Peter Edelman, “The Worst Thing Bill Clinton Has Done”; Ezekiel Emanuel, “Whose Right to Die?”; Matthew Gurewitsch, “An Audubon in Sound”; Lester C. Thurow, “The Revolution Upon Us”; and much more.
A recent article in these pages argued that Thomas Jefferson was so deeply racist that he should be expelled from the American pantheon. But examining the problems this ambiguous figure poses for Americans reveals how the American principles of democracy and equality were entwined with the country's practice of slavery and racism, and helps to explain why America has had such difficulty creating an interracial society.
He was just one old man with a little brown book of Bible stories. How could he compete with MTV, the Playboy Channel, and rental movies where people kill each other with no more thought than it would take to swat a fly?
“What do you think of this company Netscape?” my parents asked. It was 1995, and they had called me on the landline, which back then just meant the telephone. Netscape was a company that made a graphical web browser—the web browser, really—but gave it away for free. Its income statement showed only modest revenue (and substantial losses). The web was new and exciting but unproven, so I steered my folks away from Netscape’s IPO.
Hahaha. Netscape stock doubled its $28 offering price the day it went public, making its founders half billionaires and ushering in the dot-com era. By the end of the year, the stock hit $174, and when AOL acquired the company in 1999, just before the dot-com crash, the deal was worth $10 billion.
The shortage is a calamity—not a victory for breastfeeding.
The baby was just two weeks old, and hungry. Elizabeth Hanson tried to breastfeed, but didn’t have enough milk. With terror, she watched as her daughter lost weight, tiny bones protruding from her skin.
In America, in modern times, most parents can count on multiple safe, healthy options for feeding an infant: breast milk or formula. That is, unless they are experiencing the impacts of the current formula shortage, as thousands of families across the United States are.
But in 1724, Elizabeth Hanson couldn’t turn to formula when her milk dried up. Her story illustrates the nightmarish realities that confronted families before the development of modern commercial formula in the mid-20th century.
Strategic prudence argues in favor of pocketing successes rather than pressing the fight and running the tantamount risks.
The war in Ukraine is entering a more dangerous phase. Even though Russia appears to have downsized its goals after Kyiv blunted Moscow’s initial invasion, the Kremlin is now determined to enlarge the chunk of eastern and southern Ukraine that it grabbed in 2014. Meanwhile, NATO allies are pouring in arms, providing intelligence, and savoring the prospect of a “victory” that entails expelling Russia from Ukraine.
With both sides doubling down, NATO must engage in a forthright dialogue with the Ukrainian government about its goals and how best to bring the bloodshed to a close sooner rather than later. Russia has already been dealt a decisive strategic defeat. Ukrainian forces have rebuffed the advance on Kyiv and retain control of most of the country; the West has hit Russia with severe economic sanctions; and NATO has reinforced its eastern flank, while Finland and Sweden now seek to join the alliance. For NATO and Ukraine alike, strategic prudence argues in favor of pocketing these successes rather than pressing the fight and running the tantamount risks.
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A shadow box above Rebecca’s dining-room table, hanging there since 2006, displays an autographed copy of the Pirates of the Caribbean script—signed by Keira Knightley, Orlando Bloom, and Johnny Depp. Though Rebecca, at age 36, is emphatically no longer a Depp fan, she says she keeps the script on her wall as a conversation starter. If someone asks about it, maybe she’ll go into the full story, rather than pretending she never liked Depp. “Also it’s not like it’s his smug little face,” she told me.
That face is everywhere right now, on account of Depp’s ongoing and highly public lawsuit against his ex-wife Amber Heard. The case is complicated, and the testimony is rife with sordid, disturbing details. In short, Depp has taken Heard to court for defamation over a 2018 essay she published in The Washington Post that identified her as a victim of domestic abuse and sexual violence. Heard also made abuse allegations when she filed for divorce from Depp in early 2016, and was granted a restraining order against him.
An inspiring research project went viral for the wrong reasons.
Sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS, “will be a thing of the past,” according to Carmel Harrington, a sleep researcher at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead, in Australia. A press release describes her new study, out this month, as a “game-changing” effort and a “world-first breakthrough” that could prevent future deaths from the tragic illness. Celebrations quickly spread on social media: “THEY FOUND THE CAUSE OF SIDS. Excuse me while I cry for all the parents,” one viral tweet declared. “Closest thing to a miracle in a long time,” said another. The press soon picked up the story. On Friday, a segment on Good Morning America touted Harrington’s “very, very important study” of SIDS, while a story in the New York Post promised that her data would “bring closure to countless parents who have endured the nightmare of losing a child.”