. But I knew better. An hour before, Karen Sarkisyan, one of the plant scientists responsible for this petunia’s existence, had dropped it off at my office. He warned me that my petunia had spent a while in transit, and might not immediately put on a show. Still, I’d rushed the petunia into a windowless room. My eyes took a moment to adjust to the darkness. But then I saw it. The white blooms gave off a green luminescence. The glow was indeed faint. But it was a plant that was glowing. I gasped. The company that makes these plants, Light Bio, had opened orders to the general public just a few weeks prior. A first run of 50,000 sold out. The company planned to double that by year end, and has already taken orders for two weddings. Sarkisyan was in town to speak with …

Andrea Long Chu’s Radical Gender Libertarianism

Andrea Long Chu’s Radical Gender Libertarianism

Published by skeptic

The point of a public intellectual is to make wild arguments with maximum conviction. And in this respect, Andrea Long Chu—transgender woman, Pulitzer Prize–winning literary critic, irrepressible provocateur—always exceeds my expectations. In a recent cover story for New York magazine, Chu makes the case for child gender transition using the most unpopular rationale possible: in essence, that minors should be allowed to have mastectomies and other gender surgeries if they want them, simply because they want them. “We will never be able to defend the rights of transgender kids until we understand them purely on their own terms: as full members of society who would like to change their sex,” Chu writes. “It does not matter where this desire comes from.” Counterpoint: It does. The most broadly appealing version of the argument for medical transition is that a small number of people have a psychological condition (gender dysphoria) that makes them unhappy (because their sexed bodies feel alien to them) and doctors have treatments (hormones and surgery) that can help. In making the case for …

DNA Tests Are Uncovering the True Prevalence of Incest

DNA Tests Are Uncovering the True Prevalence of Incest

Published by Sam

When Steve Edsel was a boy, his adoptive parents kept a scrapbook of newspaper clippings in their bedroom closet. He would ask for it sometimes, poring over the headlines about his birth. Headlines like this: “Mother Deserts Son, Flees From Hospital,” Winston-Salem Journal, December 30, 1973. The mother in question was 14 years old, “5 feet 6 with reddish brown hair,” and she had come to the hospital early one morning with her own parents. They gave names that all turned out to be fake. And by 8 o’clock that evening, just hours after she gave birth, they were gone. In a black-and-white drawing of the mother, based on nurses’ recollections, she has round glasses and sideswept bangs. Her mouth is grimly set. The abandoned boy was placed in foster care with a local couple, the Edsels, who later adopted him. Steve knew all of this growing up. His parents never tried to hide his origins, and they always gave him the scrapbook when he asked. It wasn’t until he turned 14, though, that he …

Putin’s ‘Rabble of Thin-Necked Henchmen’

Putin’s ‘Rabble of Thin-Necked Henchmen’

Published by skeptic

Not even the most passionate supporters of Vladimir Putin are pretending that the results of this weekend’s election are in doubt: Putin, Russia’s longest-serving leader since Joseph Stalin, is about to embark on his sixth term. And so, with no electoral politics to debate, both pro-Putin and liberal Kremlinologists in the Russian-language mediasphere have been focusing instead on changes at the very top of Russia’s power pyramid: the new elite that is coming to replace the old Putin cronies, the tensions between the men in military uniforms and those in suits, and the perennial question of who will lead the country in the case of Putin’s sudden death. Before the war, perhaps the leading candidate for a successor was Putin’s favorite general and then–deputy head of military intelligence, Aleksey Dyumin, who commanded the Special Operations Forces’ top-secret “little green men” during the annexation of Crimea. But his train has departed, as Russians say: “Dyumin’s name was connected to Wagner, which decreased his chance to become Putin’s successor,” a columnist named Andrey Revnivtsev wrote on Tsargrad, …

The persistent mystery of protein intake

The persistent mystery of protein intake

Published by skeptic

Scientists still aren’t sure how much we actually need. Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani. Sources: Getty. March 14, 2024, 3:57 PM ET This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here. If nutritional information were a slice of bread, we’d be living in a world full of dense 24-grain-and-seed loaves. The internet is stuffed with listicles, tips, and tricks for consuming the right ratio of “macros” (fats, carbs, and proteins). Rows and rows of vitamins and supplements fill pharmacy aisles. Calorie-counting apps track every savored crumb. But in 1918, the answer to the question “What and how much should we eat?”—the title of an Atlantic article that year—was just beginning to be scientifically understood. Published in The Atlantic in the waning days of World War I, the story is in part a reaction to living in a resource-strapped country. “Let us first consider the question how much energy is really needed; or, to put it the other way, how little …

Of Course America Fell for Liquid Death

Of Course America Fell for Liquid Death

Published by skeptic

When you think about it, the business of bottled water is pretty odd. What other industry produces billions in revenue selling something that almost everyone in America—with some notable and appalling exceptions—can get basically for free? Almost every brand claims in one way or another to be the purest or best-tasting or most luxurious, but very little distinguishes Poland Spring from Aquafina or Dasani or Evian. And then there is Liquid Death. The company sells its water in tallboy cans branded with its over-the-top name, more over-the-top melting-skull logo, and even more over-the-top slogan: “Murder your thirst.” Liquid Death feels more like an absurd stunt than a real company, but it’s no joke. You can find its products on the shelves at Target, 7-Eleven, Walmart, and Whole Foods. After the great success of its plain canned water, it has branched out into iced tea and seltzer, with flavors such as Mango Chainsaw, Berry It Alive, and Dead Billionaire (its take on an Arnold Palmer). On Monday, Bloomberg reported that the company is now valued at …

The Bump-Stocks Case Is a Sign of Worse to Come

The Bump-Stocks Case Is a Sign of Worse to Come

Published by Sam

Sometimes a Supreme Court case appears to be about a minor technical issue, but is in fact a reflection of a much broader and significant legal development—one that could upend years of settled precedent and, with it, basic understandings of the allocation of powers across our system of government. That’s exactly what is happening in Garland v. Cargill, a case for which the Supreme Court heard oral argument at the end of February. The specific challenge in the case is to a Trump-era federal regulation banning all “bump stocks”—contraptions that, when attached to semiautomatic firearms, allow them to discharge ammunition even more rapidly and without additional pulls of the trigger. Although the specific legal issue before the justices reduces to the technical question of whether a bump stock thus converts a semiautomatic rifle into a “machine gun,” Garland v. Cargill is a much broader illustration of—and referendum on—the real-world implications of the Court’s mounting hostility toward federal administrative agencies. That’s because the real question in Cargill is not whether a rifle with a bump stock …