New Year’s resolutions are a time for reflection—a chance to think about the limited time we have on this Earth and how to use it wisely.Oliver Burkeman is a writer who focuses on this nexus of mortality and productivity. He is the author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mere Mortals (4,000 weeks is about the length of the average American’s life span).
If an asteroid were to gain sentience and set a course for Earth, might it pick a time like the holidays in order to catch the humans off guard? Well, that’s not going to work: Someone is monitoring space for incoming objects, holidays or not.Kelly Fast manages the Near-Earth Object Observations Program at NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office, which funds observatory teams at U.S. institutions using telescopes located around the world.
The world’s largest volcano is erupting for the first time since 1984. Hawaii’s Mauna Loa, a giant mound of a volcano that looks so much like Mars that researchers actually hold Mars simulations there, has stirred. Authorities say the eruption does not threaten any local communities; no evacuation orders have been issued.For scientists, it’s an exciting development.
A canker sore—a painful white ulcer inside the mouth—might be brought on by stress. Or the wrong toothpaste. Or certain foods: tomatoes, peanuts, cinnamon. Or an iron deficiency. Or an allergy. Or a new prescription. Or an underlying autoimmune disease.Even though millions of people suffer from them every year, researchers still don’t know much about what fundamentally causes these sores.
After the turkey comes the pumpkin pie; after the pumpkin pie, the sales.Black Friday is America’s biggest shopping day, with some consumers lining up in the wee hours of the morning to get first grabs at the discounts. But an equally chaotic celebration takes place online.
In the weeks since Elon Musk took over as CEO of Twitter, the company has laid off nearly half of its workers and offered the remaining employees an ultimatum: Commit to being “extremely hardcore” going forward or leave the company. According to The New York Times, hundreds of employees have opted for the latter.
Large numbers of American workers are reporting feeling stressed and exhausted on the job. Some of that is beyond the reach of the workplace—people have been living through more than two years of a global pandemic, and, more personally, most people have stressors at home that are hard to leave behind when the workday starts. But some elements of burnout do lie within an employer’s control, because they can result from the way jobs and workplaces are structured.
Every October, Joel Best starts getting calls from journalists, and he knows exactly what they want to talk about: candy. Specifically, they want to discuss the stubborn fear that bad actors might tamper with children’s trick-or-treat stashes by lacing candy with razors or fentanyl.
Hayes Valley is an aspirational neighborhood located in central San Francisco, the main strip of which is lined with trendy stores and restaurants. It’s also a neighborhood where, according to Davis Smith, the CEO of the outdoor-gear brand Cotopaxi, retailers have begun to lock their doors during the day for fear of being robbed in broad daylight.
This week, Ian slammed into southwestern Florida as a Category 4 (almost 5) hurricane. The state is still very much in the process of assessing the damage: Emergency teams have rescued hundreds of stranded people, while some 1.9 million people remain without power. Officials have identified as many as 21 dead, and that number may still rise.Ahead of the storm’s landfall, Florida officials ordered the evacuation of about 2.5 million people.
For now, the country’s railroads will continue to run. A national strike—which would’ve started at midnight tonight and disrupted both freight and passenger rail—was averted by a tentative deal between union leaders and railroad management. That deal still needs to be ratified by the union members themselves.President Joe Biden praised the agreement as “a big win for America.
The first thing you need to know about quiet quitting is that it’s not actually quitting. Instead, the quitter keeps their job and chooses to do only the bare minimum rather than go above and beyond. The second thing you need to know is that the term is brand new, so everyone is still figuring out the rest. To cite the Oxford English Dictionary of our very online times, Google searches for quiet quitting were basically nonexistent until this past August.But now it’s everywhere.
Two days after FBI agents executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago, details about the underlying investigation are still scarce. News reports suggest that it is connected to concerns around presidential record-keeping—that Trump White House documents that should have been in the hands of a professional archivist somehow ended up on vacation at the former president’s Florida home.
Coronavirus cases are up more than 25 percent in the United States over the past two weeks—and those are just the ones we know about. Experts warn that the true size of the current outbreak could be 10, or even 14, times worse than the official counts suggest.Take Hawaii, for example.
“Like everyone, and I’d say especially like every parent, I am of course saddened and horrified by the latest mass shooting-murder. My sympathies to all,” James Fallows, a longtime correspondent for this magazine, wrote nearly a decade ago on July 20, 2012. That day, a gunman had opened fire on theater-goers in Aurora, Colorado. A dozen people were dead.
Every weekday evening, our editors guide you through the biggest stories of the day, help you discover new ideas, and surprise you with moments of delight. Subscribe to get this delivered to your inbox.The country’s latest jobs report is a dose of good news for an economy still struggling with inflation: The United States added more than 400,000 new positions in March, continuing its rebound from dramatic losses in the spring of 2020.
We’re fumbling our way through another challenging January. Writers and editors from around our newsroom share the poems that they’re turning to this month. Then: Here’s what else to read, listen to, and watch this weekend.“I Could Be a Whale Shark” by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
It’s been a difficult couple of pandemic years for parents of young children.
Every weekday evening, our editors guide you through the biggest stories of the day, help you discover new ideas, and surprise you with moments of delight. Subscribe to get this delivered to your inbox.The United States is logging record-setting numbers of coronavirus cases in the final week of 2021. The country is now averaging more than 300,000 new cases per day as it prepares to enter a third calendar year spent battling the pandemic.
Every weekday evening, our editors guide you through the biggest stories of the day, help you discover new ideas, and surprise you with moments of delight. Subscribe to get this delivered to your inbox.The United States is logging record-setting numbers of coronavirus cases in the final week of 2021. The country is now averaging more than 300,000 new cases per day as it prepares to enter a third calendar year spent battling the pandemic.
Every weekday evening, our editors guide you through the biggest stories of the day, help you discover new ideas, and surprise you with moments of delight. Subscribe to get this delivered to your inbox.
(Maria Chimishkyan)
If we’re going to have to face another bout of pandemic uncertainty, then, hey: We at least deserve some good tunes.This week, our culture writer Spencer Kornhaber summarized the year in music, picking his top 10 albums.
Every weekday evening, our editors guide you through the biggest stories of the day, help you discover new ideas, and surprise you with moments of delight. Subscribe to get this delivered to your inbox.Inflation was bad; now it’s worse. Prices jumped again in November, new data reveal, moving the inflation rate to 6.8 percent—its highest since 1982. The last time prices rose similarly to this, Ronald Reagan was president and the movie E.T. had just hit theaters.
Now that it’s December, you may be tempted to settle in and get cozy. That doesn’t mean your entertainment has to be bland.To help spice up this first weekend of the last month of the year, I asked our culture writer Shirley Li to pick a few spunky or nerve-wracking shows to stave off the winter slump. Happy watching.1. YellowjacketsThis new coming-of-age survival thriller is “sort of like Lost meets Lord of the Flies meets Jennifer’s Body,” Shirley tells me.
The coronavirus is flying through the Greek alphabet. On Friday, the World Health Organization designated Omicron a “variant of concern”—spooking stock markets and triggering a new round of international travel bans. Today, President Joe Biden echoed the WHO’s language, calling Omicron a “cause for concern,” but warned Americans not to panic.Little is known about the variant so far, my colleague Katherine J. Wu says.
For many people, cooking Thanksgiving dinner means reaching for the tried and true. But even the classics can benefit from a refresh sometimes. (Just ask Taylor Swift.)In other words, you have our permission to rotate in a new dish or update your favorites. Below, Atlantic cooks offer personal tips and inspiration. Just be sure to get your plans in order before the holiday rush on grocery stores.Make your main vegetarian.
Every weekday evening, our editors guide you through the biggest stories of the day, help you discover new ideas, and surprise you with moments of delight. Subscribe to get this delivered to your inbox.The scariest weekend of the year is here. I asked our critic David Sims to select a few movies to get you in the Halloween mood.David’s five picks span the universe of spook to fulfill the needs of wannabe witches, little pumpkins, and hard-core-horror fans alike.
Every weekday evening, our editors guide you through the biggest stories of the day, help you discover new ideas, and surprise you with moments of delight. Subscribe to get this delivered to your inbox.
Getty; The Atlantic
Certain moments in history leave long shadows. The January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol is sure to be one of them, even though the fallout is far from settled. Not even a year has passed, and already we are seeing glimpses of its disturbing cultural legacy.
It’s not just toilet paper anymore. Pandemic pressure on the global supply chain is causing disruptions and shortages of a diverse assortment of items, such as books, furniture, wood, and COVID tests.“Americans are settling into a new phase of the pandemic economy,” my colleague Derek Thompson writes. “This is the Everything Shortage.”
The global supply chain is a disaster. And not just one part of it, either.
Every weekday evening, our editors guide you through the biggest stories of the day, help you discover new ideas, and surprise you with moments of delight. Subscribe to get this delivered to your inbox.Facebook went down. Really down. The social-networking site was offline for six hours today. Instagram and WhatsApp, also owned by the company, were likewise inaccessible. At this time, we don’t know what caused the outage, which the company acknowledged on Twitter.
Getty; The Atlantic
Every weekday evening, our editors guide you through the biggest stories of the day, help you discover new ideas, and surprise you with moments of delight. Subscribe to get this delivered to your inbox.Fall is here, and the air is getting crisp, which means it’s the perfect time to snuggle up and press play on a new work of audio storytelling. I asked writers and editors from around our newsroom to recommend a podcast episode worth your listen.
Tomorrow marks 20 years since the attacks on September 11, 2001. The adrenaline shock of that morning has long worn off, leaving behind only the horror, the loss, and two decades’ worth of grief.
It’s tempting to use this anniversary to consider the attacks as a greater political or cultural moment, to analyze where the country went right or wrong in its response. And doing so is important.