Footage of combat in Afghanistan, filmed and with voiceover narration by Louie Palu
For some comedians, it can be an escape from pain and the challenges of everyday life.
A history of the first African American White House—and of what came next
In the waning days of President Barack Obama’s administration, he and his wife, Michelle, hosted a farewell party, the full import of which no one could then grasp. It was late October, Friday the 21st, and the president had spent many of the previous weeks, as he would spend the two subsequent weeks, campaigning for the Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton. Things were looking up. Polls in the crucial states of Virginia and Pennsylvania showed Clinton with solid advantages. The formidable GOP strongholds of Georgia and Texas were said to be under threat. The moment seemed to buoy Obama. He had been light on his feet in these last few weeks, cracking jokes at the expense of Republican opponents and laughing off hecklers. At a rally in Orlando on October 28, he greeted a student who would be introducing him by dancing toward her and then noting that the song playing over the loudspeakers—the Gap Band’s “Outstanding”—was older than she was.
From politics shows to horror series, highlights from a year of listening
Gone are the days of explaining what a podcast is: The arrival of money to the form and a continued increase in listeners has led to another banner year and the premiere of hundreds of shows to suit any listener’s audio preferences. Whether it’s entrepreneurial advice, video game breakdowns, or candid looks at celebrities, if you know what you want, there’s likely a show that offers exactly that. Finding them, though, can be a trial-by-fire enterprise that requires serious listening hours. The following shows don’t require you to love a certain movie or have a particular sense of humor. They don’t force you to become best friends with the host or listen to five episodes before you pick up on the “in” jokes. We’ve chosen the 50 best podcasts of 2016 based on their innovation this year, consistent high quality, excellence within their genre, and of course, entertainment value.
John Georgelas was a military brat, a drug enthusiast, a precocious underachiever born in Texas. Now he is a prominent figure within the Islamic State. Here’s the never-before-reported story of his long and troubling journey.
At dawn on a warm September morning in 2013, a minivan pulled up to a shattered villa in the town of Azaz, Syria. A long-bearded 29-year-old white man emerged from the building, along with his pregnant British wife and their three children, ages 8, 4, and almost 2. They had been in Syria for only about a month this time. The kids were sick and malnourished. The border they’d crossed from Turkey into Syria was minutes away, but the passage back was no longer safe. They clambered into the minivan, sitting on sheepskins draped on the floor—there were no seats—and the driver took them two hours east through a ravaged landscape, eventually stopping at a place where the family might slip into Turkey undetected.
David Friedman is the president-elect's latest high-level appointee with little substantive experience, but who looks like the kind of person who might possess it.
To understand why Donald Trump chose David Friedman to be his ambassador to Israel, it’s worth reading a story written by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s Uriel Heilman this April. With the New York Republican primary only days away, a group of Orthodox Jewish activists came to meet Trump at his office. According to Heilman, “One of the first things Trump did when he sat down in the sunny corner conference room at Trump Tower and saw that almost all the 20 or so faces around the room were Orthodox Jews was summon some Orthodox Jews of his own.” Turning to his then campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, Trump said, “Maybe I can get Jason Greenblatt down here.” Greenblatt, an Orthodox Jew, is Trump’s chief legal officer. “And you know who else?” Trump added, “David Cohen.” Later, “Trump also talked about his Jewish son-in-law, Jared Kushner.”
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In my cover story in the December issue of the magazine, on how the United States should prepare for the possibility of a more truculent and repressive China, I mention the concept of the “Thucydides Trap.” The article describes the implications:
This concept was popularized by the Harvard political scientist [and my one-time professor as an undergraduate] Graham Allison. Its premise is that through the 2,500 years since the Peloponnesian warfare that Thucydides chronicled, rising powers (like Athens then, or China now) and incumbent powers (like Sparta, or the United States) have usually ended up in a fight to the death, mainly because each cannot help playing on the worst fears of the other. “When a rising power is threatening to displace a ruling power, standard crises that would otherwise be contained, like the assassination of an archduke in 1914, can initiate a cascade of reactions that, in turn, produce outcomes none of the parties would otherwise have chosen,” Allison wrote in an essay for TheAtlantic.com last year.
What makes things cool?
Several decades before he became the father of industrial design, Raymond Loewy boarded the SS France in 1919 to sail across the Atlantic from his devastated continent to the United States. The influenza pandemic had taken his mother and father, and his service in the French army was over. At the age of 25, Loewy was looking to start fresh in New York, perhaps, he thought, as an electrical engineer. When he reached Manhattan, his older brother Maximilian picked him up in a taxi. They drove straight to 120 Broadway, one of New York City’s largest neoclassical skyscrapers, with two connected towers that ascended from a shared base like a giant tuning fork. Loewy rode the elevator to the observatory platform, 40 stories up, and looked out across the island.
Fascism is in the running to be Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year. But it’s not the right word for the current moment.
The votes are in, the people have spoken, and the result is ugly. Merriam-Webster has warned that fascism could become 2016’s most-searched term on its online dictionary—presumably with even more searches than bigly.
'Fascism' is still our #1 lookup.
— Merriam-Webster (@MerriamWebster) November 29, 2016
# of lookups = how we choose our Word of the Year.
There's still time to look something else up.
This is a significant result. The chaps at the Oxford Dictionary may issue their Word of the Year by decree—this year it’s post-truth, or so they say—but Merriam-Webster is a democratic dictionary. Its Word of the Year, part of an annual list of the top 10 search terms, reflects what is on people’s minds—if only they knew what it meant.
When we graduated in 1993, my friends and I had big dreams for ourselves. More than two decades later I decided to find out if anyone’s had come true.
This is the first story in a seven-part series looking at women’s ambitions in the years following college.
Shortly after I turned 40 I was offered a fantastic job that I didn’t take. It had all the hallmarks of the kind of job I should take, and wanted to take, but it would have also meant a dramatic change in lifestyle. For the last 15 years I’d been a freelancer and then a small-business owner. I worked from home, which meant I could be around for my two young children. When someone had strep I could be there to administer the Tylenol in between conference calls. I picked my kids up from school most days and spent a lot of afternoons with them. I had what was, in theory, an ideal set up—I got to have a job and be a physically present mother.
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Governor Jerry Brown of California got Twitter-verse attention for saying two days ago that if Donald Trump shuts down satellite collection of climate data, “California will launch its own damn satellites.”
I’ve now seen the short speech from which that line was taken, thanks to a tip from reader CS. It’s remarkable enough to be worth your time. It’s a genuine fighting speech, with a tone that is resolute but positive, rather than resentful or doomed. It’s a rousing call-to-battle against the environmental backwardness and larger disdain for fact of the coming era, from a person who as he nears age 80 has struck a distinctive Happy Warrior tone of resistance. Happy, in its confidence. Warrior, in its resoluteness.
Helping children confront challenges requires a more nuanced understanding of the “growth mindset.”
As a young researcher, Carol Dweck was fascinated by how some children faced challenges and failures with aplomb while others shrunk back. Dweck, now a psychologist at Stanford University, eventually identified two core mindsets, or beliefs, about one’s own traits that shape how people approach challenges: fixed mindset, the belief that one’s abilities were carved in stone and predetermined at birth, and growth mindset, the belief that one’s skills and qualities could be cultivated through effort and perseverance. Her findings brought the concepts of “fixed” and “growth” mindset to the fore for educators and parents, inspiring the implementation of her ideas among teachers—and even companies—across the country.
In a short animation, Barack Obama speaks with Ta-Nehisi Coates about his road to the White House.
When a pastor in Portland, Oregon, advocated for inclusivity in his congregation, he paid a high price.
A short film on the popular American sport, and why it deserves a better reputation
