One of the best and toughest parts of being a science writer is acting as a kind of jargon liaison. Weird, obscure, aggressively multisyllabic words appear in scientific discourse; I, wielding nothing but a Google Doc, a cellphone, and the Powers of the Internet™, wrest these terms from their academic hidey-holes and try to pin them down with some endearing yet accurate analogy.
“These are unique and extraordinary circumstances,” White House counsel Dana Remus said.
Eighteen-hour workdays with no lunch breaks. Car accidents caused by sleep deprivation. A crew member who returned to set the day after a miscarriage.For months, members of a union representing more than 150,000 behind-the-scenes workers in the entertainment industry have shared hundreds of these stories on social media—anonymous testimonies about the grueling conditions on TV and film sets.
This article contains spoilers through the Season 2 finale of Ted Lasso.In an episode halfway through the new season of Ted Lasso, Apple’s sweet and strange series about an optimistic American coach thrown into the cesspool of British soccer, the three AFC Richmond fans who compose the show’s dim-witted Greek chorus get ready to watch the FA Cup quarterfinal in a pub. “I swear, if we actually win this match, I will burn this pub to the ground,” one boasts.
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.
Adam Maida / The Atlantic
In September, The Wall Street Journal published a report, based on leaked documents, describing Facebook’s awareness of the harmful effects one of its platforms was having on young people. “Thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse,” the company’s internal research revealed. “Comparisons on Instagram can change how young women view and describe themselves.
Some research advocates fear the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health could be left behind in a crush of end-of-session business and lose momentum.
As Republican lawmakers attempt to make it harder to vote in states across the country, we look at the life and legacy of Fannie Lou Hamer, the civil rights pioneer who helped organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Historian Keisha Blain writes about Hamer in her new book, “Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America.
The family of Henrietta Lacks has filed a lawsuit against biotech company Thermo Fisher Scientific for making billions in profit from the “HeLa” cell line. Henrietta Lacks was an African American patient at Johns Hopkins University Hospital. Doctors kept her tissue samples without her consent for experimental studies while treating her for cervical cancer in 1951.
The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded Friday morning to Filipina journalist Maria Ressa and Russian newspaper editor Dmitry Muratov for their work to “safeguard freedom of expression.” Ressa has repeatedly been arrested by the government of Rodrigo Duterte for the groundbreaking work of her news site Rappler, which has exposed Duterte’s deadly war on drugs that has killed tens of thousands.
Support for vaccine mandates was divided along partisan, racial and ethnic lines.
Asked whether he had an FDA nominee, President Joe Biden told reporters on Tuesday that “We’ll be talking about that in a little bit.
The new investment builds on $2 billion the administration is using to boost production of a number of different Covid-19 tests.
The central bank plans to begin yanking back assistance to the economy as early as next month, and many Fed officials are open to increasing interest rates next year.
Key aspects of the economy are doing better than before the pandemic, which supporters say shows how government spending can help.
With the deadline looming, the White House is starting to ramp up pressure on Republicans.
The central bank said it’s making progress toward its goals of averaging 2 percent inflation over time and reaching maximum employment.
Biden laid blame for the sluggish growth of U.S. jobs on the “impact of the Delta variant” of the coronavirus.
Derecka Purnell draws from her experience as a human rights lawyer in her new book, published this month, “Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom,” to argue that police reform is an inadequate compromise to calls for abolition. Since the murders of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville in 2020, many states have passed laws aimed at reforming police, but congressional talks at the federal level have broken down.
In the news today: Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell announced yesterday that his party will not stand in the way of postponing the current debt ceiling fight until December. Finding at least nine other Republicans willing to go along with that announcement, however, proved a challenge, and a filibuster scuttling the deal was avoided today by only the narrowest of margins.
Republicans were in total disarray Thursday after leader Mitch McConnell blinked and decided to allow a floor vote on saving the country from economic disaster by raising the debt limit. McConnell made that decision but apparently didn’t do a vote count beforehand. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer scheduled the vote for 7:30 p.m. ET Thursday. Within an hour of the vote, it’s not at all clear that McConnell can pull it off.
The best thing you can say about John Cornyn is that he’s the least—or rather less—revolting U.S. senator from Texas. That’s not saying much, of course. After all, even if the senior senator from the Lone Star State were an intestinal fluke who emerged fortnightly to sing Captain & Tennille B-sides during official state dinners, he still wouldn’t be as revolting as Ted “Probably Not the Zodiac Killer” Cruz.
On Tuesday, former White House press secretary and top Trump aide Stephanie Grisham released her tell-all book, something something something blah blah blah. Early leaks from the book gave a very believable account of the insecurities, the arrogance, the pettiness, and the incompetence that emanated from the Trump administration. Grisham is an unreliable narrator but so is every single person she talks about.
Mia Amor Mottley is not a household name here in the United States, though she should be. Since her rise to become the first female prime minister of Barbados in 2018, Mottley has become a voice for her nation, the Caribbean, and countries worldwide facing the global challenges of climate change, COVID-19, economic inequality, colonialism, racism, and militarism.
The newly released clips reveal officers making racist remarks and celebrating as they shoot rubber bullets at protesters.
The House committee investigating the attack on the U.S. Capitol wants to hear from Mark Meadows, Steve Bannon, Dan Scavino and Kash Patel.
#MississippiFlagGuy and #KingstonAsh were identified by online sleuths back in February.
The court concluded that the officer convicted of killing George Floyd is ineligible for a public defender to represent him in his appeal.
Organ recipients who aren’t vaccinated against COVID-19 are at much greater risk of dying from the disease, data shows.
Millions of miles away, on the surface of Mars, inside an enormous crater, a little NASA rover is taking some pictures. The view is quite stunning there—miles of undisturbed cinnamon terrain scattered with pebbles and boulders, with silky dunes where the craggy bedrock doesn’t peek through. But when the rover, named Perseverance, sent the photos back home from the crater, known as Jezero, scientists saw something more.