At the start of the spring of 2015, Jeffrey, a three-year-old meerkat, was happily eating, tussling with his brothers, and surveying zoo patrons from his usual perch, his forepaws gathered and his black-tipped snout aloft. But one day in April, his caretakers discovered him in his enclosure, so weak that he could barely lift his head. By the time he was brought to Eric Baitchman, the head vet at Massachusetts’s Stone Zoo, Jeffrey was losing consciousness.

We’d gathered that day at the cafeteria’s “Black” table, cracking jokes and philosophizing during the free period that was our perk as upperclassmen. We came in different shades: bone white, tan and brownish, dark as a silhouette. One of my classmates, who fancied himself a lyricist, was insisting that Redman, a witty emcee from nearby Newark, New Jersey, was the greatest rapper ever. This was the late ’90s, and for my money, no one could compete with Jay-Z.

In 2021, on the eve of the Tokyo Olympics, 23 top Chinese swimmers tested positive for the drug trimetazidine. In its proper clinical setting, the medication is used to treat angina. But for an athlete or a coach willing to cheat, it is a performance-enhancing drug, boosting the heart muscle’s functioning. Nonprescription use of trimetazidine, or TMZ, is prohibited at all times, not just during competition; the default sanction for an athlete’s violation is a four-year ban.

Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings or watch full episodes here.  
Ahead of next week’s closing arguments for Donald Trump’s hush-money trial, the former president’s allies took turns appearing outside the Manhattan courthouse. Speaker Mike Johnson, Senator J. D. Vance, and Representative Matt Gaetz were among those who made appearances.

On-screen, during an early scene in The Fall Guy, the stunt driver Logan Holladay pulls off a move that looks utterly chaotic. He steers an SUV that soars across a beach, parts of it breaking off as it tumbles over and over until landing upside down, in a mess of smoke and debris.  
But Holladay could feel, even before he was told, that he’d completed the stunt as planned.

Democrats and Republicans don’t agree on much, but for a long time, they agreed on this: the more free trade, the better. Now they agree on the opposite: Free trade has gone too far.
On Tuesday, President Joe Biden announced plans to impose steep new tariffs on certain products made in China, including a 100 percent tariff on electric cars.

Preparing a birth plan requires considering the many things that could go wrong during childbirth—or, in the best-case scenario of everything proceeding as normal, how you might attempt to mitigate earth-shattering pain. In Babes, a new comedy about two best friends navigating pregnancy and the delirium of postpartum life, one woman is determined to approach her birth plan differently.

This article was originally published by Hakai Magazine.
The last rat on Tromelin Island—a small teardrop of scrubby sand in the western Indian Ocean near Madagascar—was killed in 2005.
Rats had lived on the island for hundreds of rat generations.