Saturday 27th April 2024

The Passover Plot

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.“Another thing the Gentiles said about us was that we used the blood of murdered Christian children at the Passover festival,” the Russian Jewish immigrant Mary Antin wrote in The Atlantic in 1911. “Of course that was a wicked lie. It made me sick to think of such a thing.” Antin grew up in the Pale of Settlement, an area spanning from modern-day Russia through Ukraine and Poland where Jews were permitted to reside from 1791 to 1915 but deprived of citizenship. Antin’s vivid essay describes her childhood there before coming to America, including the vibrancy of Jewish life at the time as well as its tribulations under the brutal Russian empire.


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How America Lost Sleep

Many Americans are reporting that they’d feel better if they slept more, but finding the right remedy isn’t always simple.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.


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Trump Is Getting What He Wants

At today’s hearing on Donald Trump’s claim of absolute immunity from criminal prosecution, the Republican-appointed Supreme Court majority appeared poised to give him what he most desires in the case: further delays that virtually preclude the chance that he will face a jury in his election-subversion case before the November election.But the nearly three hours of debate may be even more significant for how they would shape a second Trump term if he wins reelection. The arguments showed that although the Court’s conservative majority seems likely to reject Trump’s claim of absolute immunity from criminal prosecution, four of the justices appear predominantly focused on limiting the possibility that future presidents could face such charges for their actions in office, with Chief Justice John Roberts expressing more qualified sympathy with those arguments. Among the GOP-appointed justices, only Amy Coney Barrett appeared concerned about the Court potentially providing a president too much protection from criminal proceedings.


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The Happiness Trinity

This is Work in Progress, a newsletter about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here.

After writing about how and why Americans are depressed, I thought I’d turn things around for a change. What matters most for happiness—marriage, money, or something else entirely?


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No One Has a Right to Protest in My Home

As a constitutional scholar and the dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law, I strongly defend the right to speak one’s mind in public forums. But the rancorous debate over the Israel-Hamas war seems to be blurring some people’s sense of which settings are public and which are not. Until recently, neither my wife—Catherine Fisk, a UC Berkeley law professor—nor I ever imagined a moment when our right to limit a protest at a dinner held at our own home would become the subject of any controversy.

Ever since I became a law-school dean, in 2008, the two of us have established a custom of inviting each class of first-year students over for a meal. These dinners help create and reinforce a warm community, and, to accommodate all students, they take place on many evenings during the year. The only exceptions were in 2020 and 2021 because of COVID. So last year and this year, at the request of the presidents of the third-year classes, we organized make-up dinners on three successive nights and invited each of the 400 graduating students to attend one.


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Photos of the Week: Wheelbarrow Race, Count Binface, Orange Skies

A volcanic eruption in Indonesia, a tilting tower in Taiwan, a growing refugee camp in Chad, the Tokyo Rainbow Pride Parade in Japan, humanitarian aid parachuted into Gaza, protests opposing Israel’s attacks on Gaza in the United States, a performance by Phish at the Sphere in Las Vegas, and much more

Spiral bookshelves are seen in a bookshop in Guangzhou, China, on April 23, 2024 #


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Is India an Autocracy?

Last October, Indian authorities revived legal proceedings against the novelist and activist Arundhati Roy. In a case first registered against her in 2010, Roy stood accused of “provocative speech” that aroused “enmity between different groups” for having said that Kashmir was not an “integral” part of India. The charge carries a maximum sentence of seven years and kept her from traveling to Germany to deliver the opening address at the 2023 Munich Literature Festival.

The assault on expression, and on virtually every other mainstay of democracy, has become commonplace under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, and it is the backdrop against which Indians have begun voting to elect their next Parliament and prime minister. Of the nearly 1 billion eligible voters, perhaps more than 600 million will cast their votes over a six-week-long process. Modi, who heads the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), is widely expected to win a third term as prime minister in his bitter contest against a motley alliance of opposition parties, the Indian National Development Inclusive Alliance (INDIA).


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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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