In one very specific and mostly benign way, it’s starting to feel a lot like the spring of 2020: Disinfection is back.“Bleach is my friend right now,” says Annette Cameron, a pediatrician at Yale School of Medicine, who spent the first half of this week spraying and sloshing the potent chemical all over her home. It’s one of the few tools she has to combat norovirus, the nasty gut pathogen that her 15-year-old son was recently shedding in gobs.

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.At the end of each issue of The Atlantic is a short ode by my colleague James Parker. He has praised many of life’s realities, most of them completely ordinary: naps, barbecue potato chips, chewing gum, cold showers.

Last October, I accepted an invitation to speak (for—full disclosure—an honorarium) at St. Andrew’s, a small Episcopal boarding school in Middletown, Delaware. It was beautiful in the expected ways: the lake on which the school’s champion crew teams practice, the mid-autumn foliage, the redbrick buildings. But it was also beautiful in one unexpected way, which revealed itself slowly.My first experience of St.

This article was originally published by Hakai Magazine.A boulder that weighs more than 40 tons sits on the sand high above the ocean. Dwarfing every other rock in view, it is conspicuously out of place. The answer to how this massive anomaly got here likely lies not in the vast expanse of the Atacama Desert behind it but in the Pacific Ocean below: Hundreds of years ago, a tsunami slammed into the northern Chilean coast, sweeping boulders landward like pebbles.

If you’d told any music connoisseur living in the year 1994 that one of the hottest albums of the year 2023 would sound like Pure Moods, the relaxing compilation CD then being sold on TV commercials for $17.99 (plus shipping and handling), that person might have laughed. But if you’d told me the same thing in 1994, I’d have said that the future sounded cool. I was 7 years old.

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.Right-wing political and media figures regularly level the accusation of “elitism” at other Americans.

During the Cold War, NATO had nightmares of hundreds of thousands of Moscow’s troops pouring across international borders and igniting a major ground war with a democracy in Europe. Western governments feared that such a move by the Kremlin would lead to escalation—first to a world war and perhaps even to a nuclear conflict.That was then; this is now.Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is nearly a year old, and the Ukrainians are holding on.

The basic story of Fox News and the 2020 election is well understood. Fox’s relatively small news operation covered the vote count accurately; this coverage infuriated President Donald Trump, the MAGA base, and Fox’s opinion stars; some viewers temporarily flipped to further-right outlets, such as Newsmax; and Fox panicked.But thanks to Dominion Voting Systems, which is pursuing a $1.

Yesterday, Senator John Fetterman, the Pennsylvania Democrat who suffered a stroke at the near-peak of his political campaign last May, announced that he was checking into Walter Reed National Military Medical Center to treat a case of obdurate depression.

Everyone has an opinion about Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. I lived it. I saw firsthand the harms that can flow from unchecked power in tech. But it’s not too late to turn things around.I joined Twitter in 2021 from Parity AI, a company I founded to identify and fix biases in algorithms used in a range of industries, including banking, education, and pharmaceuticals.