The Atlantic Daily: Manhunt in Berlin

The search for the suspect in Berlin’s Christmas market rampage continued, President Obama indefinitely protected parts of the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans from offshore drilling, and more.

What We’re Following

The Search Continues: German authorities continued looking for the suspect behind the truck rampage at a Berlin Christmas market that left 12 people dead and 48 injured. An arrest warrant was issued for 24-year-old Anis Amri, a Tunisian national who applied for asylum in Germany but was rejected this summer. Though not much is known about Amri, who has reportedly used six different aliases and three different nationalities, authorities are offering a reward of 100,000 euros for information leading to his capture.

Policy Reversals: President-elect Donald Trump has pledged to undo a number of President Obama’s policies once he takes office, including taking the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement, repealing the Affordable Care Act, and stalling efforts to transfer remaining detainees out of the Guantanamo Bay prison. But some reversals may be harder to achieve than others. With the help of a 1953 law, President Obama has blocked indefinitely offshore drilling in parts of the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans. It’s a ban Trump likely won’t be able to reverse—at least not without Congress’s help.

Goodbye, 2016: Many have taken to lamenting the less than savory aspects of the past year by blaming the year itself.  “We know of course, that horror and death appear on a rolling basis, that no one year has a monopoly on tragedy,” Julie Beck writes. “But it’s nice to hope, not that the tragedy will ever stop appearing, but that maybe this next arbitrarily delineated period will hold a little less than the one we’re in now.” So cheers to 2017.

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Snapshot

The Monkey Head Nebula, which boasts a colorful collection of young stars, cosmic gas, and dust, is located 6,400 light-years away in the constellation Orion. For more cosmic shots, check out  our Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar, featuring new images every day until December 25. (NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team)

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Evening Read

James Parker on the ninja cure for anxiety:

What do you do, reader, when the imps of agitation are upon you? ... Do you have a drink? Take a pill? Reach for your laptop? Shovel a drooping, dripping slice of pizza into your face? Because if America—as John Updike beautifully observed—is a conspiracy to make you happy, it is also a conspiracy to make you anxious, violent, horny, and obese. Stimulated by everything, nourished by nothing, you gape yet more savagely with need: the real need, the intolerable need, the need beneath the needs. So you dose yourself or distract yourself or stuff yourself.

But there is another course open to you: the course of health. You can get fit. You can address yourself to the engine of the body, and drive it and drive it until you are sanctified with shining sweat and glossy with endorphins. Self-medication through exercise. Working out works, at least for some of us: It temporarily settles the rogue brain. Many’s the time, sitting in the gym, on the factory floor of fitness, trembling between sets on some comically inhuman-looking machine, that I’ve wondered, Who else is down here because they’re just barely keeping it together?

Keep reading here, as Parker finds a self-medicating force in extreme-fitness reality TV.

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What Do You Know?

1. Oozing yellow slime molds can solve mazes, make decisions, and share memories despite not having a ____________.

Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.

2. Tokyo estimates that it will cost nearly ____________ to host the 2020 Olympics.

Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.

3. In the late 1800s, ____________ were considered to be feminine jewelry.

Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.

Answers: Brain, $17 billion, watches

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Reader Response: What You’re Working With

Last month, as part of a series of interviews with more than 100 American workers, we asked you to tell us about your work: The pivotal moments in your career, the times you’ve succeeded or struggled to make it, what your job has taught you about how to treat people, and more. This week and next, we’ll be publishing some of your responses here. This reader says he “found peace and purpose working at a Red Lobster in St. Louis”:

It’s a difficult, confrontational work environment to build friendly relationships in, and it can be easy to vilify not only your co workers but the management and clientele that pit you against them. Despite, or perhaps because, of these tensions my job has taught me more about people and how I can and should treat them than anything else in my life.

I make a conscious effort to rebuild a sense of community for myself and for my coworkers and customers. It’s no master plan, just a daily committal to helping coworkers more often, cleaning more shelves, stocking more boxes, bottling more dressings, building more relationships as well as understanding and forgiving more.

Read more reflections from American workers here, including stories from a waitress and a pizza-delivery driver.

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