An Inside Look at Susan G. Komen for the Cure's Spin Machine

WFP / Connecticut State Senate Democrats / Andrew Cuomo / Hans Pennink / AP / Zak Bickel / The Atlantic

The Pugnacious, Relentless Progressive Party That Wants to Remake America

Molly Ball

The Working Families Party has pushed the political debate to the left in the states where it’s already active. Now—in the era of Occupy and Bernie Sanders—it’s ready to take that fight nationwide.

At a recent private dinner in Manhattan, a small group of leftists plotted to take over America.

The group, a dozen community organizers and activists from all over the country, had convened at a sushi restaurant in the Flatiron District with the leaders of the New York-based Working Families Party. They were heads of organizations from Boston to Albuquerque, with names like National People’s Action and Washington Community Action Network. And they were there to hear why their states should form their own chapters of the insurgent party, in order to capitalize on the country’s rising liberal tide and push the national conversation leftward.

The party’s deputy director, Jon Green, a pale, bespectacled 42-year-old, made the pitch. “In 2010, we saw the Tea Party yank the entire political discourse way to the right,” he said. The Tea Party was powerful, he said, because it was boldly ideological; it recruited and groomed candidates; and it created a strong national brand. “Our view is that there isn’t anything analogous to that on the left, and there ought to be.” Heads nodded around the table.

Secrets From a Prehistoric Mummy's Gut Bacteria

Cari Romm

The Iceman cometh, and he’s raising some questions about ancient migration patterns.

Here are some of the things scientists know so far about Otzi, the frozen Copper Age mummy who was discovered in 1991 in the Otzal Alps: He suffered from parasitic worms, Lyme disease, tooth decay, joint problems, and other ailments. He died in his mid-40s, likely sometime between 3239 and 3105 BCE and likely from a blow to the head. He has at least 19 living relatives somewhere in Austria. His nickname, the Iceman, is a perfectly badass moniker for someone who wore leather leggings and had 60-plus tattoos.

Otzi, who now resides at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano, Italy, was well-preserved enough that the people studying him have even been able to determine his last few meals: grains, goat, and deer (including a few animal hairs—Otzi may not have been the best cook, or the cleanest). Food isn’t the only thing of interest in his stomach, though: In a paper published today in the journal Science, researchers from across Europe and the U.S. reported that a microbe taken from his gut reveals new information about human migration patterns during and after Otzi’s lifetime.

Why Do Americans Work So Much?

Rebecca J. Rosen

The economist John Maynard Keynes predicted a society so prosperous that people would hardly have to work. But that isn’t exactly how things have played out.

How will we all keep busy when we only have to work 15 hours a week? That was the question that worried the economist John Maynard Keynes when he wrote his short essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” in 1930. Over the next century, he predicted, the economy would become so productive that people would barely need to work at all.

For a while, it looked like Keynes was right: In 1930 the average workweek was 47 hours. By 1970 it had fallen to slightly less than 39.

But then something changed. Instead of continuing to decline, the duration of the workweek stayed put; it’s hovered just below 40 hours for nearly five decades.

So what happened? Why are people working just as much today as in 1970?

Rubio Turns Hard Right

Peter Beinart

The Florida senator’s fiery rhetoric is an acknowledgement that today’s GOP is Donald Trump’s party.

On Monday in New Hampshire, Marco Rubio virtually accused President Obama of treason. “It’s now abundantly clear,” the Florida senator declared, that “Barack Obama has deliberately weakened America.” The president, Rubio continued, wants to “humble” the United States because he believes “our power has done more harm than good.” Essentially, Obama hates America and is working to bring it down.

Why is Rubio accusing Obama of purposely sabotaging America’s well-being? It probably has less to do with Rubio’s analysis of international politics than with his analysis of Republican primary politics. Basically, he’s been Trumped.

Obama entered the White House believing that America was overstretched. He believed George W. Bush’s decisions to invade Iraq and Afghanistan, in wars paid for on the national credit card, had hollowed the American military, distracted the country from challenges at home, cost trillions, and damaged America’s reputation overseas. So, like Dwight Eisenhower during Korea and Richard Nixon during the waning years of Vietnam, Obama sought to end costly land wars and bring America’s international commitments into better alignment with its resources.

Why the British Tell Better Children’s Stories

Colleen Gillard

Their history informs fantastical myths and legends, while American tales tends to focus on moral realism.

If Harry Potter and Huckleberry Finn were each to represent British versus American children’s literature, a curious dynamic would emerge: One defeats evil with a wand, the other takes to a raft to right a social wrong. In a literary duel for the hearts and minds of children, one is a wizard-in-training at a boarding school in the Scottish Highlands, while the other is a barefoot boy drifting down the Mississippi, beset by con artists, slave hunters, and thieves. Both orphans took over the world of English-language children’s literature, but their stories unfold in noticeably different ways.

The small island of Great Britain is an undisputed powerhouse of children’s bestsellers: The Wind in the Willows, Alice in Wonderland, Winnie-the-Pooh, Peter Pan, The Hobbit, James and the Giant Peach, Harry Potter, and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Significantly, all are fantasies. Meanwhile, the United States, also a major player in the field of children’s classics, deals much less in magic. Stories like Little House in the Big Woods, The Call of the Wild, Charlotte’s Web, The Yearling, Little Women, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer are more notable for their realistic portraits of day-to-day life in the towns and farmlands on the growing frontier. If British children gathered in the glow of the kitchen hearth to hear stories about magic swords and talking bears, American children sat at their mother’s knee listening to tales larded with moral messages about a world where life was hard, obedience emphasized, and Christian morality valued. Each style has its virtues, but the British approach undoubtedly yields the kinds of stories that appeal to the furthest reaches of children’s imagination.

How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood

Alexis C. Madrigal

To understand how people look for movies, the video service created 76,897 micro-genres. We took the genre descriptions, broke them down to their key words, … and built our own new-genre generator.

If you use Netflix, you've probably wondered about the specific genres that it suggests to you. Some of them just seem so specific that it's absurd. Emotional Fight-the-System Documentaries? Period Pieces About Royalty Based on Real Life? Foreign Satanic Stories from the 1980s?

If Netflix can show such tiny slices of cinema to any given user, and they have 40 million users, how vast did their set of "personalized genres" need to be to describe the entire Hollywood universe?

This idle wonder turned to rabid fascination when I realized that I could capture each and every microgenre that Netflix's algorithm has ever created.

Through a combination of elbow grease and spam-level repetition, we discovered that Netflix possesses not several hundred genres, or even several thousand, but 76,897 unique ways to describe types of movies.

Top: New York Public Library, Bottom: © Google, Inc.

Fifth Avenue Then and Now, a Century of Streetviews in NYC

Alan Taylor

Using newly-released images from the New York Public Library, a comparison of street views of New York made in 1911, and today, using Google Maps.

The New York Public Library has recently released even more digitized images from their vast collection, including more than 180,000 in the public domain. While browsing, one of the first collections I came across was a book published in 1911, titled Fifth Avenue, New York, From Start to Finish, with wide-angle streetview photographs made by photographer Burton Welles more than a century ago. I thought it would be fun to revisit those same locations using Google Maps Streetview images from today, to see what differences are visible. Some views look remarkably unchanged, while others are completely unrecognizable. The images are stacked on top of each other—unfortunately they never quite lined up enough to make use of my then-and-now fader widget. (Adding a note: I just discovered that the NYPL made their own wonderful then-and-now viewer for this same set of images.)

Shutterstock / Fotolia / Paul Spella / The Atlantic

When Are You Really an Adult?

Julie Beck

In an age when the line between childhood and adulthood is blurrier than ever, what is it that makes people grown up?

It would probably be fair to call Henry “aimless.” After he graduated from Harvard, he moved back in with his parents, a boomerang kid straight out of a trend piece about the travails of young adults.

Despite graduating into a recession, Henry managed to land a teaching job, but two weeks in, he decided it wasn’t for him and quit. It took him a while to find his calling—he worked in his father’s pencil factory, as a door-to-door magazine salesman, took on other teaching and tutoring gigs, and even spent a brief stint shoveling manure before finding some success with his true passion: writing.

Henry published his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, when he was 31 years old, after 12 years of changing jobs and bouncing back and forth between his parents’ home, living on his own, and crashing with a buddy, who believed in his potential. “[He] is a scholar & a poet & as full of buds of promise as a young apple tree,” his friend wrote, and eventually was proven right. He may have floundered during young adulthood, but Henry David Thoreau turned out pretty okay. (The buddy he crashed with, for the record, was Ralph Waldo Emerson.)

The Brazilian Guide to Weight Loss

Olga Khazan

The country attempts a revolutionary nutrition strategy based around a few simple rules: Eat food. Mostly plants that are native to your country. And absolutely nothing 'ultra-processed.'

RIO DE JANEIRO—Bela Gil hosts one of Brazil’s most popular food TV shows, Bela Cozinha, now in its fifth season. The premise is putting a hip, healthy spin on Brazilian classics—think tofurkey, but not disgusting.

In one episode, Gil baked cookies using the baru nut, which tastes a bit like peanuts and is crammed with protein. Though the baru is indigenous to Brazil, many of Gil’s viewers either didn’t know what it was or couldn’t find it in stores.

Some said, “‘I’ve never seen these ingredients. She's crazy,’” Gil says.

To her, widespread ignorance about native foods says something profound about the country’s broader nutritional woes. As part of her mission, Gil occasionally meets with the country’s health authorities. They share a goal: To get young Brazilians to eat the traditional foods their grandparents would recognize. That means more family dinners with slow-cooked, local ingredients, and a lot less chips and soda.

The Triumph of Email

Adrienne LaFrance

Why does one of the world’s most reviled technologies keep winning?

Email, ughhhh. There is too much of it, and the wrong kind of it, from the wrong people. When people aren’t hating their inboxes out loud, they are quietly emailing to say that they’re sorry for replying so late, and for all the typos, and for missing your earlier note, and for forgetting to turn off auto-reply, and for sending this from their mobile device, and for writing too long, and for bothering you at all.

For an activity that’s so mundane, email seems to be infused with an extraordinary amount of dread and guilt. Several studies have linked frequent email-checking with higher levels of anxiety. One study found that constant email-checkers also had heart activity that suggested higher levels of cortisol, a hormone associated with stress—until they were banned from their inboxes.