The Atlantic, Washington Mall, DC (2024)

12/09/2024

The fall of Assad’s regime in Syria marks an era of new potential for the nation, writes Arash Azizi. If the nation’s militias and ethnic groups can “put their differences aside, they could begin to build an effective polity” for their citizens:

12/09/2024

Over the past few years, clinical trials of Ozempic and related drugs have shown that prescribing diet and exercise adds almost nothing to these medicines’ effects on people’s body weight, Daniel Engber reports:

12/09/2024

Tech billionaires such as Jeff Bezos and Marc Andreessen aren’t even trying to mask their politics anymore, Ali Breland writes:

12/09/2024

Seamus Heaney wrote Caitlin Flanagan a poem, on the occasion of her baptism as a child. She’s kept the fragile sheet of onionskin he typed the poem on ever since. It was her introduction to faith and to poetry, as well as a “certificate of belonging”—the one thing she “desperately needed growing up in that crazy family.” In The Atlantic’s January 2025 cover story, Caitlin reflects on her childhood with the famous Irish poet. https://theatln.tc/umxaAzrD

Caitlin first met Seamus in 1970, when she was 9. He and his family had come to California so that he could spend the academic year in the UC Berkeley English department, where Caitlin’s father, Tom, was a professor. Caitlin’s family took the Heaneys under their wing, and Seamus would go on to liken his bond with Tom to the one between father and son.

As an adult, six months after her father died, Caitlin was suddenly diagnosed with aggressive and life-threatening breast cancer. She kept the information quiet. “I thought it would hurt my career if people knew I was that sick, and also, in a primitive way, I thought that the fewer people who knew about it, the better the chance it wasn’t real. But somehow Seamus found out,” she writes. “Not 10 days after the diagnosis, a letter arrived from Seamus and [his wife] Marie. They were aghast at the completely ‘arbitrary insult upon health and beauty.’ Soon after, another letter: He’d heard I’d come through surgery, ‘as valiantly and gracefully as the great spirit you are and have been.’ They would be in St. Lucia for 10 days … and he told me how to reach them if I needed them.”

“After I first got sick, and in the years since, I have returned often to some of his most famous lines, from ‘The Cure at Troy,’ which argues for faith in an unseen future,” Caitlin writes. “Seamus didn’t believe in a force as mere as optimism. He believed in something far greater and more powerful: hope.”

Read more here: https://theatln.tc/umxaAzrD

12/09/2024

In the first days of Syria’s freedom, the country’s citizens appear to be behaving like traumatized, decent people worthy of their liberty, Graeme Wood writes:

12/09/2024

The notion that “mainstream media” is a “category reserved only for journalists guided by a professional code of ethics, a mission of public service, and an aspiration toward objectivity or at least fairness” is outdated, Helen Lewis writes. The outsiders have now seized the microphone. https://theatln.tc/xdV8aiY0

“The concept of the mainstream media arose in the 20th century, when reaching a mass audience required infrastructure—a printing press, or a broadcast frequency, or a physical cable into people’s houses—and institutions,” Lewis writes. “That reality made the media easy to vilify.” Years later, “the idea that the mainstream media is made up of major corporations has persisted, even though the internet, smartphones, and social media have made it possible for anyone to reach an audience of millions.”

Today, the divide between the “mainstream media” and the outsiders is not about reach: Sixty-three percent of American adults get at least some of their news from television, but 54 percent of American adults get at least some of their news from social media. This means that alongside established outlets, Americans are relying on sources such as Infowars videos, Facebook memes, and posts on X. The “mainstream”-outsider divide is not about influence or resources, either. The podcaster Joe Rogan’s last deal with Spotify was reportedly worth as much as $250 million, enough to hire a whole newsroom if he wanted to. “But Rogan has intuited, correctly, that many Americans no longer trust institutions. They prefer to receive their news from trusted individuals,” Lewis writes.

“We cannot reverse the drift from institutions to individuals,” she argues.

Read the full story here: https://theatln.tc/xdV8aiY0

🎨: Ben Hickey

12/09/2024

The notion of political realignment in the Lone Star State is older than you think. It goes back to Giant, an acidic novel by Edna Ferber.

12/09/2024

Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. Over the past decade, he’s noticed a change among his students: They’ve become overwhelmed by the reading. One first-year student shared with him that, at her public high school, she had never been asked to read a single book cover to cover. “My jaw dropped,” Dames told Rose Horowitch. https://theatln.tc/m3YaGD03

Though no comprehensive data exist on this trend, the majority of the 33 professors that Horowitch spoke with relayed a similar experience: Students are shutting down when confronted with ideas they don’t understand; they struggle to get through challenging texts like they used to; they can’t stay focused on even a sonnet. “It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading,” Horowitch writes, “it’s that they don’t know how.”

One explanation is that middle- and high-school students are encountering fewer and fewer books in the classroom. But the decline in reading abilities may also be explained by a shift in values rather than in skill sets. “Students today are far more concerned about their job prospects than they were in the past,” Horowitch continues—and even if students enjoy what they’re learning in literature courses, one professor told her, they want a degree in something that seems more useful for their career. “The same factors that have contributed to declining enrollment in the humanities might lead students to spend less time reading in the courses they do take.”

Read the full story on how a generation of college students stopped reading, from The Atlantic’s November issue: https://theatln.tc/m3YaGD03

12/09/2024

Another year of existential crisis for Hollywood—and an excellent year for cinema itself:

12/09/2024

Seamus Heaney wrote Caitlin Flanagan a poem, on the occasion of her baptism as a child. She’s kept the fragile sheet of onionskin he typed the poem on ever since. It was her introduction to faith and to poetry, as well as a “certificate of belonging”—the one thing she “desperately needed growing up in that crazy family.” In The Atlantic’s January 2025 cover story, Caitlin reflects on her childhood with the famous Irish poet. Read more: https://theatln.tc/ygUbCL3B

12/09/2024

Some IVF patients are turning to a niche medical procedure to find peace, Melissa Jeltsen reports. (From June)

12/09/2024

Why do newlyweds seem to think people want custom wedding merch taking up space in cabinets and drawers for years to come?⁠ https://theatln.tc/R127dU2o
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The intentions behind wedding favors are good—those throwing the wedding naturally want to give a little something back to their guests. But the well-meaning gesture doesn’t always land, Kelly Conaboy wrote in 2023. This can be inferred from just about every result that comes up when one searches “wedding favors” on TikTok. A surprising number of the videos feature the word “actually” used almost as a pejorative: “wedding favors your guests will ACTUALLY use.”⁠
⁠
Lisa Cavanaugh, an associate professor of marketing and behavioral science, hasn’t studied wedding favors specifically, but her research might illuminate a fundamental disconnect at their core: Gift givers tend to think in terms of what a gift means to them, rather than what it will mean to the recipient. When giving a customized wedding favor, she says, the giver tends to think “very optimistically that people will see it and think fondly of the event.” They don’t necessarily think about what people might actually want, or branded favors they’ve received in the past that they may have guiltily thrown in the trash.⁠
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But for those couples who still wish to give a personally branded gift, all might not be lost. Research by Mary Steffel, an associate professor of marketing at Northeastern University, shows that sharing something personal with guests can build connections. Though people tend to prefer recipient-centric gifts, Steffel pointed out that at least one study has shown giver-centric gifts to be associated with a stronger social connection between the two parties. For her part, Conaboy continues, “I’m still at a loss about what favor to give guests at my own wedding, or whether to give one at all.” ⁠
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📷: Getty

12/09/2024

If where you live isn’t truly your home, and you have the resources to make a change, it could do wonders for your happiness, Arthur C. Brooks writes. (From 2021)

12/09/2024

With the help of an eclectic group of writers and editors, The Atlantic is offering 65 gifts for bringing more merriment, adventure, and wonder to the ones you love.

Find them all here: https://theatln.tc/Vfu03UIh

📸: Tenzo

12/09/2024

"Chinatown" is about the secret history of how Los Angeles became a paradise—but the 1974 movie offers a warning for the city today, Chris Stanton wrote in June.

12/09/2024

Lori Gottlieb advises a reader who is unsure whether to marry her boyfriend after discovering the scope of his debt: (From 2023)

12/09/2024

The gender divide is about to grow into a gender chasm—but women are not the only ones who will suffer, Sophie Gilbert writes. So, too, will the men who have been trained to see women as disgusting, untamable, and fundamentally inferior. https://theatln.tc/iJ6vvrKV

“American conservatism has long fetishized motherhood in a way that made it proximate to power,” Gilbert continues. Mothers have been encouraged to seek political office as long as “it’s understood that they’re doing so on behalf of others.” But the “motherhood now being promoted on the right is much more passive, and powerless,” Gilbert writes. “It’s the kind modeled by the former Supreme Court clerk Usha Vance, who stands by silently while her husband weakly brushes off his racist fans’ attacks on his family.” It’s also exemplified by the tradwives of TikTok and Instagram, with their performances of submissive domesticity.

Since Donald Trump’s arrival in politics, in 2015, “he’s propagated the idea that those of us who don’t flatter or agree with him are not just difficult but ‘nasty,’ using the language of disgust to make women seem contaminated and morally reprehensible.” Even before Kamala Harris officially became the nominee in 2024, Trump’s allies attacked her in sexualized terms, “subliminally linking female power to the so-called threat of unfettered female sexuality,” Gilbert continues. “The old analytical terms we use to describe sexism in politics aren’t sufficient to deal with this onslaught of repugnant hatred.”

But women don’t have to play along: “All his life, Trump has ruined people who get close to him,” Gilbert writes. “He won’t ruin women, but he will absolutely destroy a generation of men who take his vile messaging to heart.”

Read the full story from The Atlantic’s January issue: https://theatln.tc/iJ6vvrKV

🎨: Ben Hickey

12/09/2024

Group fitness classes aren’t just about exercise, Mikala Jamison writes. https://theatln.tc/z5fhRvrd

When Jamison was teaching indoor cycling, she was the nicest version of herself: “warm, welcoming, and encouraging to the point of profound corniness, despite my usual caustic tendencies,” she writes. People that met in her class started dating; strangers went out for coffee. “These experiences have convinced me that group fitness classes are the best place to make friends as an adult,” she continues, “an idea supported by research that suggests that the glow of exercise’s feel-good chemicals has interpersonal benefits.”

Once, friendships were born in what the sociologist Ray Oldenburg called “third places”: physical spaces that aren’t a home or a workplace, don’t charge (much) for entry, and exist in large part to foster conversation. Group classes don’t quite fit in that definition—they can cost money, and their primary activities are “sweating, grunting, and skipping a few reps when the instructor isn’t looking,” Jamison writes. “But they fulfill many conditions that social-psychology research has repeatedly shown to help forge meaningful connections between strangers: proximity (being in the same place), ritual (at the same time, over and over), accumulation (for many hours), and shared experiences or interests (because you do and like the same things)”—a less awkward way to find people with similar interests than at work or at a party.

Even if you don’t find your next best friend at Zumba class, getting into a fitness habit might help you step out of your comfort zone and make more friends in other spaces.

“A room full of grown adults flailing, shouting, and running miles without ever going anywhere is a fundamentally ridiculous prospect,” Jamison continues. “Ridiculous things, however, play a crucial role in connecting with others: They make us laugh.”

Read more: https://theatln.tc/z5fhRvrd

🎨: Debora Szpilman