Skip to content
  • Sign in My Account Subscribe
    Quick Links
    • Dear Therapist
    • Crossword Puzzle
    • Manage Subscription
    Popular
    Latest

    Sections

    • Politics
    • Ideas
    • Photo
    • Science
    • Culture
    • Podcasts
    • Health
    • Education
    • Planet
    • Technology
    • Family
    • Projects
    • Business
    • Global
    • Events
    • Books
    • Fiction
    • Newsletter

    The Atlantic Crossword

    crossword promo
    Play Crossword

    The Print Edition

    the latest issue of the atlantic
    Latest Issue Past Issues
    Give a Gift
  • Quick Links
    • Dear Therapist
    • Crossword Puzzle
    • Manage Subscription
  • Popular
  • Latest
  • Sign In My Account
  • Subscribe

Reporter's Notebook

Chris Bodenner
8:30 AM / September 29, 2015

'It Looks Like a Thousand Dead Snakes Bleeding'

Funny or Die does its best Buzzfeed:

People Who've Never Heard Of Spaghetti Try Spaghetti For The First Time from Dan Abramson

More Notes From The Atlantic
  • When a Company Invests in an ‘Underdog City’ February 25, 2021
  • Learning From the New Deal—For the Next Recovery February 22, 2021
  • How Michael Jones Changed Our Daily Lives January 26, 2021
  • What Post-pandemic Repair Could Look Like December 11, 2020
  • Why Some Libraries Are Ending Fines December 4, 2020
  • Notes Home
Most Popular On The Atlantic
  • Landscape of Mars's surface
    JPL / Cornell / NASA

    Mars Is a Hellhole

    Shannon Stirone

    Colonizing the red planet is a ridiculous way to help humanity.

    There’s no place like home—unless you’re Elon Musk. A prototype of SpaceX’s Starship, which may someday send humans to Mars, is, according to Musk, likely to launch soon, possibly within the coming days. But what motivates Musk? Why bother with Mars? A video clip from an interview Musk gave in 2019 seems to sum up Musk’s vision—and everything that’s wrong with it.

    In the video, Musk is seen reading a passage from Carl Sagan’s book Pale Blue Dot. The book, published in 1994, was Sagan’s response to the famous image of Earth as a tiny speck of light floating in a sunbeam—a shot he’d begged NASA to have the Voyager 1 spacecraft take in 1990 as it sailed into space, 3.7 billion miles from Earth. Sagan believed that if we had a photo of ourselves from this distance, it would forever alter our perspective of our place in the cosmos.

    Continue Reading
  • A photo collage of Adam Kinzinger and Donald Trump.
    Adam Maida/ Tom Williams / Brendan Smialowski/ Getty / The Atlantic

    The Man Who Refused to Bow

    Peter Wehner

    Adam Kinzinger says he’ll fight to take his party back from Donald Trump.

    adam Kinzinger is a liberated individual—liberated from his party leadership, liberated from the fear of being beaten in a primary, liberated to speak his mind. The 43-year-old representative was one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Donald Trump for inciting the attack on the U.S. Capitol.

    “I don’t have a constitutional duty to defend against a guy that is a jerk and maybe says some things I don’t like,” Kinzinger told me, explaining what had pushed him to finally break with the president. “I do when he’s getting ready to destroy democracy—and we saw that culminate on January 6th.”

    This was the sort of language a number of Republicans used in the immediate aftermath of the riot. “The president bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said on January 13. But by the end of the month, McCarthy was traveling hat in hand to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Trump.

    Continue Reading
  • A nurse injects a vaccine dose into someone's shoulder
    Patrick T. FALLON / AFP / Getty

    The False Dilemma of Post-Vaccination Risk

    James Hamblin

    We’ll never know for sure how contagious people are after they’re vaccinated, but we do know how they should act.

    Every day, more than 1 million American deltoids are being loaded with a vaccine. The ensuing immune response has proved to be extremely effective—essentially perfect—at preventing severe cases of COVID-19. And now, with yet another highly effective vaccine on the verge of approval, that pace should further accelerate in the weeks to come.

    This is creating a legion of people who no longer need to fear getting sick, and are desperate to return to “normal” life. Yet the messaging on whether they might still carry and spread the disease—and thus whether it’s really safe for them to resume their unmasked, un-distanced lives—has been oblique. Anthony Fauci said last week on CNN that “it is conceivable, maybe likely,” that vaccinated people can get infected with the coronavirus and then spread it to someone else, and that more will be known about this likelihood “in some time, as we do some follow-up studies.” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky had been no more definitive on Meet the Press a few days before, where she told the host, “We don’t have a lot of data yet to inform exactly the question that you’re asking.”

    Continue Reading
  • Photo illustration showing a Trump press conference, a vaccine syringe, and Anthony Fauci
    Alex Wong / Chet Strange/ Sarah Silbiger / Bloomberg / Getty / The Atlantic

    5 Pandemic Mistakes We Keep Repeating

    Zeynep Tufekci

    We can learn from our failures.

    When the polio vaccine was declared safe and effective, the news was met with jubilant celebration. Church bells rang across the nation, and factories blew their whistles. “Polio routed!” newspaper headlines exclaimed. “An historic victory,” “monumental,” “sensational,” newscasters declared. People erupted with joy across the United States. Some danced in the streets; others wept. Kids were sent home from school to celebrate.

    One might have expected the initial approval of the coronavirus vaccines to spark similar jubilation—especially after a brutal pandemic year. But that didn’t happen. Instead, the steady drumbeat of good news about the vaccines has been met with a chorus of relentless pessimism.

    Continue Reading
  • John Dillermand at the circus
    Christen Bach / DR Ramasjang

    ‘To Me, This Penis Is Out of Control’

    Katherine J. Wu

    The Danish series John Dillermand makes a very big deal about a very big body part.

    The world of Danish children’s television is not for the prudish. Kids who turn on the tube in Denmark might be greeted by gratuitous flatulence, cursing, casual nudity, or cross-dressing puppets. One show centers on a pipe-smoking pirate who wallops ninjas and flirts with Satanism. In another, an audience of 11-to-13-year-olds asks probing questions about the bodies of adults who disrobe before them. As Christian Groes, an anthropologist at Denmark’s Roskilde University, told me, Danish children’s television is not unlike an LSD trip: “Everything is possible in that universe,” he said, loosely quoting a friend, “and people won’t complain about it.”

    But people did complain when the Danes debuted a kids’ animated series in January featuring a protagonist with an absurdly long, prehensile penis.

    Continue Reading
  • a hand holding a syringe
    Getty / The Atlantic

    The Second COVID-19 Shot Is a Rude Reawakening for Immune Cells

    Katherine J. Wu

    Side effects are just a sign that protection is kicking in as it should.

    At about 2 a.m. on Thursday morning, I woke to find my husband shivering beside me. For hours, he had been tossing in bed, exhausted but unable to sleep, nursing chills, a fever, and an agonizingly sore left arm. His teeth chattered. His forehead was freckled with sweat. And as I lay next to him, cinching blanket after blanket around his arms, I felt an immense sense of relief. All this misery was a sign that the immune cells in his body had been riled up by the second shot of a COVID-19 vaccine, and were well on their way to guarding him from future disease.

    Side effects are a natural part of the vaccination process, as my colleague Sarah Zhang has written. Not everyone will experience them. But the two COVID-19 vaccines cleared for emergency use in the United States, made by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna, already have reputations for raising the hackles of the immune system: In both companies’ clinical trials, at least a third of the volunteers ended up with symptoms such as headaches and fatigue; fevers like my husband’s were less common.

    Continue Reading
  • A birthday party in a park on a sunny day, with people relaxing in the background an urban skyline in the distance
    Chang W. Lee / The​ New York Times / Redux

    The Most Likely Timeline for Life to Return to Normal

    Joe Pinsker

    An uncertain spring, an amazing summer, a cautious fall and winter, and then, finally, relief.

    Updated at 10:12 a.m. ET on February 24, 2021.

    The end of the coronavirus pandemic is on the horizon at last, but the timeline for actually getting there feels like it shifts daily, with updates about viral variants, vaccine logistics, and other important variables seeming to push back the finish line or scoot it forward. When will we be able to finally live our lives again?

    Pandemics are hard to predict accurately, but we have enough information to make some confident guesses. A useful way to think about what’s ahead is to go season by season. In short: Life this spring will not be substantially different from the past year; summer could, miraculously, be close to normal; and next fall and winter could bring either continued improvement or a moderate backslide, followed by a near-certain return to something like pre-pandemic life.

    Continue Reading
  • A black-and-white photograph of adults sitting around a restaurant table. Each person has either a red or green dot covering their face.
    Adam Maida / Getty / The Atlantic

    You Got the Vaccine! What Can You Do Now?

    Rachel Gutman

    A guide to America’s awkward, semi-vaccinated months

    The past 11 months have been a crash course in a million concepts that you probably wish you knew a whole lot less about. Particle filtration. Ventilation. Epidemiological variables. And, perhaps above all else, interdependence. In forming quarantine bubbles, in donning protective gear just to buy groceries, in boiling our days down to only our most essential interactions, people around the world have been shown exactly how linked their lives and health are. Now, as COVID-19 vaccines rewrite the rules of pandemic life once more, we are due for a new lesson in how each person’s well-being is inextricably tangled with others’.

    This odd (and hopefully brief) chapter in which some Americans are fully vaccinated, but not enough of us to shield the wider population against the coronavirus’s spread, brings with it a whole new set of practical and ethical questions. If I’m vaccinated, can I travel freely? Can two vaccinated people from different households eat lunch together? If your parents are vaccinated but you’re not, can you see them inside? What if only one of them got both shots? What if one of them is a nurse on a COVID-19 ward?

    Continue Reading
  • Country artist Morgan Wallen performs onstage
    Jason Kempin / Getty

    The Biggest Country Musician in America Is a Disgrace

    Spencer Kornhaber

    After saying a racial slur and being exiled from radio, Morgan Wallen has become only more popular. What’s going on?

    It’s no exaggeration to say that one of the biggest artists in American music right now is a disgrace. Three weeks after the 27-year-old country singer Morgan Wallen said a racial slur on camera, his second studio album, Dangerous: The Double Album, is at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart. His singles have been bobbing in the country-music top 10 and the cross-genre Hot 100. Billboard’s ranking of the most popular artists in the United States had him in the top spot for five straight weeks. Thousands of people are, at this moment, streaming Wallen’s songs, buying his records, and watching his music videos—putting money in the pockets of someone who has admitted to saying one of the most noxious things imaginable.

    Continue Reading
  • An iceberg
    Christian Vorhofer/ imageBROKER / Alamy

    The Arctic Has a Cloud Problem

    Quanta
    Max Kozlov

    Tiny iodine particles are clumping together to trap sunlight and melt polar sea ice.

    To climate scientists, clouds are powerful, pillowy paradoxes. They can reflect away the sun’s heat but also trap it in the atmosphere; they can be products of warming temperatures but can also amplify their effects. Now, while studying the atmospheric chemistry that produces clouds, researchers have uncovered an unexpectedly potent natural process that seeds their growth. And as the Earth continues to warm from rising levels of greenhouse gases, this process could be a major new mechanism for accelerating the loss of sea ice at the poles—one that no global climate model currently incorporates.

    This discovery emerged from studies of aerosols: the tiny particles suspended in air onto which water vapor condenses to form clouds. As described this month in a paper in Science, researchers have identified a powerful yet overlooked source of cloud-making aerosols in pristine, remote environments: iodine.

    Continue Reading
More Popular Stories
Latest Notes
  • When a Company Invests in an ‘Underdog City’
  • Learning From the New Deal—For the Next Recovery
  • How Michael Jones Changed Our Daily Lives
  • What Post-pandemic Repair Could Look Like
  • Why Some Libraries Are Ending Fines
  • More
Most Popular On The Atlantic
  • Landscape of Mars's surface
    JPL / Cornell / NASA

    Mars Is a Hellhole

    Shannon Stirone

    Colonizing the red planet is a ridiculous way to help humanity.

    There’s no place like home—unless you’re Elon Musk. A prototype of SpaceX’s Starship, which may someday send humans to Mars, is, according to Musk, likely to launch soon, possibly within the coming days. But what motivates Musk? Why bother with Mars? A video clip from an interview Musk gave in 2019 seems to sum up Musk’s vision—and everything that’s wrong with it.

    In the video, Musk is seen reading a passage from Carl Sagan’s book Pale Blue Dot. The book, published in 1994, was Sagan’s response to the famous image of Earth as a tiny speck of light floating in a sunbeam—a shot he’d begged NASA to have the Voyager 1 spacecraft take in 1990 as it sailed into space, 3.7 billion miles from Earth. Sagan believed that if we had a photo of ourselves from this distance, it would forever alter our perspective of our place in the cosmos.

    Continue Reading
  • A photo collage of Adam Kinzinger and Donald Trump.
    Adam Maida/ Tom Williams / Brendan Smialowski/ Getty / The Atlantic

    The Man Who Refused to Bow

    Peter Wehner

    Adam Kinzinger says he’ll fight to take his party back from Donald Trump.

    adam Kinzinger is a liberated individual—liberated from his party leadership, liberated from the fear of being beaten in a primary, liberated to speak his mind. The 43-year-old representative was one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Donald Trump for inciting the attack on the U.S. Capitol.

    “I don’t have a constitutional duty to defend against a guy that is a jerk and maybe says some things I don’t like,” Kinzinger told me, explaining what had pushed him to finally break with the president. “I do when he’s getting ready to destroy democracy—and we saw that culminate on January 6th.”

    This was the sort of language a number of Republicans used in the immediate aftermath of the riot. “The president bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said on January 13. But by the end of the month, McCarthy was traveling hat in hand to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Trump.

    Continue Reading
  • A nurse injects a vaccine dose into someone's shoulder
    Patrick T. FALLON / AFP / Getty

    The False Dilemma of Post-Vaccination Risk

    James Hamblin

    We’ll never know for sure how contagious people are after they’re vaccinated, but we do know how they should act.

    Every day, more than 1 million American deltoids are being loaded with a vaccine. The ensuing immune response has proved to be extremely effective—essentially perfect—at preventing severe cases of COVID-19. And now, with yet another highly effective vaccine on the verge of approval, that pace should further accelerate in the weeks to come.

    This is creating a legion of people who no longer need to fear getting sick, and are desperate to return to “normal” life. Yet the messaging on whether they might still carry and spread the disease—and thus whether it’s really safe for them to resume their unmasked, un-distanced lives—has been oblique. Anthony Fauci said last week on CNN that “it is conceivable, maybe likely,” that vaccinated people can get infected with the coronavirus and then spread it to someone else, and that more will be known about this likelihood “in some time, as we do some follow-up studies.” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky had been no more definitive on Meet the Press a few days before, where she told the host, “We don’t have a lot of data yet to inform exactly the question that you’re asking.”

    Continue Reading
  • Photo illustration showing a Trump press conference, a vaccine syringe, and Anthony Fauci
    Alex Wong / Chet Strange/ Sarah Silbiger / Bloomberg / Getty / The Atlantic

    5 Pandemic Mistakes We Keep Repeating

    Zeynep Tufekci

    We can learn from our failures.

    When the polio vaccine was declared safe and effective, the news was met with jubilant celebration. Church bells rang across the nation, and factories blew their whistles. “Polio routed!” newspaper headlines exclaimed. “An historic victory,” “monumental,” “sensational,” newscasters declared. People erupted with joy across the United States. Some danced in the streets; others wept. Kids were sent home from school to celebrate.

    One might have expected the initial approval of the coronavirus vaccines to spark similar jubilation—especially after a brutal pandemic year. But that didn’t happen. Instead, the steady drumbeat of good news about the vaccines has been met with a chorus of relentless pessimism.

    Continue Reading
  • John Dillermand at the circus
    Christen Bach / DR Ramasjang

    ‘To Me, This Penis Is Out of Control’

    Katherine J. Wu

    The Danish series John Dillermand makes a very big deal about a very big body part.

    The world of Danish children’s television is not for the prudish. Kids who turn on the tube in Denmark might be greeted by gratuitous flatulence, cursing, casual nudity, or cross-dressing puppets. One show centers on a pipe-smoking pirate who wallops ninjas and flirts with Satanism. In another, an audience of 11-to-13-year-olds asks probing questions about the bodies of adults who disrobe before them. As Christian Groes, an anthropologist at Denmark’s Roskilde University, told me, Danish children’s television is not unlike an LSD trip: “Everything is possible in that universe,” he said, loosely quoting a friend, “and people won’t complain about it.”

    But people did complain when the Danes debuted a kids’ animated series in January featuring a protagonist with an absurdly long, prehensile penis.

    Continue Reading
  • a hand holding a syringe
    Getty / The Atlantic

    The Second COVID-19 Shot Is a Rude Reawakening for Immune Cells

    Katherine J. Wu

    Side effects are just a sign that protection is kicking in as it should.

    At about 2 a.m. on Thursday morning, I woke to find my husband shivering beside me. For hours, he had been tossing in bed, exhausted but unable to sleep, nursing chills, a fever, and an agonizingly sore left arm. His teeth chattered. His forehead was freckled with sweat. And as I lay next to him, cinching blanket after blanket around his arms, I felt an immense sense of relief. All this misery was a sign that the immune cells in his body had been riled up by the second shot of a COVID-19 vaccine, and were well on their way to guarding him from future disease.

    Side effects are a natural part of the vaccination process, as my colleague Sarah Zhang has written. Not everyone will experience them. But the two COVID-19 vaccines cleared for emergency use in the United States, made by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna, already have reputations for raising the hackles of the immune system: In both companies’ clinical trials, at least a third of the volunteers ended up with symptoms such as headaches and fatigue; fevers like my husband’s were less common.

    Continue Reading
  • A birthday party in a park on a sunny day, with people relaxing in the background an urban skyline in the distance
    Chang W. Lee / The​ New York Times / Redux

    The Most Likely Timeline for Life to Return to Normal

    Joe Pinsker

    An uncertain spring, an amazing summer, a cautious fall and winter, and then, finally, relief.

    Updated at 10:12 a.m. ET on February 24, 2021.

    The end of the coronavirus pandemic is on the horizon at last, but the timeline for actually getting there feels like it shifts daily, with updates about viral variants, vaccine logistics, and other important variables seeming to push back the finish line or scoot it forward. When will we be able to finally live our lives again?

    Pandemics are hard to predict accurately, but we have enough information to make some confident guesses. A useful way to think about what’s ahead is to go season by season. In short: Life this spring will not be substantially different from the past year; summer could, miraculously, be close to normal; and next fall and winter could bring either continued improvement or a moderate backslide, followed by a near-certain return to something like pre-pandemic life.

    Continue Reading
  • A black-and-white photograph of adults sitting around a restaurant table. Each person has either a red or green dot covering their face.
    Adam Maida / Getty / The Atlantic

    You Got the Vaccine! What Can You Do Now?

    Rachel Gutman

    A guide to America’s awkward, semi-vaccinated months

    The past 11 months have been a crash course in a million concepts that you probably wish you knew a whole lot less about. Particle filtration. Ventilation. Epidemiological variables. And, perhaps above all else, interdependence. In forming quarantine bubbles, in donning protective gear just to buy groceries, in boiling our days down to only our most essential interactions, people around the world have been shown exactly how linked their lives and health are. Now, as COVID-19 vaccines rewrite the rules of pandemic life once more, we are due for a new lesson in how each person’s well-being is inextricably tangled with others’.

    This odd (and hopefully brief) chapter in which some Americans are fully vaccinated, but not enough of us to shield the wider population against the coronavirus’s spread, brings with it a whole new set of practical and ethical questions. If I’m vaccinated, can I travel freely? Can two vaccinated people from different households eat lunch together? If your parents are vaccinated but you’re not, can you see them inside? What if only one of them got both shots? What if one of them is a nurse on a COVID-19 ward?

    Continue Reading
  • Country artist Morgan Wallen performs onstage
    Jason Kempin / Getty

    The Biggest Country Musician in America Is a Disgrace

    Spencer Kornhaber

    After saying a racial slur and being exiled from radio, Morgan Wallen has become only more popular. What’s going on?

    It’s no exaggeration to say that one of the biggest artists in American music right now is a disgrace. Three weeks after the 27-year-old country singer Morgan Wallen said a racial slur on camera, his second studio album, Dangerous: The Double Album, is at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart. His singles have been bobbing in the country-music top 10 and the cross-genre Hot 100. Billboard’s ranking of the most popular artists in the United States had him in the top spot for five straight weeks. Thousands of people are, at this moment, streaming Wallen’s songs, buying his records, and watching his music videos—putting money in the pockets of someone who has admitted to saying one of the most noxious things imaginable.

    Continue Reading
  • An iceberg
    Christian Vorhofer/ imageBROKER / Alamy

    The Arctic Has a Cloud Problem

    Quanta
    Max Kozlov

    Tiny iodine particles are clumping together to trap sunlight and melt polar sea ice.

    To climate scientists, clouds are powerful, pillowy paradoxes. They can reflect away the sun’s heat but also trap it in the atmosphere; they can be products of warming temperatures but can also amplify their effects. Now, while studying the atmospheric chemistry that produces clouds, researchers have uncovered an unexpectedly potent natural process that seeds their growth. And as the Earth continues to warm from rising levels of greenhouse gases, this process could be a major new mechanism for accelerating the loss of sea ice at the poles—one that no global climate model currently incorporates.

    This discovery emerged from studies of aerosols: the tiny particles suspended in air onto which water vapor condenses to form clouds. As described this month in a paper in Science, researchers have identified a powerful yet overlooked source of cloud-making aerosols in pristine, remote environments: iodine.

    Continue Reading
More Popular Stories
  • About
    • Our History
    • Staff
    • Careers
  • Contact
    • Help Center
    • Contact Us
    • Atlantic Brand Partners
    • Press
  • Podcasts
    • The Experiment
    • Social Distance™
    • Floodlines
    • The Ticket: Politics from The Atlantic
    • Crazy/Genius
  • Subscription
    • Purchase
    • Give a Gift
    • Manage Subscription
    • Download iOS App
    • Newsletters
  • Follow
  • Privacy Policy
  • Do Not Sell My Personal Information
  • Advertising Guidelines
  • Terms Conditions
  • Responsible Disclosure
  • Site Map

TheAtlantic.com Copyright (c) 2021 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.