Thursday 25th April 2024

The Unreality of Columbia’s ‘Liberated Zone’

What happens when genuine sympathy for civilian suffering mixes with a fervor that borders on the oppressive?Yesterday just before midnight, word goes out, tent to tent, student protester to student protester—a viral warning: Intruders have entered the “liberated zone,” that swath of manicured grass where hundreds of students and their supporters at what they fancy as the People’s University for Palestine sit around tents and conduct workshops about demilitarizing education and fighting settler colonialism and genocide. In this liberated zone, normally known as South Lawn West on the Columbia University quad, unsympathetic outsiders are treated as a danger.


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A Sexy Tennis Thriller—Yes, Really

As any fan of tennis can inform you, one of the sport’s chief joys is how rivalries between players can develop and mature over decades. Certain matchups are larded with history, friendship, and sometimes real animosity that can be far more personal than in any team competition. Luca Guadagnino’s new film, Challengers, injects romance into this dynamic, as the on-court battle between two players quickly comes to include a woman they both love. And because it’s made by the filmmaker behind movies such as Call Me by Your Name and A Bigger Splash, what might be a straightforward love triangle is also possessed with a tangled European sensibility that’s unafraid to step beyond conventional sexual norms.Challengers follows the tennis champ Art Donaldson (played by Mike Faist) and his wife, Tashi Duncan (Zendaya), a retired player whose meteoric stardom was derailed by injury. Their life is interrupted by Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor), Art’s former practice partner and Tashi’s former boyfriend, whose own professional career is approaching washout status. The film skillfully ping-pongs back and forth in time, filling in the audience on the highs and lows of each relationship and how it shaped the arc of Art and Patrick’s rivalry. With each new nugget of narrative context, Guadagnino reveals that Challengers isn’t just a war over a woman’s affections; it’s also a love story between the two men, whose relationship has always existed in the murky nexus between best friends and potential lovers.


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The New Quarter-Life Crisis

Maybe you started running for fitness, or because it seemed like a good way to make friends. Or perhaps it was a distraction from an uninspiring and underpaid job. Maybe you wanted an outlet for the frustration you felt at being single and watching your friends couple up. But no matter the reason you started, at some point it became more than a hobby. Your runs got longer, and longer, and longer, until you started to wonder: Should you … sign up for a marathon?This might sound like a classic midlife-crisis move. But these days, much-younger people are feeling the same urge. TikTok and Instagram are filled with videos of 20-somethings filming themselves running and showing off slick gear as they train for what some call their “quarter-life-crisis marathon.” And offline, more young people really have been running marathons in recent years. In 2019, only 15 percent of people who finished the New York City Marathon were in their 20s. By 2023, that share had grown to 19 percent. Similarly, at this year’s Los Angeles Marathon, 28 percent of finishers were in their 20s, up from 21 percent in 2019.


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Why a Dog’s Death Hits So Hard

My mom died six years ago, a few hours after I sat on the edge of her bed at her nursing home in Georgia and talked with her for the last time. My wife, Alix, and I were staying with my brother and his wife, who lived just down the road. My brother got the phone call not long after midnight. He woke me up, and we went down to the nursing home and walked the dim, quiet hallway to her room. She was in her bed, cold and still. I touched her face. But I didn’t cry.Two years earlier, the veterinarian had come to our house in Charlotte, North Carolina, to see our old dog, Fred. He was a yellow Lab mix I had found as a puppy in the ditch in front of our house. We had him for 14 and a half years, until he got a tumor on his liver. He was too old for surgery to make any sense. Alix and I held him in our laps as the vet gave him two shots, one to make him sleep, the other to make him still. All three of us cried as he eased away in our arms.


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The Particular Cruelty of Colonial Wars

A new history of Indonesia’s fight for independence reveals the brutal means by which the Dutch tried to retain power.Even the most well-read World War II enthusiast is likely unaware of one major military operation that happened in 1945. It involved Royal Air Force bombers, 24 Sherman tanks, and 36,000 troops—some of them British, the rest Indian and Nepalese Gurkhas under British command. More than 600 of these soldiers died, including a British brigadier general.


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The College Financial-Aid Scramble

Students are bearing the brunt of the disastrous FAFSA overhaul. That may affect where they go to college—and whether they enroll at all.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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My Book Had Come Undone

because I’d deemed the book complete, the last pages written, end notes done. Because the pages seemed armored against me. Needful of nothing. Smug. Because a day passed. Because I got a call; a heart had faltered. The person the protagonist was drawn on: gone. Because it was my father. Because was. Because my father is, in the book, alive. Because alive now seems a lie. Death, the missing letter. Because his heart pumps through the pages’ veins, through trees felled for their pulp. Because art can’t match life’s stride, or death’s. Because my book has shorter legs. Because it lags like a video streamed on unstable internet. Because I couldn’t finish the bowl of chicken soup I’d started before the call. Because my father’s flesh was warm when I heated the broth. Because I thought of the chicken my father saw as a pet, as a child. Because he learned it wasn’t. Because he ate it, learned, then cried. Because I need to edit. Because death is absent, but death is the absence that can’t be revised.


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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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