Thursday 25th April 2024

A Democrat’s Case for Saving Mike Johnson

If Speaker Mike Johnson keeps his job, it’ll be Democrats who save him. Like his predecessor, Kevin McCarthy, the Louisiana conservative is facing an attempted ouster after he defied Republican hard-liners by relying on Democratic support to pass a funding bill—$61 billion for Ukraine, in this case—they hated.

Democrats helped boot McCarthy six months ago, but now several of them say they’ll rescue Johnson. Just three Republicans have signed on to the effort to depose Johnson, so the speaker might be able to survive with only a small Democratic contingent backing him. On the surface, the willingness of any Democrat to stand with Johnson might seem curious; he’s both more conservative than McCarthy and more loyal to Donald Trump. So why are some Democrats who voted to end McCarthy’s speakership planning to salvage Johnson’s?


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The Republicans Who Want American Carnage

On Monday, the Arkansas senator demanded that President Joe Biden send in the National Guard to clear out the student protests at Columbia University against the Israel-Hamas war, which he described as “the nascent pogroms at Columbia.” Last week, Cotton posted on X,  “I encourage people who get stuck behind the pro-Hamas mobs blocking traffic: take matters into your own hands. It’s time to put an end to this nonsense.” He later deleted the post and reworded it so that it did not sound quite so explicitly like a demand for aspiring vigilantes to lynch protesters.

This is a long-standing pattern for Cotton, who enjoys issuing calls for violence that linger on the edge of plausible deniability when it comes to which groups, exactly, are appropriate targets for lethal force. During the George Floyd protests of 2020, Cotton demanded that the U.S. military be sent in with orders to give “no quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters,” insisting unconvincingly in a later New York Times op-ed that he was not conflating peaceful protesters with rioters. Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, who had raised a fist in apparent solidarity with the mob that assaulted the Capitol on January 6 before fleeing through the halls to avoid them once the riot began, echoed Cotton’s call for deploying the National Guard to Columbia. (Both men, as it turns out, are in favor of some quarter for “insurrectionists” who happen to be on the right side.)


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Tesla Is Not the Next Ford. It’s the Next Con Ed.

Of late, Tesla’s cars have come to seem a bit hazardous. Their self-driving features have been linked to hundreds of accidents and more than a dozen deaths. Then, earlier this month, the company recalled its entire fleet of Cybertrucks. A mechanical problem that trapped its gas pedal, as InsideEVs put it, “could potentially turn the stainless steel trapezoid into a 6,800-pound land missile.”

Along the way, Tesla—which did not respond to multiple requests for comment—has defended its cars and autopilot software. As of last week, the company told federal regulators that the Cybertruck malfunction had not been linked to any accidents or injuries. But even resolving every safety concern may not stop Tesla’s entire EV business from becoming a hazard. Yesterday afternoon, the world’s most valuable car company released its earnings report for the first quarter of 2024, announcing that its net income had dropped 55 percent from a year ago. On an investor call shortly after, Elon Musk could offer only a vague euphemism to describe what has become an especially disastrous month: His car juggernaut “navigated several unforeseen challenges.” Just in April, Tesla has announced its first drop in sales since 2020, recalled one line of vehicles and reportedly canceled plans for another, and begun mass layoffs. There are still, somehow, six days left for the month to get worse.


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The Story That’s Holding Taylor Swift Back

The artist is an extraordinarily powerful woman who still, somehow, feels like she has no real power at all.

The year was 2006. Popular music was, for women, a pretty desolate landscape. Songs such as “My Humps” and “Buttons” served up shimmering, grinding strip-pop, while dull, minor-key objectification infused “Smack That,” “Money Maker,” and similar tracks. In the video for “London Bridge,” the singer and former child star Fergie gave a lap dance to a silent, immotive King’s Guardsman, barely pausing to lick his uniform. For “Ms. New Booty,” the rapper Bubba Sparxxx staged a mock infomercial for a product offering women “a little more frosting in your cakes … cantaloupes in your jeans,” before proselytizing the message of the era: “Get it ripe, get it right, get it tight.”


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Columbia Has Resorted to Pedagogy Theater

Columbia University shut down all in-person classes on Monday, and faculty and staff were encouraged to work remotely. “We need a reset,” President Minouche Shafik said, in reference to what she called the “rancor” around pro-Palestinian rallies on campus, as well as the arrest—with her encouragement—of more than 100 student protesters last week. Also on Monday, Columbia’s office of the provost put out guidance saying that “virtual learning options” should be made available to students in all classes on the university’s main campus until the term ends next week. “Safety is our highest priority,” that statement reads.

By moving its coursework online, the administration has sent an important set of messages to the public. In the midst of what it says is an emergency, the school asserts that it is still delivering its core service to students. It affirms that universities share the public’s perception that education, per se—as opposed to research, entertainment, community-building, or any of the other elements of the college experience—is central to their mission. And it implies that Columbia is carrying out its duties of oversight and care for students.


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Photos: Chile’s Amazing National Parks

Across the length of Chile, stretching 2,650 miles (4,265 kilometers) from north to south, more than 40 national parks have been established in the past century, protecting many endangered species, wild landscapes, and natural wonders. Collected below are images of several of these parks, from Lauca National Park, in the altiplano of Chile’s far north, to the dramatic mountains of Torres del Paine National Park, in the southern Patagonia region.

A view of the Cuernos del Paine, a cluster of steep granite peaks in Chile's Torres del Paine National Park. #


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Welcome to the TikTok Meltdown

So: You’ve decided to force a multibillion-dollar technology company with ties to China to divest from its powerful social-video app. Congratulations! Here’s what’s next: *awful gurgling noises*

Yesterday evening, the Senate passed a bill—appended to a $95 billion foreign-aid package—that would compel ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, to sell the app within about nine months or face a ban in the United States. President Joe Biden signed the bill this morning, initiating what is likely to be a rushed, chaotic, technologically and logistically complex legal process that is likely to please almost no one.


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How Bird Flu Is Shaping People’s Lives

A conversation with Katherine J. Wu about the disease sweeping through animals and raising food-safety questions

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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What to do when racing thoughts keep you up at night | Psyche Ideas

is a commissioning editor at Psyche. He was previously a senior editor at Psychology Today.

It’s time for bed. You lay down, pull up the cover, close your eyes, and then… the thoughts come rushing in. Maybe you’re replaying a conversation from earlier in the day, chewing on a piece of unhappy news, or thinking ahead to tomorrow’s to-do list. Perhaps you start worrying about sleep itself and whether you’ll get enough of it. With the lights out and nothing else to do, it suddenly seems impossible not to focus on these thoughts. So you lie there and wait anxiously for sleep to come.

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Bottles of 250-Year-Old Cherries Discovered Beneath George Washington's Home

Researchers at Mount Vernon say that the stash still “bore the characteristic scent of cherry blossoms”

George Washington’s legacy is famously colored by myths: He never did wear wooden dentures, for instance, and he didn’t skip a silver dollar across the Potomac River.

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