Today's News: April 2, 2017

a black-and-white photo of someone getting their upper arm tattooed — Corbis / Getty

Tattoos Do Odd Things to the Immune System

Katherine J. Wu

When you stick ink-filled needles into your skin, your body’s defenders respond accordingly. Scientists aren’t sure if that’s good or bad for you.

In 2018, I paid a man a couple hundred dollars to repeatedly jam several needles into the skin of my right wrist. I felt as if I were being attacked by a microscopic cavalry of crabs. Into every jab went black ink, eventually forming the shape of double quotation marks. It was my first tattoo, and likely not my last.

In the thousands of years that tattoos have been around, not much has changed. The practice still involves carving wounds into permanent, inked-in shapes that we find aesthetically pleasing. But much of tattooing remains mysterious: Scientists still aren’t sure what makes certain tattoos fade fast, why others stick around when they’re supposed to disappear, or how they react to light. One of the strangest and least-studied enigmas, though, is how tattoos survive at all. Our immune system is constantly doing its darndest to destroy them—and understanding why it fails could clue us in to one of our bodies’ most important functions, even when we leave the skin blank.

Two children in a field display extreme emotion while holding books. — Hulton Archive / Getty

Why Kids Aren’t Falling in Love With Reading

Katherine Marsh

Hint: It’s not just the screens.

These days, when I explain to a fellow parent that I write novels for children in fifth through eighth grades, I am frequently treated to an apologetic confession: “My child doesn’t read, at least not the way I did.” I know exactly how they feel—my tween and teen don’t read the way I did either. When I was in elementary school, I gobbled up everything: haunting classics such as The Witch of Blackbird Pond and gimmicky series such as the Choose Your Own Adventure books. By middle school, I was reading voluminous adult fiction like the works of Louisa May Alcott and J. R. R. Tolkien. Not every child is—or was—this kind of reader. But what parents today are picking up on is that a shrinking number of kids are reading widely and voraciously for fun.

Red-and-white graphic illustration showing the Earth from space, but the continents are crowded with giant people — Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

The Malthusians Are Back

Alex Trembath

Vijaya Ramachandran

Climate activists who worry that the world has too many people are joining an ugly tradition.

Scolding regular people for contributing to climate change is out of fashion. But scolding people for making new people is, apparently, totally fine. Many climate activists say the worst thing an individual can do, from an emissions perspective, is have kids. The climate-advocacy group Project Drawdown lists “family planning and education,” which are intended to lower fertility rates, as leading solutions to global warming. Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard historian and celebrated climate researcher, published an op-ed in Scientific American this month titled “Eight Billion People in the World Is a Crisis, Not an Achievement.”

Trent McNamara: Liberal societies have dangerously low birth rates

In recent years, many climate advocates have emphasized human population itself—as opposed to related factors such as consumption and technology—as the driving force behind environmental destruction. This is, at bottom, a very old idea that can be traced back to the 18th-century cleric Thomas Malthus. It is also analytically unsound and morally objectionable. Critics of overpopulation down through the ages have had a nasty habit of treating people less as individuals with value and agency than as sentient locusts.

Illustration collage of Ron DeSantis and a tank in Ukraine. — Paul Spella / The Atlantic; Ignacio Marin / Anadolu Agency / Getty; Cheny Orr / AFP / Getty

Ron DeSantis Is Right About Ukraine

Mario Loyola

His statements have been hotly disputed, but not refuted.

“While the U.S. has many vital national interests,” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis wrote recently, “becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them.”

The comments inspired a wave of disapproval from conservatives and Republicans, including The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page and the Washington Post columnist George Will, who quipped, “If that is his settled view after the dust settles and he elaborates on this, then he’s not fit to be president, period.”

As an inveterate critic of Woodrow Wilson, Will should know better. DeSantis was merely taking a realist foreign-policy stance at a time when elites in both parties have gotten into a dangerously Wilsonian frame of mind. With support for Ukraine aid falling among Republicans, DeSantis’s comments were also more in tune with where GOP voters are, and are likely to be in the months ahead.

A photo of a performance of the musical Parade — Joan Marcus / DKC / O&M Co.

A ‘Parade’ of Anti-Semites on Broadway

Yair Rosenberg

Anti-Jewish bigots steal the show in the revived musical. And that’s why it works.

There’s a moment in Parade, the musical revival that opened last week on Broadway, that encapsulates the show’s subversiveness. It’s also the moment that seals the demise of the drama’s protagonist, Leo Frank.

Frank, played by Ben Platt, is on trial for the murder of Mary Phagan, a 13-year-old girl who was found dead in the Atlanta factory where he served as superintendent in 1913. (The plot is based on a true story.) A nerdy northern Jew in Georgia, Frank is an easy target for the ire of the public and the prosecution. In a taut and tense courtroom scene, he is implicated by a succession of coached but compelling witnesses. The most damning testimony comes from a janitor, Jim Conley (Alex Joseph Grayson), who claims that the Jew stereotypically attempted to buy his silence, recalling Frank’s words in a sinister song:

A bedroom with fuzzed out clocks and maps and squiggles zooming around — Jon Han

Procrastinating Ourselves to Death

Megan Garber

Jenny Odell’s latest book asks an urgent question: What happens when our emergencies become banal?

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.

“Time to stand!”

My wrist gets a buzz. The tiny computer strapped around it lights up with a message, rendered in lilac-blue: I am sitting, the watch informs me. I shouldn’t be. The screen sends the same reminder—cheery, vaguely judgy—several times a day. Sometimes I find myself refusing to heed, in an act of petty rebellion. And some of those times, I find myself wondering, as I stay in the chair, What exactly am I defying?

Watches mark time; they also impose it. I got the “smart” version of one as a gift over the holidays, and I thought of it, at first, as a way to add some order to a stretch of time that felt out of control. I’d been sleeping badly; quantifying the badness, I thought, might be the first step toward fixing it. If I could understand the rhythms of those wayward hours—the deep sleep, the REM sleep, the stretches of enervating wakefulness—maybe I could improve the rest, and with that, my life overall. My “new watch, new you” hopes soon expanded: I kept the “Stand!” reminders and the default step-counter. I added hourly exhortations to drink water. To help things along, I bought one of those enormous water bottles that break the day down into fluid ounces (7 a.m. at the top, 10 p.m. at the bottom), treating hydration as a winnable race against time.

shadow of an adult hand reaching for a child's — Photograph by Dion Bierdrager for The Atlantic

The Real Reason South Koreans Aren’t Having Babies

Anna Louie Sussman

Gender, rather than race or age or immigration status, has become the country’s sharpest social fault line.

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.

On the days she’s feeling most generous toward men—say, when she sees a handsome man on the street—Helena Lee can sometimes put her distaste aside and appreciate them as “eye candy.” That’s as far as she goes: “I do not want to know what is inside of his brain.” Most of the time, she wants nothing at all to do with men.

“I try to have faith in guys and not to be like, ‘Kill all men,’” she says. “But I’m sorry, I am a little bit on that side—that is, on the extreme side.”

Her father, she says, was abusive and moved out when she was 6, and she has lived with her mother and grandmother ever since, a mini-matriarchy that suits her fine. She wears her hair in a bob, and on the day we met, she had on a black-denim button-down and a beige trench coat. In college, male classmates told her she’d be cuter if she “fixed her gay style.” The worst part, she said, was that they were surprised when she was offended—they thought they’d paid her a compliment. She is 24, studying for civil-servant exams, and likes reading Andrea Dworkin, Carl Sagan, and the occasional romance novel, which she considers pure fantasy.

Daniel Zender / The Atlantic

Crypto Is Mostly Over. Its Carbon Emissions Are Not.

Emma Marris

The environmental toll of Bitcoin could be even higher this year than last.

Sign up for The Weekly Planet, The Atlantic’s newsletter about living through climate change, here.

At this point, for most of us, cryptocurrency seems like nothing more than a fad. After the FTX bankruptcy and broader crypto crash last year, basically all of the celebrities who were promoting crypto have gone silent. “MiamiCoin,” hyped by Miami Mayor Francis Suarez as a new source of income for the city, is now worthless. The Wild West days of the industry may be over. Recently, the head of the SEC warned crypto firms to “do their work within the bounds of the law” or face enforcement actions. Lots of people lost money in the crash, but from the planet’s perspective, the industry’s downfall is good news: The computing power fueling the crypto boom was so substantial that it was causing substantial greenhouse-gas emissions.

What Really Happened to Malaysia’s Missing Airplane

William Langewiesche

Five years ago, the flight vanished into the Indian Ocean. Officials on land know more about why than they dare to say.

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.

Photograph of a bottle of ivermectin — Houston Cofield / NYT / Redux

How Ivermectin Became a Belief System

Kaitlyn Tiffany

The deworming drug is central to an improvisational, alternative medical subculture that was forming even before the pandemic.

Since fall 2021, Daniel Lemoi has been a central figure in the online community dedicated to experimental use of the antiparasitic drug ivermectin. “You guys all know I’m not a doctor,” he often reminded them. “I’m a guy that grew up on a farm. I ran equipment all my life. I live on a dirt road and I drive an old truck—a 30-year-old truck. I’m just one of you.” Lemoi’s folksy Rhode Island accent, his avowed regular-guy-ness, and his refusal to take any money in exchange for his advice made him into an alt-wellness influencer and a personal hero for those who followed him. He joked about his tell-it-like-it-is style and liberal use of curse words: “If you don’t like my mouth, go pray to God, because he’s the one that chose me for this mission.”

America's Most Widely Misread Literary Work

Jackie Lay

Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” originally published in The Atlantic in 1915, is animated in a new video.

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The World’s Tallest Waterslide Was a Terrible, Tragic Idea

Emily Buder

A fatal accident at a waterslide park was the result of gross negligence, lax state regulations, and a whole lot of hubris.

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Why Do American Schools Have Such Long Hours?

Alice Roth

The structure of America’s school calendar may seem counterintuitive—and in many ways, it is.

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Today's News: April 2, 2017

A judge rules that Trump may have incited violence at campaign rally in Kentucky, a South Korean shipping vessel disappears, and 20 people died in a stabbing attack in Pakistan.

Updates

A Cargo Ship Disappears in the South Atlantic Ocean

20 People Are Found Murdered at a Religious Shrine in Pakistan

A Judge Rules That Trump May Have Incited Violence at an Election Rally

Most Popular

Tattoos Do Odd Things to the Immune System

Why Kids Aren’t Falling in Love With Reading

The Malthusians Are Back

Ron DeSantis Is Right About Ukraine

A ‘Parade’ of Anti-Semites on Broadway

Procrastinating Ourselves to Death

The Real Reason South Koreans Aren’t Having Babies

Crypto Is Mostly Over. Its Carbon Emissions Are Not.

What Really Happened to Malaysia’s Missing Airplane

How Ivermectin Became a Belief System

America's Most Widely Misread Literary Work

The World’s Tallest Waterslide Was a Terrible, Tragic Idea

Why Do American Schools Have Such Long Hours?