Ariana Grande is, notably, a good singer; she has a four-octave range that she uses for R&B ballads, pop bangers, and musical-theater showstoppers. But her stint hosting Saturday Night Live last night also proved that Grande is good at being a bad singer. In one of the episode’s first sketches, she played a bridesmaid performing a parody of Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso.
Harvest moon.
My howling heart—
mouth a mask.
What say you?
The Sun
knows nothing.
Only night—
my voice raised in it
tall as wheat.
The maize
of your breath.
The body
betrays us—
so we run.
Still the moon
bearing babies
above us, waxes
unlike the leaves.
Burn on,
saith the trees.
*
Save yourself.
*
October, almost—
ghost moon.
Haunted heart.
No, I won’t.
The rain slows, shows
the earthworms
they were wrong—
far harder to breathe
here, above earth,
than below,
where the storms
shelter their own.
To watch baseball or any other sport is to confront the fundamental unpredictability of the universe, its utter refusal to bend to your wishes, no matter how fervent. In recent years, some broadcasters have sought to soothe this existential uncertainty with statistics. This season, ESPN announced that a special graphic would appear on all of its Major League Baseball telecasts.
This year is the 40th anniversary of the publication of Sandra Cisneros’s classic The House on Mango Street. The novel tells the story of Esperanza Cordero, a Mexican American girl coming of age in a Latino enclave in Chicago, observing her family and community as she decides who she wants to be. Cisneros was only 21 when she started writing the book; it has sold more than 7 million copies, and earlier this year became the first title by a U.S.
More than 530 years after Christopher Columbus led an expedition across the Atlantic Ocean to the New World, many Americans still see the navigator as a symbol of their country’s origins. Others see him as a progenitor of colonialism, enslavement, and genocide. So the day that honors him, the second Monday of October, is unusually polarizing among federal holidays. Just 16 states will observe Columbus Day this year. Some states and many cities instead observe Indigenous Peoples’ Day.
Goodbye, haunted houses. Hello, gingerbread houses.
Climate migration doesn’t work the way you might expect.
Why America still loves a weatherman.
The stakes of overpriced dinner delivery have never been higher.
Missteps by the World Health Organization, a vaccine manufacturer and an African country led to another health emergency, experts say.
Trump says he’ll veto legislation to ban the procedure.
The ruling allows abortions to resume beyond six weeks into pregnancy.
Still angry about the Covid response, GOP lawmakers want to overhaul the National Institutes of Health if they win in November.
The Democratic nominee isn’t campaigning much on the Biden administration’s bigger, slower-moving policies.
The Treasury secretary is defending her legacy — and warning that the stability of the U.S. economy is at stake.
It was her first solo interview with a national network as the Democratic presidential nominee.
Interest rate cut “is not a declaration of victory, it’s a declaration of progress.
The move signals that the central bank is growing nervous about the declining labor market.
We speak with the director of The Apprentice, “the movie Trump doesn’t want you to see,” which opens today in theaters despite legal threats from the former president. The film looks at how Trump was mentored by Roy Cohn, former chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy during the Red Scare. He went on to represent Trump as he built his New York real estate empire, and “was the person who sort of built Trump, as a person, as a brand, as an identity,” says Abbasi.
A Japanese group of atomic bomb survivors, Nihon Hidankyo, has won the Nobel Peace Prize as fears grow of a new nuclear arms race. The head of the group has compared Gaza today to Japan 80 years ago when the U.S. bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We feature a Democracy Now! interview with Setsuko Thurlow, a survivor of the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima and an anti-nuclear activist, and get response from Joseph Gerson, president of the Campaign for Peace, Disarmament and Common Security, a U.
As the Israeli military continues its assaults on Gaza and Lebanon, which have included the targeting of hospitals and ambulances and the killing of medical personnel, among other violations of international law, we speak to a doctor currently volunteering in Beirut. Dr. Bing Li is an emergency medicine physician and U.S. Army veteran who also volunteered at Indonesian Hospital in northern Gaza earlier this year.
We look at the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in southwest Florida, which runs a radio station called Radio Conciencia that helped immigrant farmworkers prepare for Hurricane Milton and other storms. Established in 2003, the community radio station broadcasts in Spanish, Creole and other languages to share crucial information during natural disasters. “This is always scary for us whenever a hurricane hits in our area,” says organizer Gerardo Reyes Chavez.
“What a great day for Korea!” my mom wrote to me on Thursday. “Nobel for Han Kang!”
For the past few decades, several South Korean authors have been bruited about as contenders for the Nobel Prize in Literature, notably the poet Ko Un and the novelist Hwang Sok-yong, elder statesmen who were both previously jailed for political activism. As an American-born writer of Korean ancestry, I liked these authors in theory, but their actual work didn’t jump off the page for me, an English-only reader.
The huge solemnity of his eyes, grave and sober as a child’s but with a spark of ancient, euphoric irony back in there somewhere. The gangster-ish heaviness of his hands, dynastic hands, Godfather hands. The too-big head. The carved, impassive face that suddenly droops, drags, goes baggy with the weight of being alive. The voice, New York nasal as a young man, roaring and combusted as he ages, the lungs working like bellows, the larynx shooting flames.
Arizona is one of several states where right-leaning groups are backing conservative judges as they prepare to challenge newly passed ballot measures protecting abortion.
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.
Although Election Day is more than three weeks away, early voting is already under way in many states. Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are ramping up their efforts to win over undecided and unlikely voters, especially in key swing states.
Politically, I’m a bit of a wanderer. I grew up in a progressive family and was a proud democratic socialist through college. Then, in the Reagan-Thatcher era of the 1980s, after watching the wretched effects some progressive social policies had on poor neighborhoods in Chicago, I switched over to the right—and then remained a happy member of Team Red for decades. During the era of social thinkers like James Q.
Over the past month, as meteorologists warned millions of Americans to protect themselves from impending major hurricanes, they were forced to contemplate another, unexpected danger. Threatening messages spilled into forecasters’ inboxes. Meteorologists, those messages said, are in cahoots with the government to create hurricanes out of thin air and steer the storms toward specific places and people. They should suffer for it.
In the age of climate change, is owning your home a bigger liability than an asset?
Goodbye, haunted houses. Hello, gingerbread houses.