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The Blake family sits around the table — Wilson Webb / A24

The Scariest Movie of the Year Isn’t a Horror Movie

Shirley Li

The Humans turns a difficult Thanksgiving dinner into something grotesque.

The Humans features no ghosts, monsters, or poltergeists. It’s not set inside a haunted house, an abandoned building, or a tract of shadowy woods. And yet, it might be the scariest movie of the year.

Based on Stephen Karam’s Tony-winning play, and adapted and directed by Karam himself, The Humans centers on the Blake family as they gather in lower Manhattan for a Thanksgiving dinner. The mood is about as warm as a broken oven. Deirdre (Jayne Houdyshell, brilliantly reprising her role from the play) and Erik (Richard Jenkins) have driven hours to visit their younger daughter, Brigid (Beanie Feldstein), at her new apartment, where she lives with her boyfriend, Richard (Steven Yeun)—but all they’ve gotten for their journey are terse thank-yous and cheap champagne in plastic cups. Aimee (Amy Schumer), their older daughter, is still reeling from a recent breakup and career setbacks, while Momo (June Squibb), Erik’s mother, has dementia and must be cared for at all times. The setting doesn’t help: Brigid and Richard’s home is a thin-walled, claustrophobia-inducing space that lets in barely any natural light. Each family member has something to get off his or her chest, and it’s as if their collective dread has permeated the foreboding premises. Or is it the reverse?

Mel Gibson and an actor playing Christ — AA Film Archive / Alamy

Cancel Mel Gibson

Joshua Malina

Why is Hollywood still hiring this raging anti-Semite?

Every day, as dawn’s rosy fingers reach through my window, I arise and check in with Twitter, to see what fresh hell awaits. Generally, by about 6:30, I’ve been made furious by the outrage du jour. But recently, I experienced more of a sense of bemusement than ire, as I took in Deadline’s headline: “Mel Gibson in Talks to Direct Lethal Weapon 5.”

Gibson is a well-known Jew-hater (anti-Semite is too mild). His prejudices are well documented. So my question is, what does a guy have to do these days to get put on Hollywood’s no-fly list? I’m a character actor. I tend to take the jobs that come my way. But—and this hurts to write—you couldn’t pay me enough to work with Mel Gibson.

Now, I love the Lethal Weapon movies (at least the first few). And Danny Glover’s a gem. But Gibson? Yes, he’s a talented man. Many horrible people produce wonderful art. Put me down as an ardent fan of Roald Dahl, Pablo Picasso, and Edith Wharton; can’t get enough of what they’re selling. But these three had the good taste to die. That makes it a lot easier to enjoy their output. Gibson lives. And Tinseltown need not employ him further.

The Beatles sit at a variety of instruments, playing. — Linda McCartney / Apple Corps Ltd. / Disney+

Like Watching Six Different Marriages Fall Apart

James Parker

What Peter Jackson’s Get Back reveals about the Beatles breakup

What is happening to the Beatles? Whose idea was this? What is going on? It’s January 1969, and look at them: stuck on a soundstage in Twickenham Film Studios—the Beatles!—sitting around like a bunch of YouTubers, idly generating content. They burble; they dawdle; they pick up their instruments and put them down again. They are of the ’60s and they are above the ’60s. “I think your beard suits you … man,” George says to Paul. Planes of shifting color light up the white screens behind them, viridescent splodges and blooms of moody fuchsia, as if they’re trapped at the end of a rainbow. Everybody’s watching, everybody’s listening: nosy cameras, nudging mics, cables and crew members all over the place.

An empty airport in Japan after travel was restricted because of the Omicron variant — Carl Court / Getty

Omicron’s Best- and Worst-Case Scenarios

Rachel Gutman

A new, highly contagious variant could have terrible consequences. But if it ends up causing milder symptoms than Delta, there’s a real upside.

World, meet Omicron; Omicron, meet a lot of people who are very, very anxious to know more about you.

The arrival of the newest coronavirus variant, first identified in Botswana and South Africa and now present in the United States, might be bad news, or it might be terrible news—or maybe it’s just a temporary distraction from Delta. Ultimately, Omicron’s effect on the course of the pandemic will be determined by three factors: its transmissibility; the degree to which it evades our existing immune defenses; and its virulence, or the severity of the disease that it causes. If Omicron turns out to jump between hosts with ease, blow past our neutralizing antibodies, and cause unusually dangerous complications, we’ll all be in deep trouble. But it could also turn out to do a lot of other things, with more subtle implications. If Omicron ends up being super contagious, for example, but mild in its symptoms, that might even be a good thing—a perfect variant, just in time for Christmas.

a Pfizer vaccine vial — Justin Tallis / Getty / The Atlantic

Omicron Won’t Ruin Your Booster

Katherine J. Wu

Sometimes, dips in immunization quality can be rescued with a little extra quantity.

If it doesn’t happen with this variant, it’ll happen with the next one, or maybe the next. Some version of this coronavirus is bound to flummox our vaccines. In the past two years, SARS-CoV-2 has hopscotched across the globe, rejiggering its genome to better coexist with us. The latest coronavirus contender, Omicron, has more than 50 mutations, making it the most heavily altered coronavirus variant of concern that researchers have identified to date. Even in the fully vaccinated, at least a few antibodies will likely be stumped, and at least a few cells infected. Our collective defenses may soon bear an Omicron-shaped dent.

But immunity isn’t a binary switch that some party-crashing variant can flip off. Even if a wily virus erodes some of the safeguards that our original-flavor vaccines have raised, it’s nearly impossible for a variant to wipe them away completely. “I don’t think we’re ever going to go back to square one of having no immunity against this virus,” Rishi Goel, an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania, told me. Defenses, if they drop, should fall stepwise, not all at once: first against infection, then transmission and mild symptoms, and finally the severest disease. And vaccinated immune systems are extraordinarily stubborn about letting those last fortifications go.

Illustration of a smartphone with a sad girl on the screen. — Getty; The Atlantic

The Dangerous Experiment on Teen Girls

Jonathan Haidt

The preponderance of the evidence suggests that social media is causing real damage to adolescents.

Social media gets blamed for many of America’s ills, including the polarization of our politics and the erosion of truth itself. But proving that harms have occurred to all of society is hard. Far easier to show is the damage to a specific class of people: adolescent girls, whose rates of depression, anxiety, and self-injury surged in the early 2010s, as social-media platforms proliferated and expanded. Much more than for boys, adolescence typically heightens girls’ self-consciousness about their changing body and amplifies insecurities about where they fit in their social network. Social media—particularly Instagram, which displaces other forms of interaction among teens, puts the size of their friend group on public display, and subjects their physical appearance to the hard metrics of likes and comment counts—takes the worst parts of middle school and glossy women’s magazines and intensifies them.

Two close-ups of crying eyes, superimposed on a purple background — The Atlantic. Source images: Christopher Furlong / Getty; Nhac Nguyen / AFP / Getty

The Opposite of Toxic Positivity

Scott Barry Kaufman

“Tragic optimism” is the search for meaning during the inevitable tragedies of human existence, and is better for us than avoiding darkness and trying to “stay positive.”

Countless books have been written on the “power of gratitude” and the importance of counting your blessings, but that sentiment may feel like cold comfort during the coronavirus pandemic, when blessings have often seemed scant. Refusing to look at life’s darkness and avoiding uncomfortable experiences can be detrimental to mental health. This “toxic positivity” is ultimately a denial of reality. Telling someone to “stay positive” in the middle of a global crisis is missing out on an opportunity for growth, not to mention likely to backfire and only make them feel worse. As the gratitude researcher Robert Emmons of UC Davis writes, “To deny that life has its share of disappointments, frustrations, losses, hurts, setbacks, and sadness would be unrealistic and untenable. Life is suffering. No amount of positive thinking exercises will change this truth.”

An image of a peloton bike in a bubble. — Getty ; Peloton ; The Atlantic

Peloton Is Stuck, Just Like the Rest of Us

Amanda Mull

People want the company to be a pandemic crystal ball. It’s not.

It was the best of pelotimes, it was the worst of pelotimes.

If the graph of Peloton’s stock-price fluctuations were the blueprint for a new roller coaster, it would be a terrifying ride for anyone brave enough to strap in. The line undulates with disasters: Since the fitness-tech company went public in late 2019, it has weathered a virally bad holiday ad campaign, pandemic delivery delays so extensive that it bought up tons of pricey cargo-plane space, and a recall of one of its treadmills following dozens of injuries and the death of a child.

Between those precipitous drops, the company had a better pandemic than nearly all other businesses on the planet. With gyms closed, Peloton’s stock price skyrocketed alongside sales of its spin bikes and treadmills, increasing more than eightfold from March to December 2020. By August 2021, the company had 2.3 million users paying nearly $40 a month to take classes on its “connected fitness” products—more than quadruple the number it reported two years prior. But the highs and lows have continued apace: Peloton’s stock tanked in November after the company reported quarterly sales far below its own expectations and slashed annual-revenue projections. As more people return to gyms, new signups have slowed and existing members are taking fewer classes. The Wall Street Journal gave the phenomenon a name: Peloton fatigue. (Peloton declined to comment for this story.)

Illustration of the Supreme Court with a red circle behind it. — Getty; The Atlantic

Republicans Hope Their Assault on Democracy Will Stop a Post-Roe Backlash

Adam Serwer

Conservatives on the Supreme Court have engineered a system that allows half the country’s population to be stripped of a fundamental constitutional right.

Women’s constitutional right to decide whether to bear children appears to be hanging by a thread. At yesterday’s oral argument in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed justices displayed an eagerness to overturn Roe v. Wade, the legal precedent that prevents states from banning abortion. This is no surprise—the conservative legal movement fought a decades-long political battle to achieve just this objective. The case, which will decide the constitutionality of Mississippi’s ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, offers a clear opportunity to do so.

I should caution that the back-and-forth of arguments before the Court can be deceiving. The Obama administration’s difficulty arguing its case in favor of the Affordable Care Act led observers to declare it would be struck down—that didn’t happen. An oral argument can be a preview of how the justices will rule, but it is not always, and so the decision in this case remains unknown until it is handed down. That said, conservative activists had not spent decades attempting to strike down Obamacare. Ending legal abortion in America, though, has long been the main goal of the conservative legal movement.

Donald Trump in silhouette, backlit by a single circle of light — Brendan Smialowski / AFP / Getty

It Wasn’t a Hoax

David Frum

People with scant illusions about Trump are volunteering to help him execute one of his Big Lies.

If Donald Trump had been supported only by people who affirmatively liked him, his attack on American democracy would never have gotten as far as it did.

Instead, at almost every turn, Trump was helped by people who had little liking for him as a human being or politician, but assessed that he could be useful for purposes of their own. The latest example: the suddenly red-hot media campaign to endorse Trump’s fantasy that he was the victim of a “Russia hoax.”

Franklin Foer: Russiagate was not a hoax

The usual suspects in the pro-Trump media ecosystem will of course endorse and repeat everything Trump says, no matter how outlandish. But it’s not pro-Trumpers who are leading the latest round of Trump-Russia denialism. This newest round of excuse-making is being sounded from more respectable quarters, in many cases by people distinguished as Trump critics. With Trump out of office—at least for the time being—they now feel free to subordinate their past concerns about him to other private quarrels with the FBI or mainstream media institutions. On high-subscription Substacks, on popular podcasts, even from within prestige media institutions, people with scant illusions about Trump the man and president are nonetheless volunteering to help him execute one of his Big Lies.