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In a 1998 Atlantic cover story, William H. Calvin offered perhaps the best oceanography lesson to appear in a major national magazine.

Out on the savannas of East Africa, lions have always loomed large. Clocking in at several hundred pounds apiece and capable of ending a zebra’s life in a single swift bite, they’re veritable food-web royalty.
But in certain parts of their habitat, these hefty carnivores are now under threat from an unlikely and petite new nemesis: an invasive ant, puny enough to fit inside a hollowed-out sesame seed. The two creatures rarely, if ever, directly interact.

Were anyone in denial that this would be an election year ruled by conflict and nonsense, a wake-up call came in the form of Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve With Ryan Seacrest. Performing on the variety show, the rock band Green Day changed one line from their 2004 song “American Idiot”: “I’m not a part of a redneck agenda” became “I’m not part of the MAGA agenda.” Thus was born the first culture skirmish of 2024.
Social media lit up with salutes from the left and complaints from the right.

What a bummer. When Roy Wood Jr. stood behind Trevor Noah two weeks ago while Noah was accepting an Emmy for The Daily Show—the show that Noah no longer hosted, the show that hasn’t had a permanent host since he left at the end of 2022—and silently mouthed, for all the world to see, “Please … hire … a … host,” Jon Stewart was probably not … who … he … meant.

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“It’s hard to remember at this point, but before the Hamas slaughter on October 7, Israel was embroiled in the worst civic unrest since its founding,” my colleague Yair Rosenberg wrote earlier this month.

A woman directs a commercially successful and critically acclaimed film that is nominated for a slew of Academy Awards, but none for Best Director. Sound familiar? Back in 1992, this is what happened to Barbra Streisand, whose Oscar snub for directing The Prince of Tides prompted the ceremony’s host, Billy Crystal, to sing “Did this movie direct itself?” to the tune of “Don’t Rain on My Parade” in his opening monologue.

Informed Americans finally seem to understand that the macabre slogan of Yemen’s Houthi militia group—“God is the greatest, death to America, death to Israel, a curse upon the Jews, victory to Islam”—is more than empty rhetoric.
The Houthis are a potent Iranian proxy group, and their slogan, adapted from Iranian revolutionary propaganda, is being made manifest in action.

Last Wednesday, over the course of three and a half hours of arguments, the conservative and liberal justices on the U.S. Supreme Court jousted over whether to overrule a 40-year-old case called Chevron v. National Resources Defense Council.
The Chevron case is famous among lawyers—it’s among the most cited cases of all time—because it established the principle that the courts should defer to federal agencies when they interpret the law in the course of carrying out their duties.