All posts tagged: recent years

The Artisans Who Are Still Making Clothes in America

The Artisans Who Are Still Making Clothes in America

In 1989, the American workwear brand Carhartt produced a special clothing collection to mark its centennial. While shopping with my wife at a vintage store in New Jersey a few years ago, I came across one of these garments—a cotton-duck work jacket with a patch on the chest pocket that read 100 Years, 1889–1989. The same was stamped on each brass button. Intrigued, I took the jacket off its hanger. The inside was lined with a blanketlike fabric to provide extra warmth when working outdoors. Crafted with Pride in U.S.A. read the neck tag, and the underside bore the insignia of the United Garment Workers of America, a now-defunct labor union founded around the same time as Carhartt itself. Nineteen eighty-nine doesn’t seem that long ago. But holding this jacket in my hands, I began to have the feeling you get when looking at a very old photograph. I was holding an artifact from a lost world. Blue jeans, high-top sneakers, Western boots, button-down dress shirts, durable workwear: iconic clothing, invented by Americans. But although …

Ozempic Is a Brain Drug

Ozempic Is a Brain Drug

When scientists first created the class of drugs that includes Ozempic, they told a tidy story about how the medications would work: The gut releases a hormone called GLP-1 that signals you’re full, so a drug that mimics GLP-1 could do the exact same thing, helping people eat less and lose weight. The rest, as they say, is history. The GLP-1 revolution birthed semaglutide, which became Ozempic and Wegovy, and tirzepatide, which became Mounjaro and Zepbound—blockbuster drugs that are rapidly changing the face of obesity medicine. The drugs work as intended: as powerful modulators of appetite. But at the same time that they have become massive successes, the original science that underpinned their development has fallen apart. The fact that they worked was “serendipity,” Randy Seeley, an obesity researcher at the University of Michigan, told me. (Seeley has also consulted for and received research funding from companies that make GLP-1 drugs.) Now scientists are beginning to understand why. In recent years, studies have shown that GLP-1 from the gut breaks down quickly and has little …

Hybrid Work Doesn’t Have to Be Awful

Hybrid Work Doesn’t Have to Be Awful

A simple proposal to help fix it H. Armstrong Roberts / Getty February 29, 2024, 10:15 AM ET If you ask Americans with a desk job what they want, many say flexibility. Specifically, they want control over where that desk is located and when they work at it. Luckily for them, the American workplace is by some measures more flexible than ever before. About half of U.S. workers have “remote-capable” jobs. And Gallup data suggest that a majority of those jobs are now hybrid, meaning that employees can split time between home and the office. Despite this greater flexibility, however, surveys from last year found that Americans were more stressed and less satisfied with their job than they were during the worst of the pandemic. What explains this paradox? One possibility is that although hybrid work loosens the rigidity of a desk job, it exacerbates an even bigger problem: what I call the “overhead tax.” This article has been adapted from Newport’s forthcoming book. Since well before the pandemic, we’ve lived in a world of …

Two theories for Americans’ dire economic outlook

Two theories for Americans’ dire economic outlook

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. Even as many measures show that the economy is thriving, Americans have been feeling down lately—especially about grocery prices. I spoke with my colleague Rogé Karma, a staff writer focused on the economy, about how to understand the gap between consumers’ attitudes and standard economic measures, and how political polarization shapes Americans’ outlook on these issues. First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic: Two Theories Lora Kelley: Why are food prices so central to perceptions of the economy, and why do some inflation measures fail to capture that? Rogé Karma: Food prices are what we see every day—at the grocery store, when we’re ordering takeout or eating at restaurants. In a recent poll that we commissioned at The Atlantic, we asked respondents what factors they consider when deciding how the national economy is doing. The price of …

Black History Month in the Age of Book Bans

Black History Month in the Age of Book Bans

Nearly a century ago, the historian Carter G. Woodson started a movement to teach Black history in America’s schools. First called Negro History Week and now Black History Month, it has been an oasis amid curricula that have too often and for too long either completely ignored Black people or treated them as subordinates. Even though Black History Month can sometimes be commemorated in ways that have turned rote and bland, many enterprising educators, librarians, and parents have used the occasion to bring stories, new interpretations of the past, and intellectual challenges to students of all ages who wouldn’t encounter them otherwise. And books have always been at the heart of their efforts. Today, however, the books that have been deployed by adults to help in this passing on of history and sensibility are disappearing from school libraries. Led by mostly conservative lawmakers across the country, at least 12 state legislatures or school boards have formally restricted discussions and books that point to the existence of racism in America, under “critical race theory” bans; and …

If Online Ads Feel More Annoying, It’s Because They Are

If Online Ads Feel More Annoying, It’s Because They Are

These days, turning on my Amazon Fire smart TV is like a reflex test. Hesitate for even a second, and the home screen starts blasting an ad for the latest show or movie from Amazon Prime. Even if I do manage to navigate away in time, I still have to scroll past an ad for, say, toothpaste. Only then can I access the entertainment I actually want to watch, typically on a once-ad-free streaming service that is now … showing ads. This advertising assault—one that’s particularly acute when my cat attacks the remote at 4 a.m. and interrupts my sleep with a trailer for an explosive thriller—wasn’t as invasive when I purchased the TV three years ago. Online advertising is similarly exhausting whether you’re using a smart TV, phone, laptop, or really any other kind of screen. My fitness and nutrition app advertises Eggo waffles as I input my smoothie, my friends are enduring ads in exchange for swipes on dating apps, and when I do go searching for something to buy, it comes with …

The Everlasting KitchenAid Stand Mixer

The Everlasting KitchenAid Stand Mixer

My KitchenAid stand mixer is older than I am. My dad bought the white-enameled machine 35 years ago, during a brief first marriage. The bits of batter crusted into its cracks could be from the pasta I made yesterday or from the bread he made then. I learned to make my grandfather’s crunchy molasses gingersnaps in that stand mixer. In it, I creamed butter and sugar for the first time. Millions of stand mixers with stories like mine are scattered across the globe, sitting on counters in family homes since who knows when. The Smithsonian National Museum of American History displays Julia Child’s cobalt-enameled mixer in its re-creation of her kitchen; when Julia traveled for a cooking demonstration, she demanded that a KitchenAid be provided. If you buy the popular Artisan model today, your new appliance will look quite similar to the 1937 model designed by Egmont Arens: solid zinc base, enamel coating, arched overhang, a little cap for attachments on the face, room for a bowl to slot into its cradled arm. Inserting a …

Private Equity Has Its Eyes on Child Care

Private Equity Has Its Eyes on Child Care

Last June, years of organizing in Vermont paid off when the state’s House and Senate passed landmark legislation—overriding a governor’s earlier veto—that invests $125 million a year into its child-care system. The bill expanded eligibility for state assistance to 575 percent of the federal poverty level, meaning that more than 7,000 new families are expected to receive money for child-care expenses. Funding will also become available to help day-care centers recruit and retain teachers and expand capacity; centers will also receive additional money for providing nonstandard hours of care. But now advocates are worried that the wrong people stand to benefit from the program’s generosity. Any time there is a windfall of public money, with few strings attached, unintended consequences are nearly certain to follow. Thanks to the new law, more Vermont families will have more to spend on child care, and centers will receive additional money without explicit rules around how to spend it. Both of those facts will make child care an attractive target for private-equity groups looking for an industry with lots …

The Return of the Big Lie: Anti-Semitism Is Winning

The Return of the Big Lie: Anti-Semitism Is Winning

By now, December’s congressional hearing about anti-Semitism at universities, during which the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT all claimed that calls for the genocide of Jews would violate their university’s policies only “depending on the context,” is already a well-worn meme. Surely there is nothing left to say about this higher-education train wreck, after the fallout brought down two of those university presidents and spawned a thousand op-eds—except that all of the punditry about diversity and free speech and criticism of Israel has extravagantly missed the point. The problem was not that Jewish students on American university campuses didn’t want free speech, or that they didn’t want to hear criticism of Israel. Instead, they didn’t want people vandalizing Jewish student organizations’ buildings, or breaking or urinating on the buildings’ windows. They didn’t want people tearing their mezuzahs down from their dorm-room doors. They didn’t want their college instructors spouting anti-Semitic lies and humiliating them in class. They didn’t want their posters defaced with Hitler caricatures, or their dorm windows plastered with …

Can the Remote-Work Era Fix How Scientists Study Kids?

Can the Remote-Work Era Fix How Scientists Study Kids?

There is an open secret in the study of child development: Most of what we think we know about how babies develop is actually based on a specific subset of kids—those born to families from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (a.k.a. WEIRD) nations. The acronym was first coined in an influential 2010 paper to describe the wildly unrepresentative populations that many psychology studies have long relied on. This is an issue in the field generally, and certainly a thorny problem in developmental psychology, which primarily studies children: According to one paper, WEIRD subjects make up 96 percent of the data used in published developmental-science studies but represent only 12 percent of the world’s population. As a result, it’s hard to be certain whether many things we think we know about babies’ development are truly universal elements of human nature. It means that we tell an incomplete story about the process of our own becoming. Yet the problem has remained hard to fix. Even within the U.S., similar demographic biases have arisen: The families that …