Earlier this week, Merriam-Webster announced its 2022 word of the year: gaslighting. The dictionary’s selection of the term—defined as “the act or practice of grossly misleading someone, especially for one’s own advantage”—was in part a response to public demand: Searches for gaslighting rose by 1,740 percent over the past 12 months. That interest might reflect the fact that gaslighting describes so much, so efficiently.
Illustrations by Miki LoweWhen the Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky visited America in 1925, he had to admit that there was something grand about the country. He was amazed by electricity and railroad stations. He stepped onto the Brooklyn Bridge, he wrote, “as a crazed believer enters a church”; of the skyscrapers, he marveled, “Some buildings are as high as the stars.” But he was aware of darker currents.
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.Good morning, and welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer reveals what’s keeping them entertained.Today’s special guest is David French, a contributing writer and the author of the newsletter The Third Rail.
This article was originally published in Knowable Magazine.Andreas Fichtner strips a cable of its protective sheath, exposing a glass core thinner than a hair—a fragile, four-kilometer-long fiber that’s about to be fused to another. It’s a fiddly task better suited to a lab, but Fichtner and his colleague Sara Klaasen are doing it atop a windy, frigid ice sheet.After a day’s labor, they have spliced together three segments, creating a 12.5-kilometer-long cable.
As millions of Ukrainians face their first winter of the war, I share in their dread because I know how brutal a winter war can be. As a child in Sarajevo, Bosnia, I survived three long winters in a city under siege. I endured the cold and deprivation alongside the constant anxiety that I might lose my parents to a bullet or a mortar shell every time they went out to forage for wood or water. War and winter are relentless, but so is the human spirit.
With new infections down, health officials will wind down emergency and let it expire by end of next month.
Health officials may allow the declaration to expire, even as they keep their mpox response in place.
The latest round of Medicaid expansion negotiations comes as states prepare for the eventual end of the Covid-19 public health emergency, and as nearly a third of rural hospitals are at risk of closure.
He also criticized China’s Covid-19 response as “shutdowns without a seeming purpose.
Inflation has cooled only slightly and job growth remains strong.
A new POLITICO-Morning Consult poll suggests voters’ views of the economy are baked in.
Housing investment, though, plunged at a 26 percent annual pace, hammered by surging mortgage rates.
According to an NBC News poll released Sunday, 70 percent of registered voters expressed interest in the upcoming election as a “9” or “10” on a 10-point scale.
When high school students in Rockland County, New York, invited renowned activist and professor Angela Davis to speak, the event got shut down in two different venues over protests that she was “too radical.” But the students persevered, and Angela Davis addressed a packed church Thursday night.
More than six months since the Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was killed while reporting in the occupied West Bank, “there is still no accountability in what happened,” says journalist Sharif Abdel Kouddous. He is the correspondent on a new Al Jazeera documentary for the program “Fault Lines” that investigates Abu Akleh’s May killing.
New York Mayor Eric Adams announced this week that police and emergency medical workers will start hospitalizing people with mental illness against their will, even if they pose no threat to others. Rights groups and community organizations have slammed the move as inhumane and are demanding better access to housing and other support for people struggling with mental illness and homelessness. “That does require funding. That does require investment.
With a new Congress being sworn in next month, Democratic lawmakers have a busy lame-duck session during which they will try to pass as many bills as possible before losing their majority in the House of Representatives.
Voters with no religious affiliation supported Democratic candidates and abortion rights by staggering percentages in the 2022 midterm elections.
Last week, it became clear that under new CEO Elon Musk, Twitter had stopped enforcing a policy against spreading disinformation related to COVID-19 and vaccinations. They didn’t make a big announcement about this. It wasn’t until people began wondering why so much outright anti-vax nonsense was suddenly floating around, that it was discovered that Twitter had stopped trying to block such propaganda back in mid-November.
The Telsa CEO vowed to follow the “Christchurch Call” to action to eliminate violent hate speech — days after videos of Christchurch massacres were posted on Twitter.
Connect! Unite! Act! is a weekly series encouraging the creation of face-to-face networks in each congressional district. Groups meet to socialize, support candidates, get out the vote, and engage in other local political actions that help our progressive movement grow and exert maximum influence on the powers that be.
The social media platform’s new CEO appears to have allowed messages sent between the company’s past executives to be released.
There’s a downside to cribbing your political strategy from Donald Trump—namely, Donald Trump doesn’t know what he’s talking about on any subject, ever. (Unless, of course, you want to know which 25 McDonald’s Dollar Menu items pair best with cutting off your gravely ill infant nephew’s health insurance.)
Back in 2020, when Donald Trump was plotting to steal the presidential election, he sought to undermine faith in mail-in ballots.
As people across the globe continue to hate on Twitter following Elon Musk’s takeover, people like Marjorie Taylor Greene seem to be enjoying the newly relaxed regulations. Greene is taking full advantage of the understaffed platform to return to her favorite pastime of the last few years: spreading COVID-19 misinformation between misspellings and antisemitic rants about space lasers.
The GOP Rep.
An International Space Station instrument looks for dust, finds methane vent in the Permian Basin.
By Jerry Redfern for Capital & Main
A news release from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory about its new mineral mapping instrument on the International Space Station sent Oil Conservation Division (OCD) employees scrambling the last week in October.
This is an edition of The Great Game, a newsletter about the 2022 World Cup—and how soccer explains the world. Sign up here.Every now and then, I ask other Argentinians—friends, family, fellow journalists—which World Cup is the first that they remember. Their answers are a reliable reflection of generational differences.
This is an edition of The Great Game, a newsletter about the 2022 World Cup—and how soccer explains the world. Sign up here.When the Polish team captain Robert Lewandowski stole the ball from Abdulelah Al-Malki in last Saturday’s World Cup match between Poland and Saudi Arabia, and went on to score his first goal ever in the tournament, the Poland fans at Cleos Bar and Grill in Chicago erupted in cheers.
Last night, Matt Taibbi, an independent journalist, wrote a lengthy Twitter thread he called “THE TWITTER FILES.” The thread purported to expose how Twitter made the decision to dramatically suppress discussion of the contents of a hard drive from Hunter Biden’s laptop. But it inadvertently did something else entirely: It exposed the new Twitter owner Elon Musk’s profound misunderstandings about the First Amendment.
This is an edition of The Great Game, a newsletter about the 2022 World Cup—and how soccer explains the world. Sign up here.One of Gregg Berhalter’s charms is that he can’t be bothered. Unshaven, attired in the uniform of Team Schlub, he loped along the sideline as if it were still the height of the pandemic and he was enjoying his newfound freedom from showering.
Kristina Karamo, Matthew DePerno and Tudor Dixon are either running for party chair or mulling a run.