In 1990, the U.S. government began mailing out envelopes, each containing a presidential letter of apology and a $20,000 check from the Treasury, to more than 82,000 Japanese Americans who, during World War II, were robbed of their homes, jobs, and rights, and incarcerated in camps. This effort, which took a decade to complete, remains a rare attempt to make reparations to a group of Americans harmed by force of law.
Updated at 2:45 p.m. ET on June 12, 2022.Eating alone began as a matter of circumstance.In the spring of 2020, as my world shrunk to the square footage of my apartment, food became a mode of injecting pleasure and delight into an otherwise bleak and lonely period of my life. I frequently ordered pizza from my favorite local spot in Washington, D.C.; I sampled different brands of instant ramen; I baked loaves of banana bread. In some ways, this routine was familiar.
For the chance to escape severe debt, the characters in Netflix’s hugely popular survival drama Squid Game would risk anything, even death. Take the protagonist Seong Gi-hun. Unemployed, he spends his days in Seoul gambling on horse races and has signed away his organs as collateral to his creditors. His deficits, both financial and personal, hurt the people closest to him: He hasn’t paid child support or alimony to his ex-wife; he mooches off his elderly mother.
For the chance to escape severe debt, the characters in Netflix’s hugely popular survival drama Squid Game would risk anything, even death. Take the protagonist Seong Gi-hun. Unemployed, he spends his days in Seoul gambling on horse races and has signed away his organs as collateral to his creditors. His deficits, both financial and personal, hurt the people closest to him: He hasn’t paid child support or alimony to his ex-wife; he mooches off his elderly mother.
Editor’s Note: This article is part of our coverage of The Atlantic Festival. Learn more and watch festival sessions here. Despite the whirlwind in Washington this week, Marco Rubio isn’t worried—at least for his own party. As of now, Democrats have reached a deal to stave off a government shutdown until December, but they still need to prevent another crisis: a first-ever default on the national debt.
Editor’s Note: This article is part of our coverage of The Atlantic Festival. Learn more and watch festival sessions here. Nancy Pelosi is juggling a series of looming deadlines. House Democrats must avoid a government shutdown and federal default, and they need to reach a consensus on advancing President Biden’s agenda through two different bills.
“The indignity of being Asian in this country has been underreported,” the poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong writes in Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning. Hong, 44, is the daughter of Korean immigrants and was raised in Los Angeles. Although she has written about race in her poetry, Minor Feelings is her first nonfiction book, a blend of memoir and cultural criticism.
The time we’re living through will one day become history. This is always true, of course, but the coronavirus pandemic has, perhaps more than any other event in living memory, made people hyperaware that their present will be remembered in the future. And this new, strange sensation has compelled many to capture the moment for posterity.The urge hit Janis Whitlock, a research scientist at Cornell University, when she was walking outside in early March.