10/29/2021   The Supreme Court will hear arguments over Texas’ near-total abortion ban Monday. Here’s what you need to know, by Reese Oxner, Texas Tribune

In the abortion providers’ suit, known as Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson, the court will consider whether a state “can insulate from federal-court review a law that prohibits the exercise of a constitutional right” by offloading its enforcement to the general public.

10/27/2021   A Patriarchal Tradition That Just Won’t Budge, Straight, married couples in the U.S. still almost always give kids the father’s last name. Why?, By Michael Waters, The Atlantic

Mallinson knew that their choice was not a popular one for heterosexual American couples—she’s a professor of sociolinguistics and gender and women’s studies at the University of Maryland at Baltimore County, and wrote a 2017 paper that, in part, analyzes patrilineal surname conventions. In 2002, researchers found that about 97 percent of married couples passed down only the father’s last name to their first kid.

10/20/2021   What Does Joe Manchin Do Now?  By Russell Berman, The Atlantic

The fate of the Democrats’ push for voting-rights legislation lies once again in the hands of one senator from West Virginia.

10/6/2021   The Gender Researcher’s Guide to an Equal Marriage, by Joe Pinsker, The Atlantic

In their personal lives, sociologists attempt to ward off the same inequalities that they study at work.

10/4/2021   Billie Eilish stops mid-performance at Texas music festival: 'My f**king choice!', CNN

Billie Eilish spoke out against Texas' abortion law during a performance at Austin City Limits music festival.Source: CNN

10/2/2021   The nihilism of Neil Gorsuch, by Ian Millhiser, V0X

Trump’s first Supreme Court appointee’s radical vision to remake America, explained.

If Gorsuch had gotten his way, 13 years of work and hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of transactions would have been unraveled, possibly delivering a shock to the mortgage-lending industry similar to that of the 2008 crisis — or even sending the world economy into a tailspin.

 

 

9/20/2021   'Worst nightmare': CNN legal analyst says Texas abortion law is already blowing up in GOP's faces, by Matthew Chapman, RawStory

"This law in many respects is the worst nightmare of the anti-abortion forces, the people who are behind this law," said Toobin. "It just underlines how ridiculous it is. I mean, you have this disbarred lawyer in Arkansas under house arrest filing one lawsuit. Some random person in Chicago filing the other lawsuit. I mean, how and why they should be able to sue a doctor in San Antonio for doing something that is, at least at this moment, protected under the United States Constitution is just crazy. But it is apparently what this law allows."

 

9/17/2021   Why Republicans Are Scared of Texas’ New Abortion Ban, by Sarah Isgur, Politico

What’s going on? When considering the political ramifications of the Texas abortion law, Ian Malcom’s famous line from Jurassic Park comes to mind, with a little social-wars twist: “Your [anti-abortion advocates] were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

 

For decades, Republican state lawmakers have been able to vote for and pass highly restrictive abortion laws without living through the political consequences, because the laws were typically enjoined by the courts before they ever took effect. The politicians got to check the pro-life box important to a segment of their voters without their constituents ever living under those strict laws. This kept the political backlash to their votes to a minimum.

9/13/2021   A roadrunner stopped at Trump’s border wall in the Ariz. desert. A photographer snapped an award-winning image, by Gina Harkins, The Washington Post

Alejandro Prieto was driving on the U.S. side of the border wall near Naco, Ariz., about two years ago when a roadrunner darted out of the vegetation. Prieto, a wildlife photographer from Guadalajara, Mexico, grabbed his camera as the speedy bird stopped in the middle of a gravel road.

The roadrunner appeared to gaze at the tall barbed-wire-covered wall that cut through the desert. It was there just long enough for Prieto to snap a few shots.

9/6/2021   Waive CRISPR patents to meet food needs in low-income countries, by John van der Oost & Louise O. Fresco, Nature Correspondence

9/1/2021   Texas valedictorian, who spoke out against state's impending abortion law, calls new ban 'heart-wrenching' by Lauren M. Johnson and Ariane de Vogue, CNN

8/27/2021   The Pandemic Is Making Dads Reevaluate Their Work-Life Balance, By Joe Pinsker, The Atlantic

The past year and a half has been exhausting and stressful for parents. It also, unexpectedly, gave many fathers more of the family time they want.

8/20/2021   The Remote Work–Fertility Connection, By Stephanie H. Murray, The Atlantic

It’s easier for parents whose jobs can be done remotely to juggle work and child care. This digital divide is starting to shape who chooses to have kids.

7/29/2021   Why Managers Fear a Remote-Work Future, by Ed Zitron, The Atlantic

Remote work lays bare many brutal inefficiencies and problems that executives don’t want to deal with because they reflect poorly on leaders and those they’ve hired. Remote work empowers those who produce and disempowers those who have succeeded by being excellent diplomats and poor workers, along with those who have succeeded by always finding someone to blame for their failures. It removes the ability to seem productive (by sitting at your desk looking stressed or always being on the phone), and also, crucially, may reveal how many bosses and managers simply don’t contribute to the bottom line.

7/15/2021   Klobuchar Says D.C. Has Enough Drug Lobbyists To Double-Team Lawmakers, KHN Fact Check

 

6/22/2021   The Democrats’ Dead End on Voting Rights, by Russell Berman, The Atlantic

They claim that democracy is under threat, but they lack the collective will to save it.

6/24/2021   What Quitters Understand About the Job Market, by Derek Thompson, The Atlantic

Quitting your job is hot this summer. More Americans quit in April than any other month on record going back to the beginning of the century, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For every 100 workers in hotels, restaurants, bars, and retailers, about five of them quit.*

6/14/2021   Winners and Losers of the Work-From-Home Revolution, by Derek Thompson, The Atlantic

High-income workers at highly profitable companies will benefit greatly. Downtown landlords won’t.

 

The second team surveyed more than 30,000 Americans over the past few months and found that workers were overwhelmingly satisfied with their work-from-home experience. Most people said it exceeded their expectations. “Employees will enjoy large benefits from greater remote work” after the pandemic, the paper’s authors predicted. They said that productivity would surge in the post-pandemic economy, “due to re-optimized working arrangements” at some of the economy’s most successful white-collar companies.

 

6/11/2021   Democracy Is Already Dying in the States, by Ronald Brownstein, The Atlantic

Republicans around the country are proving Joe Manchin wrong.

6/9/2021   Joe Manchin Can’t Have It Both Ways, by Adam Serwer, The Atlantic

If the right to vote is fundamental, then it cannot be subject to veto by partisans who benefit from disenfranchisement.

5/10/2021   There’s a Perfect Number of Days to Work From Home, and It’s 2, by Amanda Mull, The Atlantic

The best job perk is self-determination.

5/3/2021   6 Questions for the Boss Who Wants You Back in Your Cubicle, by Rachel Gutman, The Atlantic

Here’s how to find out if your workplace’s return-to-office plans are actually safe.

4/27/2020   THE PANDEMIC WILL CHANGE AMERICAN RETAIL FOREVER, by By Derek Thompson, Photographs by Joshua Dudley Greer, The Atlantic

The big will get bigger as mom-and-pops perish and shopping goes virtual. In the short term, our cities will become more boring. In the long term, they might just become interesting again.

4/10/2020   THE PANDEMIC WILL CLEAVE AMERICA IN TWO, by Joe Pinsker, The Atlantic

 

Some will emerge from this crisis disrupted and shaken, but ultimately stable. Others will come out of it with much more lasting scars.

 

When someone dies, there are three ways to think about what caused it, according to Scott Frank, a professor at Case Western Reserve University’s School of Medicine. The first is the straightforward, “medical” cause of death—diagnosable things like heart disease or cancer. The second is the “actual” cause of death—that is, the habits and behaviors that over time contributed to the medical cause of death, such as smoking cigarettes or being physically inactive. The third is what Frank refers to as the “actual actual” cause of death—the bigger, society-wide forces that shaped those habits and behaviors.

4/7/2020   This Is Trump’s Fault, by David Frum, The Atlantic

The president is failing, and Americans are paying for his failures.

 

“Idon’t take responsibility at all,” said President Donald Trump in the Rose Garden on March 13. Those words will probably end up as the epitaph of his presidency, the single sentence that sums it all up.

3/26/2020   The Four Possible Timelines for Life Returning to Normal, by Joe Pinsker, The Atlantic

The coronavirus outbreak may last for a year or two, but some elements of pre-pandemic life will likely be won back in the meantime.

3/25/2020   HOW THE PANDEMIC WILL END, by Ed Yong, The Atlantic

The U.S. may end up with the worst COVID-19 outbreak in the industrialized world. This is how it’s going to play out.

 

Editor’s Note: This story is part of a collection of work by Ed Yong that earned the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting.

3/15/2020   The Coronavirus Called America’s Bluff, by Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic

Like Japan in the mid-1800s, the United States now faces a crisis that disproves everything the country believes about itself.

 

Secure in their island homeland, the rulers of Japan had been convinced for decades of their cultural superiority. Japan was unique, special, the homeland of the gods. “Japan’s position, at the vertex of the earth, makes it the standard for the nations of the world,” the nationalist thinker Aizawa Seishisai wrote nearly three decades before Perry’s arrival. But the steamships and the guns changed all that. Suddenly, the Japanese realized that their culture, their political system, and their technology were out of date. Their samurai-warrior leaders and honor culture were not able to compete in a world dominated by science.

 

The coronavirus pandemic is in its early days. But the scale and force of the economic and medical crisis that is about to hit the United States may turn out to be as formidable as Perry’s famous voyage was. Two weeks ago—it already seems like an infinity—I was in Italy, writing about the first signs of the virus. Epidemics, I wrote, “have a way of revealing underlying truths about the societies they impact.” This one has already done so, and with terrifying speed. What it reveals about the United States—not just this administration, but also our health-care system, our bureaucracy, our political system itself—should make Americans as fearful as the Japanese who heard the “distant thunder” of Perry’s guns.

The Crisis Could Last 18 Months. Be Prepared, By Juliette Kayyem, The Atlantic

The shutdowns happened remarkably quickly, but the process of resuming our lives will be far more muddled.

 

About the author: Juliette Kayyem, a former assistant secretary for homeland security under President Barack Obama, is the faculty chair of the homeland-security program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. She is the author of Security Mom: An Unclassified Guide to Protecting Our Homeland and Your Home.

2/11/2021   AMERICAN DEMOCRACY IS ONLY 55 YEARS OLD—AND HANGING BY A THREAD, By Vann R. Newkirk II

Black civil-rights activists—and especially Black women—delivered on the promise of the Founding. Their victories are in peril.

 

 

10/28/2021   Revenge of the Donald, By David Frum, The Atlantic

Nostalgia and resentment could be enough to catapult Trump back into the presidency.

 

It’s an amazing spectacle, because Donald Trump was no ordinary political loser. He was a huge political loser. He lost the popular vote in two consecutive presidential elections, the second time by a margin of 8 million votes. He led his party to a brutal midterm defeat in 2018 amid the strongest economy since the late 1990s. He was the first president to have been impeached twice, the second time for inciting a mob to invade and attack Congress to overturn a national election result. He now faces more criminal and civil jeopardy than Richard Nixon did ahead of his presidential pardon in 1974.

 

In a 2011 speech, Donald Trump explained his single top rule in life: “Get even with people. If they screw you, screw them back 10 times as hard. I really believe it.” He’s repeated the same idea over and over again in speeches, tweets, and books published under his byline. In 2024, the targets of Trump’s revenge are American law and American democracy. At a September 25 rally in Perry, Georgia, Trump excoriated state Republican officials who failed to subvert the state election for him. In Iowa two weeks later, Trump delivered more attacks on the 2020 election process, focusing this time on state Republicans who failed to steal Arizona for him. 

10/13/2021   America Is Not Ready for Trump’s Second Term, by David A. Graham, The Atlantic

And he could win, fair and square. 

11/4/2020   The Nightmare Is Here, by David A. Graham, The Atlantic

Even as the election remained unresolved, President Trump declared victory and denounced efforts to count the remaining votes as “a fraud.”

11/1/2020,  How to Tell If the Election Will Get Violent, by Olga Khazan, The Atlantic

Some experts are predicting violence after November 3. But there are ways to prevent it.

June, 2020   We Are Living in a Failed State, , by George Packer, The Atlantic

Trump came to power as the repudiation of the Republican establishment. But the conservative political class and the new leader soon reached an understanding. Whatever their differences on issues like trade and immigration, they shared a basic goal: to strip-mine public assets for the benefit of private interests. Republican politicians and donors who wanted government to do as little as possible for the common good could live happily with a regime that barely knew how to govern at all, and they made themselves Trump’s footmen.

 

Like a wanton boy throwing matches in a parched field, Trump began to immolate what was left of national civic life. He never even pretended to be president of the whole country, but pitted us against one another along lines of race, sex, religion, citizenship, education, region, and—every day of his presidency—political party. His main tool of governance was to lie. A third of the country locked itself in a hall of mirrors that it believed to be reality; a third drove itself mad with the effort to hold on to the idea of knowable truth; and a third gave up even trying.

7/10/2018   How Shelby County v. Holder Broke America, by By Vann R. Newkirk II, The Atlantic

In the five years since the landmark decision, the Supreme Court has set the stage for a new era of white hegemony.

 

Shelby County has been discussed constantly in The Atlantic, and in my work especially. That’s for good reason. In that 2013 decision, the Supreme Court invalidated a decades-old “coverage formula” naming jurisdictions that had to pass federal scrutiny under the Voting Rights Act, referred to as “preclearance,” in order to pass any new elections or voting laws. Those jurisdictions were selected based on their having a history of discrimination in voting. The decision also left it to Congress to come up with new criteria for coverage, which hasn’t happened and probably won’t happen soon. In practice, the decision means that communities facing new discriminatory voting laws have had to file suits themselves or rely on Justice Department suits or challenges from outside advocates—sometimes after the discriminatory laws have already taken effect. Under Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the department hasn’t been interested in filing such suits, meaning that citizens have been on their own.

6/27/2018   What Kennedy's Absence Means for Civil Rights, By Vann R. Newkirk II, The Atlantic

6/18/2018   THE END OF CIVIL RIGHTS, by Vann R. Newkirk II, The Atlantic

Across immigration, policing, criminal justice, and voting rights, the attorney general is pushing an agenda that could erase many of the legal gains of modern America's defining movement.