This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.
Before Pauline Kael was Pauline Kael, she was still very much Pauline Kael. When her first essay for The Atlantic ran in November 1964, she had not yet lost it at the movies. She had not yet become Pauline Kael, the vaunted and polarizing film critic for The New Yorker.
For the past couple of weeks, the vortex of campus politics has threatened to suck Joe Biden in. Protesters at colleges have dubbed the president “Genocide Joe” and demanded that he act to stop Israeli actions in Gaza, while conservatives have sought to blame Biden for disorder at colleges and universities.
In 2014, six months before she died, Joan Rivers made a triumphant return to NBC’s The Tonight Show, marking the first time she’d been featured on the show since the 1980s. Regal in black sequins and an obscene amount of emeralds, she carried a doughnut pillow with her as a visual gag and proceeded to reduce Jimmy Fallon to hysterics with jokes about her aging vagina. When Fallon broached the subject of her long absence, she briefly broke character. “I was banned for 26 years,” she said.
Workers around the world rallied Wednesday to mark May Day, with many calling on the labor movement to stand in solidarity with the Palestinian cause. In New York, Democracy Now! spoke to demonstrators who demanded that U.S. unions apply political pressure for a ceasefire in Gaza and to stop their government’s arms trade with Israel. “Workers do have the power to shape the world,” said Palestinian researcher Riya Al’sanah, who was among thousands gathered at a May Day rally in Manhattan.
A new report from Amnesty International finds the sale of U.S.weapons to Israel for use in its indiscriminate assault in Gaza is in violation of U.S. and international law. We speak to Budour Hassan, a Palestinian writer and contributing researcher to the report, who says the U.S. is “complicit in the commission of war crimes” and must “halt all arms transfer to Israel as long as Israel continues to fail to comply with international humanitarian law and international human rights law.
We look at how university administrators have responded to Palestine solidarity protests by students with Frederick Lawrence, former president of Brandeis University and now the CEO of the Phi Beta Kappa Society and a lecturer at Georgetown Law School. Brandeis was founded in 1948 by the American Jewish community in the wake of the Holocaust and named after the first Jewish Supreme Court justice, the celebrated free speech advocate Louis Brandeis.
We get an update from the University of California, Los Angeles, where police in riot gear began dismantling a pro-Palestinian encampment early Thursday, using flashbang grenades, rubber bullets and tear gas, and arresting dozens of students. The raid came just over a day after pro-Israel counterprotesters armed with sticks, metal rods and fireworks attacked students at the encampment. The Real News Network reporter Mel Buer was on the scene during the attack.
Gary Ruskin, founder of U.S. Right to Know, says the government is covering it up.
Lawmakers aren’t willing to meet the president’s budget requests, casting doubt on reaching the program’s ambitious goal.
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.
Last month’s job growth was up from a revised gain of 229,000 jobs in January.
The president’s team thinks it’s had a historically successful first term, delivering victories on the economy, climate, drug pricing and more. But many Americans aren’t feeling it.
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The turmoil on college campuses and at the Democratic National Convention in 1968 helped propel Richard Nixon to victory—and marked the long-term transformation of national politics. Donald Trump is likely hoping that history will repeat itself.
The legislation, which is expected to be soon signed into law by Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs, will preserve access to the procedure for millions of women.
The robot is shaped like a human, but it sure doesn’t move like one. It starts supine on the floor, pancake-flat. Then, in a display of superhuman joint mobility, its legs curl upward from the knees, sort of like a scorpion tail, until its feet settle firmly on the floor beside its hips. From there, it stands up, a swiveling mass of silver limbs. The robot’s ring-light head turns a full 180 degrees to face the camera, as though possessed. Then it lurches forward at you.
President Joe Biden won a decisive Electoral College victory in 2020 by restoring old Democratic advantages in the Rust Belt while establishing new beachheads in the Sun Belt.
But this year, his position in polls has weakened on both fronts. The result is that, even this far from Election Day, signs are developing that Biden could face a last-mile problem in the Electoral College.
The Atlantic is sharing news about four new staff writers: the hire of Ali Breland, most recently at Mother Jones, to report on disinformation and extremism; the promotion of Matteo Wong, previously an associate editor, covering artificial intelligence; and the moves of longtime Atlantic editors Julie Beck and Ellen Cushing to staff-writer positions, covering culture and family. More details on the new roles are below, as announced by deputy editors Paul Bisceglio and Jane Yong Kim.
Federal testing and surveillance of the outbreak has so far lagged since initial detection in dairy cows more than a month ago.
In the spring of 1988, I made a lifelong friend thanks to a video-game cheat code. As preparation for a family move to Pensacola, Florida, I visited my new school. While there, I casually told a future classmate named Tim that the numbers 007 373 5963 would take him straight to the final fight of the very popular Nintendo boxing game Mike Tyson’s Punch Out. My buddies and I in Oxford, Mississippi, all knew this code by heart, but it turned out to be rare and valuable information in Pensacola.
The Biden administration is claiming the International Criminal Court has no jurisdiction to charge Israeli officials for war crimes. This comes after rumors that the ICC may be close to issuing arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials over possible crimes in Gaza. The International Court of Justice has rejected a request by Nicaragua to order Germany to halt exporting arms to Israel, but the court declined to throw out the case.
As protests continue on campuses across North America, we go to the University of Southern California, where the union representing about 3,000 graduate student workers at USC has filed an unfair labor practice charge against the school to end campus militarization and drop charges against students and faculty. The “rampant violence that they inflicted on our workers” violates the National Labor Relations Act, says Margaret Davis, president of UAW Local 872.
Tuesday’s raid on Columbia University came 56 years to the day that police raided Hamilton Hall, arresting 700 students protesting racism and the Vietnam War. Democracy Now! co-host Juan González, who was a student leader at the historic 1968 protest, says the violent crackdown on Columbia University and other campuses across the United States has refocused national attention on “an unjust war,” carried out by Israel with U.S. backing.
New York police in full riot gear stormed Columbia University and the City College of New York Tuesday night, arresting over 300 students to break up Gaza solidarity encampments on the two campuses. The police raid began at the request of Columbia President Minouche Shafik, who has also asked the police to remain a presence on campus until at least May 17 to ensure solidarity encampments are not reestablished before the end of the term.
Lawmakers aren’t willing to meet the president’s budget requests, casting doubt on reaching the program’s ambitious goal.
The delay comes after the proposed ban drew fire from tobacco companies and other groups that argued an end to menthol cigarette sales could create an illicit market that would impact minorities the hardest.
Half of voters in a new POLITICO-Morning Consult poll support states making their own laws about abortion access, compared with just 35 percent who oppose that.
The move clears the path for a similar vote in the Senate — which appears to have the support to pass the measure.
Biden and Trump are both campaigning on warped economic statistics, cherry-picking weird data from the Covid crisis.