Ta-Nehisi Coates

My mom has been warning me that I’m going to ruin my feet for almost as long as I’ve been able to walk. She has her reasons: I spent much of my childhood refusing to wear shoes more substantial than soccer slides. In high school, she wouldn’t buy me high heels, so I got an after-school job and bought them myself. During college, I added slipperlike ballet flats and Ugg boots to my repertoire. When I was 25, a physical therapist who was treating my ankle, destroyed years prior during rec-league soccer, told me that he’d never before had a client with a leg injury show up in flip-flops.

Now I am 37, and if you already have been 37, you probably know where this is going. I’ve cleaned up my worst shoe habits, but a moderate concession to podiatric health wasn’t enough to save me. Recently, I developed plantar fasciitis, a common, nagging injury to a band of connective tissue in the foot that most acutely afflicts people who spend a lot of time on their feet—nurses, bartenders, distance runners, seemingly everyone in the NBA. It is also possible to acquire plantar fasciitis by being a dumbass who loves traipsing around in terrible shoes, which was my method.

Imagine that someone—perhaps a man from Florida, or maybe even a governor of Florida—criticized American support for Ukraine. Imagine that this person dismissed the war between Russia and Ukraine as a purely local matter, of no broader significance. Imagine that this person even told a far-right television personality that “while the U.S. has many vital national interests ... becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them.” How would a Ukrainian respond? More to the point, how would the leader of Ukraine respond?

As it happens, an opportunity to ask that hypothetical question recently availed itself. The chair of the board of directors of The Atlantic, Laurene Powell Jobs; The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg; and I interviewed President Volodymyr Zelensky several days ago in the presidential palace in Kyiv. In the course of an hour-long conversation, Goldberg asked Zelensky what he would say to someone, perhaps a governor of Florida, who wonders why Americans should help Ukraine.

Mike Pence is making little secret of his presidential ambitions. He’s written his book, he’s assembling his team, he’s mastered the art of the coy non-denial when somebody asks (in between trips to Iowa) if he’s running. In early Republican-primary polls, he hovers between 6 and 7 percent—not top-tier numbers, but respectable enough. He seems to think he has at least an outside shot at winning the Republican nomination.

And yet, ask a Republican voter about the former vice president, and you’re likely to hear some of the most withering commentary you’ve ever encountered about a politician.

In recent weeks, I was invited to sit in on a series of focus groups conducted over Zoom. Organized by the political consultant Sarah Longwell, the groups consisted of Republican voters who supported Donald Trump in both 2016 and 2020. The participants were all over the country—suburban Atlanta, rural Illinois, San Diego—and they varied in their current opinions of Trump. In some cases, Longwell filtered for voters who should be in Pence’s target demographic. One group consisted entirely of two-time Trump voters who didn’t want him to run again; another was made up of conservative evangelicals, who might presumably appreciate Pence’s roots in the religious right.

What with everything going on in the world, stewing over an obscure, century-old maritime law might seem odd. But the Jones Act really does warrant such consternation. It’s not just a terrible law that hurts you, me, and everyone we know—especially if they live in Puerto Rico or drive to work on the East Coast. It’s also a cautionary tale against government industrial policies, which can have unintended consequences far beyond higher prices or budget overrun.

The Jones Act, formally known as Section 27 of the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, was ostensibly intended to ensure adequate domestic shipbuilding capacity and a ready supply of merchant mariners and ships in times of war or other national emergencies. Today, it requires that any domestic waterborne shipping of goods be conducted on vessels that are built, owned, flagged, and crewed by Americans. As a result, the U.S. has one of the most (if not the most) restrictive shipping systems in the world.

Prominent Republicans disagree about a lot these days, but on one point they have found consensus: Getting charged with a crime would be great news for Donald Trump.

After the former president predicted that he will be arrested in Manhattan tomorrow—a forecast that seems questionable, though an indictment from Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg does seem to be imminent—conventional wisdom quickly developed on the right that Trump would be the big winner.

“The prosecutor in New York has done more to help Donald Trump get elected president than any single person in America today,” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said. “Mr. Bragg, you have helped Donald Trump, amazing.”

Tom Nichols: Trump did it again

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Recently I gave myself an assignment: Come up with a framework for explaining generative AI, such as ChatGPT, in a way that illuminates the full potential of the technology and helps me make predictions about its future.

By analogy, imagine that it’s the year 1780 and you get a glimpse of an early English steam engine. You might say: “This is a device for pumping water out of coal mines.” And that would be true. But this accurate description would be far too narrow to see the big picture. The steam engine wasn’t just a water pump. It was a lever for detaching economic growth from population growth. That is the kind of description that would have allowed an 18th-century writer to predict the future.

Updated at 11:24 a.m. ET on March 19, 2023

GLENDALE, Ariz.—Breaking: Taylor Swift is not simply a voice in our ears or an abstract concept to argue over at parties, but a flesh-and-blood being with a taste for sparkling pajamas and the stamina of a ram. All concerts are conjurings, turning the audience’s idea of a performer into a real thing, but last night’s kickoff of Taylor Swift’s Eras tour in Glendale, Arizona, heightened the amazement with Houdini-escapes-handcuffs physicality. After years of having their inner lives shaped by Swift’s highly mediated virtual output, more than 70,000 individuals can now attest to the vibrancy of Taylor Swift the person. Somehow, seeing her up close made her seem more superhuman.

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ifteen years ago, a distinguished academic publisher brought out a densely argued, lavishly illustrated, wildly erudite monograph that seemed to completely reconceive the study of Johannes Vermeer. The author, an art historian named Benjamin Binstock, said that he had discerned the existence of an entirely new artist—Vermeer’s daughter Maria, the young woman Binstock had also identified as the likely model for Girl With a Pearl Earring—to whom he attributed seven of the 35 or so paintings then conventionally ascribed to Vermeer. To hear Binstock tell it, Maria’s paintings include one of the most popular: Girl With a Red Hat, at the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C. He believes that painting and another at the National Gallery are self-portraits by Maria, and that she is also the artist behind two out of the three Vermeers at the Frick, in New York; two out of the five at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, also in New York; and one in the private Leiden Collection.  

1. The Disappearance

At 12:42 a.m. on the quiet, moonlit night of March 8, 2014, a Boeing 777-200ER operated by Malaysia Airlines took off from Kuala Lumpur and turned toward Beijing, climbing to its assigned cruising altitude of 35,000 feet. The designator for Malaysia Airlines is MH. The flight number was 370. Fariq Hamid, the first officer, was flying the airplane. He was 27 years old. This was a training flight for him, the last one; he would soon be fully certified. His trainer was the pilot in command, a man named Zaharie Ahmad Shah, who at 53 was one of the most senior captains at Malaysia Airlines. In Malaysian style, he was known by his first name, Zaharie. He was married and had three adult children. He lived in a gated development. He owned two houses. In his first house he had installed an elaborate Microsoft flight simulator.

A brown dog, muzzle gone gray—surely from a life well lived—tries to climb three steps but falters. Her legs give out, and she twists and falls. A Rottweiler limps around a kitchen. A golden retriever pants in a vet’s office, then he’s placed on a table, wrapped in medical tubes. “Bye, buddy,” a voice says off camera. Nearby, a hand picks up a syringe.

This is Dead-Dog TikTok. It is an algorithmic loop of pet death: of sick and senior dogs living their last day on Earth, of final hours spent clinging to one another in the veterinarian’s office, of the brutal grief that follows in the aftermath. One related trend invites owners to share the moment they knew it was time—time unspecified, but clear: Share the moment you decided to euthanize your dog.