Tuesday 14th May 2024

The Fad Diet to End All Fad Diets

There isn’t much evidence that intermittent fasting leads to lasting weight loss. Why is it still so popular?

In 2012, the BBC aired a documentary that pushed diet culture to a new extreme. For Eat, Fast, and Live Longer, the British journalist Michael Mosley experimented with eating normally for five days each week and then dramatically less for two, usually having only breakfast. After five weeks, he’d lost more than 14 pounds, and his cholesterol and blood-sugar levels had significantly improved. The documentary, and the international best-selling book that followed, set the stage for the next great fad diet: intermittent fasting.


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Should the Hawthorn Be Saved?

These trees once proliferated wildly across eastern North America, but now they’re dying out.

The last time Ron Lance had visited Doggett Gap in western North Carolina, he photographed one of the premier sites for hawthorn trees in the American Southeast. Thousands of white blossoms speckled the hillside, with North Carolina’s Newfound Mountains stretching to the horizon. Last summer, he visited again for the first time in 25 years. All that was left was a field of fescue grass. Only a couple dozen hawthorns remained.


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Conan O’Brien Keeps It Old-School

His true gift lies in his combination of an entertainer’s desperate desire to be liked and an antagonistic streak.

It took Conan O’Brien less than 90 seconds to upend Hot Ones. The YouTube interview show’s gimmick is simple: Celebrities eat successively hotter chicken wings while the host, Sean Evans, asks them well-researched questions about their life and career. Most guests are happy to endure painful spice while answering never-before-asked questions. O’Brien, on the other hand, shamelessly infused his own zany sensibility into the show’s design by immediately introducing “Dr. Arroyo,” his personal doctor and a man of dubious skill, credibility, and education. At one point, the character, played by O’Brien’s longtime writer José Arroyo, monitored his health by choking him to locate his pulse.


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Attack a Democrat Charged With Corruption? Republicans Wouldn’t Dare.

Earlier this month, federal prosecutors bestowed on Republicans what seemed like an election-year gift: charging a senior House Democrat in a competitive district with accepting $600,000 in bribes and acting as a foreign agent. For a party clinging to a threadbare majority in the House, the indictment offered an obvious opportunity for an America First attack. Representative Henry Cuellar of Texas, who prosecutors say acted on behalf of a Mexican bank and the government of Azerbaijan, is now the second Democrat in recent months—after Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey—to be accused of doing the bidding of foreign interests.

Yet in the past week, the GOP has been strangely quiet about Cuellar. No one in the party leadership has denounced him. Speaker Mike Johnson, fending off an attempt on his job from the far right, certainly could have used the distraction. But he hasn’t mentioned Cuellar once. Donald Trump even praised him, suggesting that President Joe Biden had sent the FBI after “the Respected Democrat Congressman” because Cuellar had criticized the administration’s handling of the U.S.-Mexico border. (Cuellar denies the charges.)


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The New York Trump Case Is Kind of Perfect

This is The Trump Trials by George T. Conway III, a newsletter that chronicles the former president’s legal troubles. Sign up here.

Not all that long ago, I thought that the trial currently being held in The People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump would be the last one I’d want to see as the first one tried against the former president. It seemed the least serious of the cases against him. Here’s a man who tried to overthrow American democracy by launching a coup to stay in power. A man who allegedly stole dozens of boxes of classified national-security documents from the White House, some containing secrets about other countries’ nuclear-weapons capabilities, then lied about the documents, concealed them, and obstructed a federal investigation about them.


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This Is the Next Smartphone Evolution

Earlier today, OpenAI announced its newest product: GPT-4o, a faster, cheaper, more powerful version of its most advanced large language model, and one that the company has deliberately positioned as the next step in “natural human-computer interaction.” Running on an iPhone in what was purportedly a live demo, the program appeared able to tell a bedtime story with dramatic intonation, understand what it was “seeing” through the device’s camera, and interpret a conversation between Italian and English speakers. The model—which was powering an updated version of the ChatGPT app—even exhibited something like emotion: Shown the sentence I ♥️ ChatGPT handwritten on a page, it responded, “That’s so sweet of you!”

Although such features are not exactly new to generative AI, seeing them bundled into a single app on an iPhone was striking. Watching the presentation, I felt that I was witnessing the murder of Siri, along with that entire generation of smartphone voice assistants, at the hands of a company most people had not heard of just two years ago.


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The Cicadas Are Here

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

For the first time in 221 years, two different groups of cicadas are emerging simultaneously and screaming from the treetops. More after these three stories from The Atlantic:


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Everything I know about flirting, I learned from the Cold War | Psyche Ideas

The Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev entertains the US First Lady Jackie Kennedy at Schönbrunn Palace, Vienna, Austria, 3 June 1961. Photo by Photoquest/Getty

The Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev entertains the US First Lady Jackie Kennedy at Schönbrunn Palace, Vienna, Austria, 3 June 1961. Photo by Photoquest/Getty

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Biodiversity Loss Increases the Risk of Disease Outbreaks, Analysis Suggests

Researchers found that human-caused environmental changes are driving the severity and prevalence of disease, putting people, animals and plants at risk

Human-driven changes to the planet are bringing widespread and sometimes surprising effects—including shifting the Earth’s rotation, hiding meteorites in Antarctic ice and, potentially, supporting locust swarms.

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See the Reconstructed Face of a Mummy Stored in a High School Library Since 1915

A forensic artist hopes the sculpture will help humanize the mummy, which appeared at Australia’s Grafton High School under mysterious circumstances

For over a century, a high school in Australia has been home to something inexplicable: the mummified head of an ancient Egyptian woman, kept in a box in the school library. Now, researchers have created a detailed sculpture of the woman’s face.

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