Boris Johnson knows exactly what he’s doing
By Tom McTague
“Nothing can go wrong!” Boris Johnson said, jumping into the driver’s seat of a tram he was about to take for a test ride. “Nothing. Can. Go. Wrong.”
The prime minister was visiting a factory outside Birmingham, campaigning on behalf of the local mayor ahead of “Super Thursday” — a spate of elections across England, Scotland, and Wales in early May. These elections would give voters a chance to have their say on Johnson’s two years in office, during which quite a lot did go wrong.
Johnson was, as usual, unkempt and amused, a tornado of bonhomie…
People tend to think of they, Mx., and hir as relatively recent inventions. But English speakers have been looking for better ways to talk about gender for a very long time.
By Michael Waters
On a frigid January day, Ella Flagg Young — the first woman to serve as superintendent of the Chicago public-school system — took the stage in front of a room of school principals and announced that she had come up with a new solution to an old problem. “I have simply solved a need that has been long impending,” she said. “The English language is in need of a personal pronoun of the third person, singular number, that will indicate both sexes and will thus eliminate our present awkwardness of speech.” …
Inside the meteoric, chilled-out, totally paradoxical rise of app-enabled serenity
By Annie Lowrey
A cathedral-like mountain towers above me; a lake laps at my feet; sunshine distilled through pine needles warms my skin. Close your eyes, a voice intones. Let your shoulders fall naturally and keep your chest open. Take a few full, deep breaths to settle into this moment, inhaling deeply and slowly releasing your breath, allowing any tension you may be holding to soften.
Fifteen minutes later, the voice asks me to bring my attention back to the room. I open my eyes to see not a mountain and a lake, but a photo of them on my…
Although some Republican leaders deplored their violence, most have come to support the rioters’ claim that Trump’s defeat meant the election was inherently illegitimate
By Adam Serwer
Republicans say they would like to move on from the 2020 election.
“A lot of our members, and I think this is true of a lot of House Republicans, want to be moving forward and not looking backward,” John Thune, the third-ranking Republican in the Senate, told CNN on May 19. “Anything that gets us rehashing the 2020 elections I think is a day lost on being able to draw a contrast between us and the Democrats’ very radical left-wing agenda.”
After Thune and 34 of his Republican colleagues used the filibuster last week to block a…
Some states now consider pornography to be a health threat. But stigmatizing porn can do more harm than good.
By Olga Khazan
If you ask some people, America is in the middle of a public-health crisis. No, not that one.
Legislators in 16 states have passed resolutions declaring that pornography, in its ubiquity, constitutes a public-health crisis. The wave of bills started five years ago, with Utah, which went a step further this spring by passing a law mandating that all cellphones and tablets sold in the state block access to pornography by default. (The measure will not go into effect unless five other states pass similar laws, but that’s very possible: Alabama is now considering a similar bill.)
I have gotten acclimated to a different existence
By Tim Kreider
This post-pandemic summer is evidently expected to be one long orgiastic reunion, after which, once that’s out of our system, it’s back to work, back to school, to what we used to call “normal.” And if the pandemic had ended, say, last June, after a couple months of lockdown, we probably would’ve returned to our lives with relief and jubilation. But after a year in isolation, I, at least, have gotten acclimated to a different existence — quieter, calmer, and almost entirely devoid of bullshit. …
A little alcohol can boost creativity and strengthen social ties. But there’s nothing moderate, or convivial, about the way many Americans drink today.
By Kate Julian
Few things are more American than drinking heavily. But worrying about how heavily other Americans are drinking is one of them.
The Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock because, the crew feared, the Pilgrims were going through the beer too quickly. The ship had been headed for the mouth of the Hudson River, until its sailors (who, like most Europeans of that time, preferred beer to water) panicked at the possibility of running out before they got home, and threatened mutiny. And so the Pilgrims were kicked ashore, short of their intended destination and beerless. William Bradford complained…
What’s going on with America’s berserk real-estate frenzy
By Derek Thompson
How wild is the U.S. housing market right now? So wild, half of the houses listed nationwide in April went pending in less than a week. So wild, one poll found that most buyers admitted to bidding on homes they’d never seen in person. So wild, a Bethesda, Maryland, resident recently included in her written offer “a pledge to name her first-born child after the seller,” according to the CEO of the realty site Redfin. So wild, she did not get the house.
Pick a housing statistic at random, and it’s probably setting an all-time record. Home…
Voting-rights advocates are scared that the White House isn’t taking Republican threats to the ballot seriously enough
By Ronald Brownstein
Anxiety is growing among a broad range of civil-rights, democracy-reform, and liberal groups over whether Democrats are responding with enough urgency to the accelerating Republican efforts to both suppress voting and potentially overturn future Democratic election victories.
With the congressional calendar dominated by President Joe Biden’s multitrillion-dollar spending proposals, these activists are expressing concern that neither the administration nor Democratic congressional leaders are raising sufficient alarms about the threats to voting rights proliferating in red states, or developing a strategy to pass the national election standards that these groups consider the party’s best chance to counter those…
We know enough to acknowledge that the scenario is possible, and we should therefore act as though it’s true
By Daniel Engber
Last summer, Michael Imperiale, a University of Michigan virologist and 10-year member of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, published an essay on the need to “rethink” some basic research-safety practices in light of the coronavirus pandemic. But he and his co-author — another biosecurity-board veteran — did want to make one thing clear: There was no reason to believe that sloppy or malicious science had had anything to do with the outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 virus; to suggest otherwise was “more akin to a conspiracy theory than to a scientifically credible hypothesis.”
Nine months later…
