Obama and the Fiscal Cliff

Illustration of a woman selling yoga pants from an Instagram window — Brittain Peck

Beware of Selling Yoga Pants on Facebook

Darlena Cunha

Is the social-media gig economy a form of entrepreneurship, fraud—or something else entirely?

“Hi! I noticed you posted about your cold today. It sucks to be sick. I thought maybe you’d like to try some greens! I love them; I swear, you’ll never get sick again!”

I did not want the greens.

This was the third time my friend from college had tried to sell them to me online. She also did things like post statuses about “That Crazy Wrap Thing” that her friends were supposed to pretend were not advertisements. My aunt who homeschools her seven children sells organic cleaning supplies. A poet I know says she sells online for the community it gives her. A young college administrator likes it for the freebies and the friendships. A stay-at-home mom said she was using a lot of makeup anyway, so Younique only made sense.

A bleached coral reef — David Gray / Reuters

Since 2016, Half of All Coral in the Great Barrier Reef Has Died

Robinson Meyer

A new study warns it has become a “highly altered, degraded system.”

Once upon a time, there was a city so dazzling and kaleidoscopic, so braided and water-rimmed, that it was often compared to a single living body. It clustered around a glimmering emerald spine, which astronauts could glimpse from orbit. It hid warm nooks and crannies, each a nursery for new life. It opened into radiant, iris-colored avenues, which tourists crossed oceans to see. The city was, the experts declared, the planet’s largest living structure.

Then, all at once, a kind of invisible wildfire overran the city. It consumed its avenues and neighborhoods, swallowed its canyons and branches. It expelled an uncountable number of dwellers from their homes. It was merciless: Even those who escaped the initial ravishment perished in the famine that followed.

How Syria Came to This

Andrew Tabler

A story of ethnic and sectarian conflict, international connivance, and above all civilian suffering

Seven years of horrific twists and turns in the Syrian Civil War make it hard to remember that it all started with a little graffiti.

In March 2011, four children in the southern city of Der’a scrawled on a wall “It’s your turn, Doctor”—a not so subtle prediction that the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, a British-trained ophthalmologist and self-styled reformer, would go down in the the manner of the Ben Ali regime in Tunisia, the Mubarak regime in Egypt, and eventually, the Qaddafi regime in Libya. But Syria’s story would turn out differently.

The crackdown started small. Assad’s security services arrested the four graffiti artists, refusing to tell their parents where they were. After two weeks of waiting, the residents of Der’a—who are famously direct and fiery—held protests demanding the children’s release. The regime responded with live gunfire, killing several, and drawing the first blood in a war that’s now killed some half a million people. With every funeral came more opportunities for protests—and for the regime to respond with more violence.

Doctors Tell All—and It’s Bad

Meghan O'Rourke

A crop of books by disillusioned physicians reveals a corrosive doctor-patient relationship at the heart of our health-care crisis.

For someone in her 30s, I’ve spent a lot of time in doctors’ offices and hospitals, shivering on exam tables in my open-to-the-front gown, recording my medical history on multiple forms, having enough blood drawn in little glass tubes to satisfy a thirsty vampire. In my early 20s, I contracted a disease that doctors were unable to identify for years—in fact, for about a decade they thought nothing was wrong with me—but that nonetheless led to multiple complications, requiring a succession of surgeries, emergency-room visits, and ultimately (when tests finally showed something was wrong) trips to specialists for MRIs and lots more testing. During the time I was ill and undiagnosed, I was also in and out of the hospital with my mother, who was being treated for metastatic cancer and was admitted twice in her final weeks.

Partial skeleton remains from an ancient burial site — Regis Duvignau / Reuters

Was There a Civilization On Earth Before Humans?

Adam Frank

A look at the available evidence

It only took five minutes for Gavin Schmidt to out-speculate me.

Schmidt is the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (a.k.a. GISS) a world-class climate-science facility. One day last year, I came to GISS with a far-out proposal. In my work as an astrophysicist, I’d begun researching global warming from an “astrobiological perspective.” That meant asking whether any industrial civilization that rises on any planet will, through their own activity, trigger their own version of a climate shift. I was visiting GISS that day hoping to gain some climate science insights and, perhaps, collaborators. That’s how I ended up in Gavin’s office.

Just as I was revving up my pitch, Gavin stopped me in my tracks.

The abstract of a scientific paper engulfed in flames — PNAS / Richard Goerg / Getty / The Atlantic

The Scientific Paper Is Obsolete

James Somers

Here’s what’s next.

The scientific paper—the actual form of it—was one of the enabling inventions of modernity. Before it was developed in the 1600s, results were communicated privately in letters, ephemerally in lectures, or all at once in books. There was no public forum for incremental advances. By making room for reports of single experiments or minor technical advances, journals made the chaos of science accretive. Scientists from that point forward became like the social insects: They made their progress steadily, as a buzzing mass.

The earliest papers were in some ways more readable than papers are today. They were less specialized, more direct, shorter, and far less formal. Calculus had only just been invented. Entire data sets could fit in a table on a single page. What little “computation” contributed to the results was done by hand and could be verified in the same way.

Barbara Bush Changed With Her Country

Timothy Naftali

The former first lady was notably eager to learn about people she didn’t understand—and recognize she might have been wrong about them.

Some famous people are much less interesting in person than you would expect. Some are more interesting. And a few—a very few—rock your world. For me, Barbara Bush, who left us on Tuesday, occupies that last category, almost by herself.

Many of the tributes to the former first lady portray her as a throwback to an earlier era of American politics, the silver-haired doyenne of a political dynasty. But I came to value her for an additional reason. Her country changed dramatically during her long, full life. But even as some in her Republican Party recoiled from those shifts, Barbara Bush never ceased questioning, learning, and adapting—changing along with the nation that she and her family served.

A worker tosses a strap over a statue — Mark Lennihan / AP

The Surgeon Who Experimented on Slaves

Sarah Zhang

Fellow doctors have been some of the most prominent defenders of J. Marion Sims, the controversial “father of gynecology.”

Their names—at least the ones we know—were Lucy, Anarcha, and Betsey. There were other women, but their identities have been forgotten.

The man whose name appears in medical textbooks, whose likeness is memorialized in statues, is J. Marion Sims. Celebrated as the “father of modern gynecology,” Sims practiced the surgical techniques that made him famous on enslaved women: Lucy, Anarcha, Betsey, and the unknown others. He performed 30 surgeries on Anarcha alone, all without anesthesia, as it was not yet widespread. He also invented the modern speculum, and the Sims’s position for vaginal exams, both of which he first used on these women.

That Sims achieved all this has long won him acclaim; how he achieved all this—by experimenting on enslaved women—started being included in his story much more recently. And on Tuesday morning, in the face of growing controversy, New York City moved a statue honoring him out of Central Park.

Pompeo's Secret Visit Shows Trump Wants to Go Big on North Korea

Uri Friedman

From maximum pressure to maximum engagement

On Tuesday, Donald Trump, who once threatened North Korea with “fire and fury” and tweeted at his secretary of state to quit “wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man,” gave North and South Korea his “blessing” discuss a possible peace treaty and boasted that the United States and North Korea were talking “at very high levels.” Hours later, we found out how high: The Washington Post reported that CIA Director Mike Pompeo, who once spoke ominously of “separating” the Kim regime from its nuclear weapons, had secretly traveled to North Korea to meet with Kim Jong Un ahead of Trump’s planned summit with Kim later this spring.

The developments underscored just how abruptly the Trump administration has pivoted from a policy focused mainly on applying “maximum pressure” on North Korea to one of pursuing maximum engagement. But they also showed how, when it comes to negotiations over the North Korean nuclear program, Trump seems to want to go big or go home. “There’s a great chance to solve a world problem” that “should have been taken care of years ago, decades ago” but now “must be taken care of one way or the other,” the president said on Tuesday, while meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at Mar-a-Lago. “We’ll either have a very good meeting or we won’t have a good meeting. And maybe we won’t even have a meeting at all depending on what’s going in.”

Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?

Jean M. Twenge

More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”