Whether it’s an impression from a cast member or from its teeming roster of celebrity guests, Saturday Night Live’s political sketches often favor highlighting the absurd over making a point. That approach has only snowballed in our current era, when a growing swath of politicians practically write their own punch lines.
At the start of the spring of 2015, Jeffrey, a three-year-old meerkat, was happily eating, tussling with his brothers, and surveying zoo patrons from his usual perch, his forepaws gathered and his black-tipped snout aloft. But one day in April, his caretakers discovered him in his enclosure, so weak that he could barely lift his head. By the time he was brought to Eric Baitchman, the head vet at Massachusetts’s Stone Zoo, Jeffrey was losing consciousness.
We’d gathered that day at the cafeteria’s “Black” table, cracking jokes and philosophizing during the free period that was our perk as upperclassmen. We came in different shades: bone white, tan and brownish, dark as a silhouette. One of my classmates, who fancied himself a lyricist, was insisting that Redman, a witty emcee from nearby Newark, New Jersey, was the greatest rapper ever. This was the late ’90s, and for my money, no one could compete with Jay-Z.
In 2021, on the eve of the Tokyo Olympics, 23 top Chinese swimmers tested positive for the drug trimetazidine. In its proper clinical setting, the medication is used to treat angina. But for an athlete or a coach willing to cheat, it is a performance-enhancing drug, boosting the heart muscle’s functioning. Nonprescription use of trimetazidine, or TMZ, is prohibited at all times, not just during competition; the default sanction for an athlete’s violation is a four-year ban.
Democrats’ efforts to ride the coattails of abortion ballot measures put passage at risk.
Health systems are trying to move more of the work they do to your house.
Federal health officials estimate that roughly 100,000 people enrolled in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program will sign up for subsidized plans through the health insurance marketplace over the next year under the rule.
Dairy cows in nine states are infected and hospitals are looking to the government for guidance.
Anti-abortion and abortion-rights groups fear the Kennedy scion will peel off voters disillusioned with Trump and Biden.
The president is getting more micro in his economic sales pitch as the landscape loses its luster.
Friday’s government report showed that last month’s hiring gain was down sharply from the blockbuster increase of 315,000 in March.
Biden and Trump are both campaigning on warped economic statistics, cherry-picking weird data from the Covid crisis.
By any measure, it amounted to a strong month of hiring.
The concern is that higher rates are putting pressure on households and businesses looking to borrow, weighing on hiring, investment and the housing market.
Our guest is the Haaretz correspondent Amira Hass, the only Israeli Jewish journalist to have spent 30 years living in and reporting from Gaza and the West Bank. She is the recipient of the 2024 Columbia Journalism Award, and on Wednesday she addressed the graduating class of the Columbia Journalism School in New York City.
Human Rights Watch has documented ethnic cleansing in the West Darfur region of Sudan by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces and allied militias against the Masalit people and other non-Arab communities. “These allied militia and the RSF then, from April until June, conducted a rampage of killings, of lootings, of torture, of rape,” says Belkis Wille, associate director with the Crisis, Conflict, and Arms Division at Human Rights Watch.
Ukrainian forces are withdrawing from some areas in the northeastern region of Kharkiv as Russian forces continue a new offensive that has displaced thousands. This latest setback for Ukraine comes more than two years after Russia invaded the country.
A new Human Rights Watch Report finds Israeli forces have attacked humanitarian aid convoys and facilities at least eight times since October 7 despite being given their coordinates. Israeli authorities did not issue advance warnings to any of the aid organizations before the attacks, which killed at least 15 people, including two children, and injured at least 16 others. More than 250 aid workers have been killed in Gaza over the past seven months, according to the United Nations.
Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings or watch full episodes here.
Ahead of next week’s closing arguments for Donald Trump’s hush-money trial, the former president’s allies took turns appearing outside the Manhattan courthouse. Speaker Mike Johnson, Senator J. D. Vance, and Representative Matt Gaetz were among those who made appearances.
On-screen, during an early scene in The Fall Guy, the stunt driver Logan Holladay pulls off a move that looks utterly chaotic. He steers an SUV that soars across a beach, parts of it breaking off as it tumbles over and over until landing upside down, in a mess of smoke and debris.
But Holladay could feel, even before he was told, that he’d completed the stunt as planned.
Democrats and Republicans don’t agree on much, but for a long time, they agreed on this: the more free trade, the better. Now they agree on the opposite: Free trade has gone too far.
On Tuesday, President Joe Biden announced plans to impose steep new tariffs on certain products made in China, including a 100 percent tariff on electric cars.
Preparing a birth plan requires considering the many things that could go wrong during childbirth—or, in the best-case scenario of everything proceeding as normal, how you might attempt to mitigate earth-shattering pain. In Babes, a new comedy about two best friends navigating pregnancy and the delirium of postpartum life, one woman is determined to approach her birth plan differently.
This article was originally published by Hakai Magazine.
The last rat on Tromelin Island—a small teardrop of scrubby sand in the western Indian Ocean near Madagascar—was killed in 2005.
Rats had lived on the island for hundreds of rat generations.
Democrats’ efforts to ride the coattails of abortion ballot measures put passage at risk.
Health systems are trying to move more of the work they do to your house.
Federal health officials estimate that roughly 100,000 people enrolled in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program will sign up for subsidized plans through the health insurance marketplace over the next year under the rule.
Dairy cows in nine states are infected and hospitals are looking to the government for guidance.
Anti-abortion and abortion-rights groups fear the Kennedy scion will peel off voters disillusioned with Trump and Biden.
The president is getting more micro in his economic sales pitch as the landscape loses its luster.
Friday’s government report showed that last month’s hiring gain was down sharply from the blockbuster increase of 315,000 in March.