For us to continue writing great stories, we need to display ads.
Un-block Learn more
He lives in Auckland, New Zealand, and calls himself “Mr. Sunshine.”
Most elite athletes are unusual in some way. So why does Caster Semenya alarm spectators more than Michael Phelps?
The South African middle-distance runner Caster Semenya will compete in the women’s 800-meter final this Saturday in Rio de Janeiro, and she’s favored to win. Her potential victory is already being described as a “dilemma.”
At best, her detractors will give the credit for her win to the 25-year-old's body chemistry rather than her skill. It might even prompt international sporting agencies to once again rethink what it means to be a female athlete.
No one is accusing Semenya of using illicit substances. Quite the opposite: Some have suggested she should be taking drugs in order to bring her hormone levels more closely in line with those of average women.
Semenya was raised and identifies as female. But according to a leaked medical test, Semenya’s testosterone levels are three times as high as those of most women, and she has internal testes instead of ovaries.
A Hillary Clinton presidential victory promises to usher in a new age of public misogyny.
Get ready for the era of The Bitch.
If Hillary Clinton wins the White House in November, it will be a historic moment, the smashing of the preeminent glass ceiling in American public life. A mere 240 years after this nation’s founding, a woman will occupy its top office. America’s daughters will at last have living, breathing, pantsuit-wearing proof that they too can grow up to be president.
A Clinton victory also promises to usher in four-to-eight years of the kind of down-and-dirty public misogyny you might expect from a stag party at Roger Ailes’s house.
You know it’s coming. As hyperpartisanship, grievance politics, and garden-variety rage shift from America’s first black commander-in-chief onto its first female one, so too will the focus of political bigotry. Some of it will be driven by genuine gender grievance or discomfort among some at being led by a woman. But in plenty of other cases, slamming Hillary as a bitch, a c**t (Thanks, Scott Baio!), or a menopausal nut-job (an enduringly popular theme on Twitter) will simply be an easy-peasy shortcut for dismissing her and delegitimizing her presidency.
Technology has made cheating on your spouse, or catching a cheater, easier than ever. How digital tools are aiding the unfaithful and the untrusting—and may be mending some broken marriages.
Jay’s wife, Ann, was supposed to be out of town on business. It was a Tuesday evening in August 2013, and Jay, a 36-year-old IT manager, was at home in Indiana with their 5-year-old daughter and 9-year-old son when he made a jarring discovery. Their daughter had misplaced her iPad, so Jay used the app Find My iPhone to search for it. The app found the missing tablet right away, but it also located all the other devices on the family’s plan. What was Ann’s phone doing at a hotel five miles from their home?
His suspicions raised, Jay, who knew Ann’s passwords, read through her e-mails and Facebook messages. (Like others in this story, Jay asked that his and Ann’s names be changed.) He didn’t find anything incriminating, but neither could he imagine a good reason for Ann to be at that hotel. So Jay started using Find My iPhone for an altogether different purpose: to monitor his wife’s whereabouts.
Donald Trump's supporters haven’t necessarily lost a job to globalization. But they’re afraid they’re next.
It’s pretty clear who Donald Trump wants to help, because he names them at every rally. Miners. Steelworkers. Guys on the assembly line, whose jobs are either being stolen by the Chinese or strangled to death by Obama’s regulations. If globalization has put your livelihood in jeopardy, Trump wants you on his side. And given his sky-high popularity among white men without a college degree, I’d argue this pitch is gaining traction.
But here’s the weird thing: Folks in hard-hit industrial towns aren’t voting for Trump. When Michigan Republicans went to the polls in March, economists expected to see huge Trump turnout in areas with the most shuttered factories. Instead, they got the opposite: Trump’s support was strongest in towns that had gained manufacturing jobs. He did about 20 percentage points worse in areas where layoffs were most intense. It was completely the opposite of what everyone expected.
Donald Trump wants a Supreme Court appointee like the formidable late judge. But Scalia had a controversial and sometimes conflicted opinion on law enforcement.
Donald Trump has repeatedly declared himself the “law and order candidate.” He’s also promised to place conservative justices on the Supreme Court, in the mold of Antonin Scalia. But would Scalia himself have supported Trump’s views on policing?
Antonin Scalia, the hero of conservatives, was known more for the force of his pen than the law that he made. He often chose to write alone, to make a point, or say things in his own indomitable way. As a consequence, Scalia was rarely a powerbroker among the justices, which requires compromise and suppressing one’s own views in order to put together the five votes needed to form a majority. That was not Scalia.
Except, ironically, when it came to the parts of the Constitution that governed policing. Here, Scalia often was the critical swing vote. And not infrequently he was the one writing the majority opinion.
In the era of Trump, Clinton and co. want to preserve the status quo, while their Republican opponents want radical change.
By any reasonable definition, Democrats are now the more conservative of America’s two parties. They are more interested than Republicans in conserving America’s international relationships, cultural norms, and political and economic institutions as they are.
This is evident among the party’s leaders. On Thursday, The New York Times profiled Steve Bannon, the new chief executive of Donald Trump’s campaign. “As the American financial system collapsed in the fall of 2008,” the Times explained, “Stephen K. Bannon began to fantasize about destroying something else: the elite economic and political establishment.” Essentially, Bannon entered the political arena to blow it up. Which makes sense given that he’s working for a candidate who has suggested scrapping NATO, defaulting on America’s debt, imposing massive tariffs on China, and using nuclear weapons. Trump’s election would immediately create more turmoil than the election of any president in modern American history.
If Trump loses, his consolation prize may be a whole new right wing media juggernaut.
Most political observers are skeptical that Donald Trump has helped his chances of winning the presidency by entrusting his campaign to the executive producer of Breitbart News, Stephen Bannon; or by hiring Roger Ailes, who left his position atop Fox News amid a sexual harassment scandal; or by pitching his rhetoric to Sean Hannity viewers and Drudge Report readers, rather than more typical Americans; or by spending so little of the money he has raised on television commercials; or by appearing to care so much about the ratings his Republican National Convention speech got and so little that its viewers were turned off, not turned on.
There is so much about the Trump campaign that doesn’t make sense so long as one assumes that its purpose is to propel the candidate to victory at the ballot box. But what if those involved now perceive a more attractive––or at least plausible–– endgame? Atop the campaign, there are three men whose past behavior suggests both a powerful desire to attract the eyeballs of a mass audience and a talent for doing so.
If the Republican nominee is defeated in a landslide, the party may be powerless to influence Clinton's agenda and administration.
The days are shortening, the back-to-school sales are starting—and Donald Trump is approaching his last chance to turn a catastrophic campaign into an ordinarily unsuccessful campaign: to rise from Goldwater debacle to respectable Dukakis defeat.
Such hope seems to have inspired Trump’s speech in North Carolina yesterday: Its remarkable language of solidarity and its unprecedented—for Trump anyway—expression of regret for words that caused pain.
The difference between a Goldwater and Dukakis outcome is the difference between holding a Republican majority in at least one chamber of Congress and a down-ballot deluge that would open the way to a new bout of Democratic legislative activism. For conservatives, it is the difference between mitigating the excesses of the Affordable Care Act and driving onward to government-run health insurance; between another burst of tax increases and the opportunity to bargain for tax cuts; between influence over Supreme Court appointments and being powerless as the justices are replaced; between outright amnesty for immigrants who are in the country illegally and stopping people from coming over U.S. borders.
After the Olympics, both winners and losers are prone to emotional crashes.
On August 21, more than 11,000 Olympic athletes will leave Rio, some carrying medals, others lugging the weight of falling short of expectations. Despite their varying degrees of success, many will have the same surprise waiting for them back home: a feeling that life suddenly seems ordinary.
This emotional drop, in its most acute form, might be called post-Olympic depression—or, to borrow a phrase from the sports psychologist Scott Goldman, the director of the Performance Psychology Center at the University of Michigan, an under-recovery.
“Think about the rollercoaster ride prior to the Olympics, and just how fast and hectic that mad dash is,” Goldman says. “This ninety-mile-per-hour or hundred-mile-per-hour ride comes to a screeching halt the second the Olympics are over. … [The athletes] are just exhausted; it was such an onslaught to their system. And when it’s all said and done, they’re just physiologically depleted, as well as psychologically.”
Chris Holman gave up on a Ph.D. in world languages to start a farm in Wisconsin.
From farm-to-table restaurants to farmer’s markets, there has been a push among a certain class to be more aware of where their food comes from. Many Americans’ increased consciousness about eating locally has drawn their attention back to the land, such that farming has come to be seen as a much more noble profession. Modern Farmer, a publication that was born in this particular cultural context, describes the vision that some city-dwellers have of becoming farmers as a “modern seduction” in which “making a living from the earth salves the psychic wounds of a day job, and acts as an antidote to urban malaise.”
Given that seduction, many people have contemplated a career change, some more seriously than others: While the number of farmers in the U.S. continues to decrease drastically, a quarter of those that remain are “beginning farmers” who have less than 10 years experience. Currently, these early-career farmers control 16 percent of farmland and 25 percent of all organic sales in the U.S. Beginning farmers are younger on average, and face challenges that most veteran farmers don’t; for instance, it’s expensive to start a farm from scratch and open, arable land can be hard to come by.
In a StoryCorps animation, Patrick Haggerty remembers the remarkable advice he got from his dairy farmer dad.
From a moral standpoint, it makes the world worse.
A bartender's camera captures the seedy street life of retro New York.
Ad Block Plus
Ghostery
uBlock
