A Magical Cup

Psychics Who Hear Voices Could Be On to Something

Joseph Frankel

The ways some “healthy voice hearers” cope might be able to help people with psychotic disorders.

Jessica Dorner was lying in bed at her cousin’s house when her grandmother, a “pushy lady” in an apron who had been dead for several years, appeared in front of her. “I know you can see me,” Jessica heard her say, “and you need to do something about it.”

It was a lonely time in Jessica’s life. She was living away from home for the first time, and she thinks her grandmother was drawn by some sense of that. She eventually told her parents what happened, and according to her they were concerned, but not overly panicked. “My parents are probably the least judgmental people I know,” she said.

As Jessica tells it, over the next two years, spirits visited her every now and again. Her brother-in-law’s deceased father began forming before her, ghostlike, just as her grandmother did. And while the experiences were intense and at times made her feel “crazy,” she said, they were infrequent, and insists that they were never a real source of suffering.

The Dark Evolution of British Drinking Culture

Chrissie Giles

In 2004, people in the U.K. consumed more alcohol than ever before. How did they get there?

I first met alcohol in the late 1980s. It was the morning after one of my parents’ parties. My sister and I, aged 9 or 10, were up alone. We trawled the lounge for abandoned cans. I remember being methodical: Pick one up, give it a shake to see if there’s anything inside, and if there is, drink! I can still taste the stale, warm metallic tang of Heineken (lager; 5 percent alcohol by volume) on my tongue. Just mind the ones with cigarette butts in them.

Other times we’d sneak a sip of Dad’s Rémy Martin VSOP (cognac; 40 percent) when he wasn’t looking, even though we didn’t like the taste. It came in a heavy glass bottle that he kept in the sideboard. He’d pour himself a glass at night, the ice cubes clinking as he walked to his small office to make phone calls. On special occasions—family birthdays, Christmas lunch—we even got to drink legitimately: usually half a glass of Asti Spumanti (sparkling wine; around 7.5 percent), served in the best glasses.

The Fight for Health Care Has Always Been About Civil Rights

Vann R. Newkirk II

In dismantling Obamacare and slashing Medicaid, Republicans would strike a blow against signature victories for racial equality in America.

It was a cold March night when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. turned his pulpit towards health care. Speaking to a packed, mixed-race crowd of physicians and health-care workers in Chicago, King gave one of his most influential late-career speeches, blasting the American Medical Association and other organizations for a “conspiracy of inaction” in the maintenance of a medical apartheid that persisted even then in 1966.

There, King spoke words that have since become a maxim: “Of all the inequalities that exist, the injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhuman.” In the moment, it reflected the work that King and that organization, the Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR), were doing to advance one of the since-forgotten pillars of the civil-rights movement: the idea that health care is a right. To those heroes of the civil-rights movement, it was clear that the demons of inequality that have always haunted America could not be vanquished without the establishment and protection of that right.

A Major Church-State Ruling That Shouldn't Have Happened

Garrett Epps

In Trinity v. Comer, there was no remaining dispute between the actual parties—and both the majority opinion and the leading dissent got the issue wrong.

Trinity Lutheran Church v. Comer, the church-state case decided by the Supreme Court Monday, is a truly hard case. I can think of good arguments for either side, and even better arguments why—since there was no remaining dispute between the actual parties—the court should have stayed out altogether.

The court waded in, alas. And the majority opinion, by Chief Justice John Roberts, and the dissent, by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, got the issue wrong.

In Trinity Lutheran, a church challenged the state of Missouri’s refusal to fund safety improvements at its daycare playground. In April 2017, however, the newly elected governor of Missouri ordered the state to grant the funding and not to enforce its no-churches funding rule. The church won what it wanted because the state decided to give it—this being, for any judges unclear on the concept, what is wistfully called “the political process” courts are supposed to support, not supplant.

The Psychology of Home: Why Where You Live Means So Much

Julie Beck

There's a reason why the first thing we often ask someone when we meet them, right after we learn their name, is "where's home for you?"

There's a reason why the first thing we often ask someone when we meet them, right after we learn their name, is "where's home for you?"

My house is a shrine to my homes. There's a triptych of sunsets next to my bedroom door, dusk forever falling over the small Michigan town where I grew up, the beach next to my college dorm and Place de la Concorde in Paris, where I spent a cliché but nonetheless happy semester. And that's only the beginning. Typographic posters of Michigan and Chicago hang above my bed, a photo of taxis zooming around Manhattan sits atop my dresser and a postcard of my hometown's famous water tower is taped to my door. My roommate and I have an entire wall in our kitchen plastered with maps of places we've been, and twin Ferris wheels, one at Navy Pier, one at Place de la Concorde, are stacked on top of one another in my living room.

That Time the TSA Found a Scientist’s 3-D-Printed Mouse Penis

Ed Yong

And other tales from the intersection of science and airport security

When Martin Cohn passed through airport security at Ronald Reagan Airport, he figured that he’d probably get some questions about the 3-D-printed model of a mouse penis in his bag.

The model is 15 centimeters long, made of clear translucent plastic, and indisputably phallic— like the dismembered member of some monstrous, transparent, 11-foot rodent. One of Cohn’s colleagues had already been questioned about it when she carried it on an outward flight from Gainesville to Washington D.C. She put it through the security scanner, and the bag got pulled. A TSA official looked inside, winked at her, and let her go. She was amused but embarrassed, so Cohn offered to take the model home on the return flight.

Democrats Don't Think Trumpcare Is Dead

Clare Foran

There could still be a vote soon on Senate GOP legislation to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, Democrats warned on Tuesday.

Republicans backed off a plan to vote this week on legislation rolling back much of President Obama’s signature healthcare law, the Affordable Care Act. But Democrats don’t think this is the end of Trumpcare.

“It’s far from over. McConnell said he’s going to come back to it soon,” Democratic Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois said in an interview at the Capitol. “We’re not taking anything for granted.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced on Tuesday afternoon that the Senate would “not be on the bill this week,” as Republican Senators continue “discussions within our conference on the differences that we have.” But he added that “we’re still working toward getting at least 50 people in a comfortable place.” McConnell only needs 50 Republican senators to pass the legislation—assuming Vice President Pence breaks a tie —because Republicans are using a process known as budget reconciliation to evade a Democratic filibuster.

The Harry Potter Personality Test

Cari Romm

A new study found that people who identify as Slytherins may be measurably different from the Hufflepuffs of the world.

I’m not particularly proud of this fact, but here it is: Pottermore, the Harry Potter-themed website unveiled by J.K. Rowling in 2012, has peered deep into my soul, evaluated its findings, and pronounced me a Hufflepuff.

Fans of the series will know why this is upsetting. For all the non-Harry Potter buffs reading this, though, here are three quick points of explanation. One: At Hogwarts, the wizards’ academy that serves as the backdrop for most of the series, students are sorted into one of four houses, each with its own distinctive character. Two: On Pottermore, fans can take a personality quiz to do the same. Three: Hufflepuff’s defining trait is “nice.” Its mascot is a badger. Its members, if Hogwarts were an American high-school cafeteria, would be the ones in the corner, frantically combing the trash for their retainers.

2017 National Geographic Travel Photographer of the Year Contest, Part II

Alan Taylor

The contest is still under way.

The National Geographic Travel Photographer of the Year Contest is open to submissions until the end of this week, June 30. The grand-prize winner will receive a 10-day trip for two to the Galápagos Archipelago with National Geographic Expeditions. National Geographic was again kind enough to allow me to share more of the entries with you here, gathered from three categories: Nature, Cities, and People. The photos and captions were written by the photographers, and lightly edited for style.

The Moral Question That Stanford Asks Its Bioengineering Students

Ed Yong

It’s about the capacity to print a human genome.

When students in Stanford University’s Introduction to Bioengineering course sit for their final exams, the first question that they have to answer is about our ability to write DNA.

Scientists have fully sequenced the genomes of humans, trees, octopuses, bacteria, and thousands of other species. But it may soon become possible to not just read large genomes but also to write them—synthesizing them from scratch. “Imagine a music synthesizer with only four keys,” said Stanford professor Drew Endy to the audience at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which is co-hosted by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic. Each represents one of the four building blocks of DNA—A, C, G, and T. Press the keys in sequence and you can print out whatever stretch of DNA you like.