This article was originally published by High Country News.Two Septembers ago, the residents of Grotto, Washington, woke to the Bolt Creek Fire ripping through the mountains above their homes. “This doesn’t happen here,” Patricia Vasquez remembers saying at the time, shocked.
Translated by Barbara MannNow that death creeps all around
and the pecans are bursting their shells,
I hide within Hebrew.
Nothing will befall me in innocent writing.
Nothing will befall me
if I am absorbed into the letters,
if I don’t go outside the line—
shrunk to a small dot
stuffed inside an O
or into the belly of a C,
a semicolon dripping tears
like a captive.
For much of the past century, America believed that college was essential to upward mobility. A four-year degree has long been a symbol of the American dream, seen as a way to ensure that millions of students could be better off than their parents and grandparents. Today, however, that faith is plummeting. A Gallup poll earlier this year found that Americans’ confidence in higher education has fallen to a new low of 36 percent, down from 57 percent in 2015.
Support for abortion cuts across party lines, performing significantly better at the ballot box than Biden and other Democrats.
Rapid adoption of artificial intelligence is cause for enthusiasm and worry, experts say.
Sen. Bernie Sanders held up the vote for months in a failed effort to push President Joe Biden to do more on drug pricing.
The CDC is tracking a spike in deadly and preventable cases of STDs passed to infants.
The Connecticut Democrat leads an unlikely coalition seeking to alleviate loneliness and the health ills that come with it.
Can Democrats overcome their college-campus branding and reclaim the working class?
The new strategy UAW President Shawn Fain announced Friday signaled the strike could start having broader implications for the economy.
Democrats are loving the Biden economy. They’re less certain about his economic message.
We speak with Palestinian human rights lawyer Noura Erakat about a new effort to hold Israel accountable at the International Criminal Court over the war in Gaza, where Israel’s monthlong air and ground assault has killed more than 10,000 Palestinians. On Wednesday, three Palestinian rights groups filed a lawsuit with the international body, urging it to investigate Israel for the crimes of genocide and apartheid.
Israeli American scholar Omer Bartov says the two-state solution is dead after decades of Israeli settlement building in the West Bank, making the creation of an independent Palestinian state all but impossible. He says a one-state solution — a single democratic state for all Jewish Israelis and Palestinians — is also unlikely to work given the competing national visions of the two communities.
Israeli American scholar Omer Bartov, one of the world’s leading experts on the Holocaust, says Israel’s brutal assault on the Gaza Strip is at risk of becoming a genocide. The monthlong air and ground war has killed more than 11,000 Palestinians in the besieged enclave, a majority of them women and children. Israel has also severely limited the movement of food, water, fuel, medicine and other essentials into Gaza.
We speak with analyst Matt Duss, former foreign policy adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders, about the U.S. political response to Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. The third Republican presidential debate on Wednesday saw candidates pledge unwavering support for Israel with “rhetoric that was frankly barbaric,” according to Duss.
The former president strolled into Madison Square Garden with Kid Rock, Tucker Carlson and Dana White before a surprise greeting at UFC 295.
How do you decide who owns a country? At 10:30 this morning in London, a group of black-clad men were gathered about 100 meters from the Cenotaph, Britain’s most famous war memorial. They were chanting. “We want our country back,” went one refrain, followed by “You’re not English, you’re not English, you’re not English anymore.”This group was—as another of their chants put it—“Tommy’s Army.
The New York Times reported that Donald Trump wants to round up millions of people and put them in huge new detention camps.
A bill extending funding would let the GOP sidestep a shutdown to instead fight over foreign aid but is also likely to face internal opposition.
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. Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia’s announcement that he will not seek reelection in 2024 capped a paradoxical week for Democrats.
Watching something made by Nathan Fielder can be an act of endurance. The creator, host, and star of shows such as Nathan for You and The Rehearsal has cultivated a reputation as a merry prankster and a mastermind of hallucinatory television. On-screen, he tends to be deadpan and awkward, making himself the butt of the joke as regularly as he messes with the ordinary people he meets.
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.In 2016, my colleague Olga Khazan saw a cultural difference playing out on the faces of those around her. “Here’s something that has always puzzled me, growing up in the U.S. as a child of Russian parents,” she wrote.
There are two observations in Defending My Life, the new documentary about Albert Brooks by his lifelong friend and fellow filmmaker Rob Reiner, that perfectly capture the imprint that Brooks has made, and continues to make, on American culture.The first comes from Conan O’Brien: “Albert broke the sound barrier,” the talk-show host says.
Neither the coup-attempting former president nor his GOP rivals even mention the Palestinian civilians under near-constant Israeli assault.
Support for abortion cuts across party lines, performing significantly better at the ballot box than Biden and other Democrats.
Rapid adoption of artificial intelligence is cause for enthusiasm and worry, experts say.
Sen. Bernie Sanders held up the vote for months in a failed effort to push President Joe Biden to do more on drug pricing.
The CDC is tracking a spike in deadly and preventable cases of STDs passed to infants.
The Connecticut Democrat leads an unlikely coalition seeking to alleviate loneliness and the health ills that come with it.
Can Democrats overcome their college-campus branding and reclaim the working class?