By all rights, TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, should be one of the world’s most respected companies. The technology start-up has created an innovative social-media platform with global appeal—an achievement that puts ByteDance in the elite ranks of Facebook and X.
There’s a single reason the company doesn’t get that respect: It’s Chinese.
This article was originally published by Hakai Magazine.
Before the sea started taking house-size bites out of Nyangai, this small tropical island off the coast of Sierra Leone hummed with activity. I first visited in 2013 while documenting the construction of a school on a neighboring island. It was a cloudless day in April. A group of teenagers was busy setting up a sound system for a party. Old men chatted and smoked in the shade of palm trees.
The adoption of artificial intelligence in health care is reviving the debate over medical malpractice reform — with a new twist.
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Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Stephanie Bai, an associate editor whose byline you might recognize from past editions of The Daily.
There is much in this drawer that is no longer in use:
a notebook with ribbon to mark passages
once of some importance, a tortoiseshell comb sadly
made of tortoise shell, a prayer book bound
in mother-of-pearl. Mother-of-pearl.
And sounds: a blurring of bees in the air
no longer heard in the wild.
Everything at once, she had said. All that you
remember must be written down.
Bed linens sailing the wind, curtains flaring
beyond the windscreens, lilacs soon to lie on the ground.
The report marks a notable reversal: People born in the U.S. in 2022 can expect to live 77.5 years, an increase from 76.4 in 2021.
So-called personhood laws are on a legal collision course with IVF in some states.
Democratic Sen. Eva Burch of Mesa told fellow lawmakers in a floor speech she was going to get an abortion because her pregnancy is no longer viable.
The Obamacare band will make the case to voters while marking the law’s anniversary.
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.
Policymakers were determined to avoid the mistakes of the Great Recession — and they succeeded. But now they are in a mood of “fear and introspection.
“You can’t blame the president when policies go wrong, and then say he’s not responsible if things are going right.
The unemployment rate stayed at 3.7%, just above a half-century low.
In Mississippi, six former sheriff’s deputies have been sentenced to between 10 and 40 years in prison for raiding a home and torturing, shooting and sexually abusing two Black men, Michael Jenkins and Eddie Parker, in January 2023. The six former deputies, all of whom are white, called themselves the “Goon Squad” and have been linked to at least four violent attacks on Black men since 2019. Two of the men attacked and tortured by the group subsequently died.
As Israel continues its relentless assault on Gaza, causing mass famine, injury and death, we get an update on the malnutrition and mental health crises in Gaza from Dr. Nahreen Ahmed, a pulmonary and critical care doctor and the medical director of the humanitarian aid group MedGlobal.
At the U.N. Security Council, China and Russia have vetoed a U.S. draft resolution on the war in Gaza. The U.S. resolution appeared to call for a ceasefire, but it was written in a way to make the resolution unenforceable. Our guest Phyllis Bennis says this was mere “wordplay” and a “convoluted” attempt by the Biden administration to play both sides, as it comes under increasing internal and external criticism over its close relationship with Israel.
A new report by the research group Forensic Architecture counters Israel’s argument at the International Court of Justice that it followed humanitarian policies to safeguard civilian life in Gaza. South Africa argued in January before the ICJ that Israel was guilty of genocide during its war on Gaza. The report argues that what Israel says are humanitarian evacuations in Gaza actually amount to the forced displacement of Palestinians, which is a war crime.
Updated at 2:05 p.m. ET on March 23, 2024
A decade ago, when foreign fighters were flowing into Syria, the Islamic State’s capital, Raqqa, became a sort of Epcot of global jihad: New arrivals from different nations clustered together in their national groups. If you were a recent arrival from France or just wanted to know where to get a croissant, you could visit a café full of French people and ask. Tens of thousands of foreign fighters came from places as distant as Chile and Japan.
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.
Republicans are on the offensive this week against what they say is Democrats’ lack of support for Israel following Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s recent criticism of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
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.
Teens exist in the murky space between youth and maturity—and in decades past, when the teen babysitter was a staple of American life, adults seemed to understand that.
This story contains mild spoilers for Netflix’s 3 Body Problem.
In Cixin Liu’s novel The Three-Body Problem, a scientist being manipulated by an extraterrestrial force is told to look up at the sky one night and watch the universe “wink” at him. The effect—akin to stars blinking on and off in unison—won’t be visible to Miao Wang’s naked eye; he has to use special glasses to observe the cosmic microwave background radiation.
Why would the most notoriously cash-strapped man in America waste money on frivolous lawsuits?
On Monday, Donald Trump—whose lawyers recently announced that he can’t come up with the money to post a $454 million bond in his civil fraud case—fired off yet another suit against a news organization that reported facts he didn’t like. The targets this time are ABC News and its anchor George Stephanopoulos, who Trump alleges defamed him by stating that Trump had been found liable for raping E.
The report marks a notable reversal: People born in the U.S. in 2022 can expect to live 77.5 years, an increase from 76.4 in 2021.
So-called personhood laws are on a legal collision course with IVF in some states.
Democratic Sen. Eva Burch of Mesa told fellow lawmakers in a floor speech she was going to get an abortion because her pregnancy is no longer viable.
The Obamacare band will make the case to voters while marking the law’s anniversary.
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.
Policymakers were determined to avoid the mistakes of the Great Recession — and they succeeded. But now they are in a mood of “fear and introspection.