Saahil Desai

This summer, one question has been living rent-free in my head: Do I look like a giant dork? Faced with miserable heat and humidity, I have surrendered to JisuLife, the maker of a plastic sea-green neck fan that spurts cool air onto my face. Mine was $28.30; it’s rechargeable and looks absolutely ridiculous—like if Beats headphones had a baby with a travel pillow.
At one point, I put on my best summer clothes for a dinner out and then wrapped the device around my neck before leaving the house.

The cocktail is $21, and it is absolutely worth it. Or at least that is what I’ve heard about a certain gussied-up old-fashioned that keeps making the rounds on my Instagram. Rum is infused with rose petals, ginger, and a smattering of other Indian spices and then mixed with orange juice and whole milk. The dairy curdles and is strained out drip-by-drip until the final clarified liquid is as clear as glass—a recipe that took two months to develop and requires 36 hours of preparation.

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Presidential elections in the United States are prolonged, chaotic, and torturous. (Please, not another election needle …) But they don’t come close to rivaling what happens in India.

During the torture ritual that was doing my taxes this year, I was surprised to find myself giddy after reading these words: “You are now chatting with IRS Representative-1004671045.” I had gotten stuck trying to parse my W-2, which, under “Box 14: Other,” contained a mysterious $389.70 deduction from my overall pay last year. No explanation. No clues. Nothing. I tapped the chat button on my tax software for help, expecting to be sucked into customer-service hell.

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present, surface delightful treasures, and examine the American idea. Sign up here.Consider—just for one terrible, stressful, bleak moment—if our forebearers in Naples had never invented pizza. No perfectly charred Margherita pies, no late-night Domino’s delivery, nothing.

Of the many quirks of Elon Musk’s Cybertruck, the Cybertruckiest of them all might be this: its windshield wiper. Not wipers, wiper. Tesla’s electric pickup, which debuted today and starts at $61,000, has just a single gigantic rain-wicking blade—a monstrosity that stretches several feet and that Musk says is “like a katana.” (The original idea, laser-beam wipers, apparently didn’t work.

It’s not that hard to say my name, Saahil Desai. Saahil: rhymes with sawmill, or at least that gets you 90 percent there. Desai: like decide with the last bit chopped off. That’s really it.More often than not, however, my name gets butchered into a menagerie of gaffes and blunders. The most common one, Sa-heel, is at least an honest attempt—unlike its mutant twin, a monosyllabic mess that comes out sounding like seal. Others defy all possible logic.

Even a halfway-decent political campaign knows you better than you know yourself. A candidate’s army of number crunchers vacuums up any morsel of personal information that might affect the choice we make at the polls. In 2020, Donald Trump and the Republican Party compiled 3,000 data points on every single voter in America. In 2012, the data nerds helped Barack Obama parse the electorate to microtarget his door-knocking efforts toward the most-persuadable swing voters. And in 1960, John F.

Congrats! You are probably about to eat the very best Thanksgiving meal of your life.Maybe your turkey is drier than a World Cup fan in Qatar, or maybe you overcommitted and nothing is ready by 8 p.m. Maybe you’re making the same exact menu as last year. But if you round up every single Thanksgiving dinner in the United States—all the birds and pies and mac and cheeses and green-bean casseroles—on average the meal will be just marginally, imperceptibly tastier than last year.

In the end, Uber Pool had to go. By mid-March 2020, chunks of America were already in lockdown, AMC had boarded up its movie theaters, and the country’s toilet-paper reserves were getting wiped out. The novel coronavirus was here, and sharing rides with strangers in a different stranger’s car had become yet another part of life upended by the pandemic.

In economic-speak, the Ukraine crisis has been a “supply shock.” In English, that means that in the United States you’ll now find record-high gas prices, liquor stores devoid of Russian vodka, and … uhh … Americans heading into their local banks and politely asking for hundreds of dollars in nickels.Let me explain.

Variants are a little bit like breakups: There’s never a great time for one to strike, but there absolutely are terrible times. With Omicron, it’s hard to imagine a worse possible moment. The promise of this holiday season has long been that Americans would finally get to make up for all the getaways and family reunions that didn’t happen last winter.

Imagine what it would be like to time-travel from 2019 to now. If you were just strolling down a city street, and not talking to anyone, would you even know that we’re in a pandemic? Sidewalks are no longer deserted, most pedestrians have stopped wearing masks outside, and cardboard signs praising essential workers have been thrown into the recycling bin. But there’s still one big tip-off that things are a little fishy: all those outdoor-dining setups.

Editor’s Note: This article is part of our coverage of The Atlantic Festival. Learn more and watch festival sessions here. For years now, artificial intelligence has been hailed as both a savior and a destroyer. The technology really can make our lives easier, letting us summon our phones with a “Hey, Siri” and (more importantly) assisting doctors on the operating table.

I like to think of America’s fast-food chains as a bunch of dysfunctional family members. McDonald’s is the golden boy, the kid who’s good at everything and won’t shut up about it. Burger King is the jealous younger brother. KFC is perhaps the cousin who still wears cargo shorts. And then, there’s Taco Bell: fast food’s problem child.The purveyor of fluorescent nacho cheese is just plain weird.

America’s hot vax summer began exactly how it was billed—less pandemic, more vacci-cations. Over the past few months, Americans have gone nuts with travel. Airbnbs are booked months in advance. Good luck finding a rental car. Even cruises are back … unfortunately. For a couple of days in July, airports were busier than they were at the same point in 2019.But you know what happened next.

Essential workers who tugged the United States through the pandemic have not gotten much compensation for what they’ve had to endure, but hey, they did get some perks. Fifteen percent off mattresses for teachers! Allbirds at $35 off with the discount code HEALTHCAREHERO.

Restaurants are back, baby! Head over to that reopened neighborhood joint, and snag a table with some friends you haven’t seen in a year. Overpriced cocktails have never sounded so good. Sit on the patio, and take in late May for all it’s worth. Oh, the waiter’s coming over; have you decided on drinks yet? Sorry, what’s that? I can’t hear you.

Here’s a cool trick for blowing any American’s mind. Tell us that in France, so many boulangeries shut down for vacation every summer that it can be tough to snag a baguette. Bakers aren’t the only ones who get time off. In August, up to half of the country’s salaried employees have been known to take at least a full week off from work. Half!Americans are good at lots of different things, but going on vacation is not one of them.

All pandemic long, I’ve been hunting for a way—please, literally any way—to bludgeon myself into exercising with some kind of regularity. The quarantine life has turned me into an Indian Gollum. My arms, never quite jacked but at least semi-toned, currently have about as much bulk as overcooked linguini. Whatever seedlings of abs I had last March are now buried deep beneath a permafrost of flab.

What do I do now? COVID-19 diagnoses start with a barrage of grueling decisions and paralyzing worries. Did I infect anyone else? Whom will I tell? Where can I isolate? Should I go to the hospital? Will I be okay?Millions of Americans have fallen sick with this virus, and we’ve seen the full kaleidoscope of ways people react and cope with illness. Some have dutifully rung up contact tracers and locked themselves in total isolation.