Saturday 27th April 2024

What the Author of ‘Frankenstein’ Knew About Human Nature

An 1826 novel encourages people to practice humility in the face of nature’s awesome forces.

During the early months of the coronavirus pandemic, when many countries were enacting variations of lockdown protocols, air pollution and greenhouse-gas emissions decreased drastically. A meme began to spread across social media proclaiming that, with so many people spending most of their time at home, nature was healing. Images of clear canals, clean skies, and wild animals roaming empty city streets were accompanied by the phrase “We are the virus.” The memes quickly turned silly, and their core claims were roundly debunked as overly simplistic, plain wrong, and somewhat eugenicist. Beyond all this, the trend was deeply ironic: By diagnosing themselves as a pox upon the Earth, people were revealing their degree of self-obsession—a belief that humanity is so powerful and important that the briefest pause in our normal activities would have meaningful consequences for the planet.


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Bad Bunny Has It All—And That’s the Problem

The Puerto Rican superstar is known for his anthems of community. His latest tour is about his own isolation.

Near the end of Bad Bunny’s 2022 World’s Hottest Tour in Las Vegas, all the lights went out. The Puerto Rican singer and rapper filled the darkness before the song “El Apagón” with a six-minute speech in Spanish about what makes his home island bien cabrón—“really fucking awesome.” He highlighted not only Puerto Rico’s beauty but also its resilience in the face of immense challenges: corrupt governance, poor electricity and water access, a hurricane only five years after the devastation of Hurricane María. Although “it is always becoming harder for Puerto Ricans to live on the island,” he said, their strong sense of kinship saves them: “The leaders are the people, who always help one another.”


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A New Sweetener Has Joined the Ranks of Aspartame and Stevia

A few months ago, my doctor uttered a phrase I’d long dreaded: Your blood sugar is too high. With my family history of diabetes, and occasional powerful cravings for chocolate, I knew this was coming and what it would mean: To satisfy my sweet fix, I’d have to turn to sugar substitutes. Ughhhh.

Dupes such as aspartame, stevia, and sucralose (the main ingredient in Splenda) are sweet and have few or zero calories, so they typically don’t spike your blood sugar like the real thing. But while there are now more sugar alternatives than ever, many people find that they taste terrible. The aspartame in Diet Coke leaves the taste of pennies in my mouth. And in large amounts, substitutes are bad for you: Last year, the World Health Organization warned that artificial sweeteners could raise the risk of certain diseases, singling out aspartame as “possibly carcinogenic.”


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Columbia University’s Impossible Position

At Columbia University, administrators and pro-Palestinian students occupying the main quad on campus are in a standoff. President Minouche Shafik has satisfied neither those clamoring for order nor those who want untrammeled protests. Yet a different leader may not have performed any better. The tensions here between free-speech values and antidiscrimination law are unusually complex and difficult, if not impossible, to resolve.

Shafik presides over a lavishly funded center of research, teaching, civic acculturation, and student activism. Such institutions cannot thrive without strong free-speech cultures. Neither can they thrive without limits on when and where protests are permitted—especially when protesters disrupt the institution as a tactic to get what they want. As Shafik told Congress in recent testimony, “Trying to reconcile the free-speech rights of those who want to protest and the rights of Jewish students to be in an environment free of harassment or discrimination has been the central challenge on our campus, and many others, in recent months.”


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We’re All Reading Wrong

Reading, while not technically medicine, is a fundamentally wholesome activity. It can prevent cognitive decline, improve sleep, and lower blood pressure. In one study, book readers outlived their nonreading peers by nearly two years. People have intuitively understood reading’s benefits for thousands of years: The earliest known library, in ancient Egypt, bore an inscription that read The house of healing for the soul.

But the ancients read differently than we do today. Until approximately the tenth century, when the practice of silent reading expanded thanks to the invention of punctuation, reading was synonymous with reading aloud. Silent reading was terribly strange, and, frankly, missed the point of sharing words to entertain, educate, and bond. Even in the 20th century, before radio and TV and smartphones and streaming entered American living rooms, couples once approached the evening hours by reading aloud to each other.


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The Trumpification of the Supreme Court

The conservative justices have shown they are ready to sacrifice any law or principle to save the former president.

The notion that Donald Trump’s supporters believe that he should be able to overthrow the government and get away with it sounds like hyperbole, an absurd and uncharitable caricature of conservative thought. Except that is exactly what Trump’s attorney D. John Sauer argued before the Supreme Court yesterday, taking the position that former presidents have “absolute immunity” for so-called official acts they take in office.


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AI’s Unending Thirst

This is Atlantic Intelligence, a limited-run series in which our writers help you wrap your mind around artificial intelligence and a new machine age. Sign up here.

In last week’s newsletter, I described artificial intelligence as data-hungry. But the technology is also quite thirsty, relying on data centers that require not just a tremendous amount of energy, but water to cool themselves with.


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Bringing a Social Movement to Life

The author Adam Hochschild recommends books that vividly illustrate moments of great change.

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.


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Sphere Is the Mind-Killer

In Las Vegas last Friday, I watched a Godzilla-sized puppy give a tongue bath to some 18,000 people. The visual—accompanied by laughter, slack jaws, and modest plumes of vaporized weed—arrived roughly three hours into a performance by Phish, the storied band, which has now been around for 40 years. At the moment in question, the band was launching into a capella scatting and mouth noising—what fans recognize as a vocal jam. And of course we were at the Sphere, a glorious, $2.3 billion arena that asks and answers the questions: What if the Earth had a moon that was made entirely of screens? And what if we took a spaceship there and grooved on it?

There is a lot to say about the visuals projected onto the walls of this place and its seeming bioluminescence. But trying to describe what happens inside the Sphere when the lights go down has a lot in common with recounting a dream or the play-by-play of a psychedelic experience: It easily veers toward the self-indulgent, tedious, and cliché. How did it feel, man? Honestly, it was tight. Like, really tight. I scrawled some phrases in my notepad as the show was under way:


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A Prominent Free-Speech Group Is Fighting for Its Life

PEN America has now canceled its annual World Voices festival, after calling off its literary-awards ceremony last week. Can it survive?

In 2015, PEN America, the organization devoted to defending free speech, chose to honor the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo at its annual gala. A few months earlier, Islamic extremists had murdered 12 people at the publication’s offices in Paris. The rationale for recognizing the magazine seemed airtight: People had been killed for expressing themselves, and PEN America’s mission is to protect people targeted for what they express. For some writers connected with the organization, however, this reasoning was not so obvious. Six of them boycotted the gala, and 242 signed a letter of protest. In their eyes, Charlie Hebdo’s editorial staff, including those recently killed, embodied a political perspective that was unworthy of plaudits. The magazine frequently mocked Islam (and, in particular, caricatured the Prophet Muhammad), and this was a form of punching down, insulting a population that, as the letter put it, “is already marginalized, embattled, and victimized.”


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