On January 24, 2017, the poet Jane Hirshfield was boiling mad. Five days into Donald Trump’s presidency, his administration had cut mentions of climate change from its website; in several federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Agriculture, employees were forbidden from speaking publicly about their research without authorization.

This article was originally published by Undark Magazine.In October 2021, 84-year-old Jim Yeldell was diagnosed with Stage 3 lung cancer. The first drug he tried disrupted his balance and coordination, so his doctor halved the dose to minimize these side effects, Yeldell recalls. In addition, his physician recommended a course of treatment that included chemotherapy, radiation, and a drug targeting a specific genetic mutation.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer reveals what’s keeping them entertained.Today’s special guest is Atlantic contributing writer Ian Bogost, who is also the director of the film-and-media-studies program at Washington University in St.

Anglophone readers of Mieko Kanai’s whirling, urgent novel Mild Vertigo will face only one disappointment: There’s not yet much more where it came from. Kanai was born in Japan in 1947 and has written roughly 30 novels and story collections over the course of a career that has also included poetry, criticism, and essay writing, but so far only a fraction of her body of work has appeared in English.Mild Vertigo, translated by Polly Barton, should generate high demand for more.

In 2017, as Hurricane Harvey came barreling toward Texas, Patrick Rios, the mayor of a coastal community called Rockport, had a morbid message for residents who might consider ignoring an evacuation order. “We’re suggesting if people are going to stay here, mark their arm with a Sharpie marker with their name and Social Security number,” Rios warned would-be holdouts.

The smoke is back. Large swaths of America are once again engulfed in a toxic haze that’s drifted down from Canada, which is experiencing its worst fire season on record. Our northern neighbor has burned through a record-breaking 8.2 million hectares so far this year, sending smoke plumes as far as Europe.

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.Say you have dinner plans with a friend on Friday night. You’ve already chosen a spot and made the reservation. Just as you’re about to head out to meet them, they text you to cancel, saying that they’re exhausted from the week.

One of the through lines in Grease, the 1978 John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John musical, is the squelching of chewing gum. Members of the Pink Ladies, a rebellious clique of high-school girls, repeatedly appear on-screen either smoking cigarettes or chewing the confectionery. In the film, gum identifies the rule breakers: It was so core to Grease that a production designer claimed that he ordered 100,000 sticks for the actors.

A few weeks ago, as the first wave of smoke from the Canadian wildfires rolled south, I was getting ready to drive from Charlottesville, Virginia, about 18 hours west to my hometown of Rogers, Arkansas, to visit family. I figured that by the time I hit the Virginia–North Carolina border, where I was planning to camp, I would have outrun the haze. But it followed me past the campsite and along I-40 in Tennessee, all the way to my corner of Arkansas, just 20 minutes away from Oklahoma.