The Atlantic

Martin Short was the host of the “Saturday Night Live” Christmas episode—but you'd hardly know it, writes Esther Zuckerman. Celebrities swarmed the show all season long, overshadowing the current cast too.

Bitcoin has become boring, James Surowiecki writes: "Skeptics have become believers, and a digital-economic instrument that was designed to circumvent, if not replace, the traditional financial system is becoming more and more integrated into it."

California's minimum-wage hike for fast-food workers has been a clear success, Rogé Karma writes, and yet it has been portrayed as a failure. That is a testament to how quickly economic misinformation spreads—and how hard it is to combat once it does:

Spend your Sunday browsing our list of don't-miss stories of 2024: a disastrous cruise vacation, why Americans stopped hanging out, a medical breakthrough, and more in The Atlantic Daily.

Last year, the winter COVID wave was nearing its peak at Christmas. This time around, the wave—if there is one—is only just getting started, writes Yasmin Tayag.

Unlike some other life skills, small talk doesn’t seem to get easier the more you practice. In the Wonder Reader, Isabel Fattal explores wisdom from Atlantic writers on handling the strange human challenge:

Scientists are debating whether concepts such as memory, consciousness, and communication can be applied beyond the animal kingdom, Zoë Schlanger wrote in our June 2024 issue. https://lnkd.in/euPQmhkr “Consciousness was once seen as belonging solely to humans and a short list of nonhuman animals that clearly act with intention,” Schlanger wrote in an article adapted from her book, “The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth.” “Yet seemingly everywhere researchers look, they are finding that there is more to the inner lives of animals than we ever thought possible. Scientists now talk regularly about animal cognition; they study the behaviors of individual animals, and occasionally ascribe personalities to them. Some scientists now posit that plants should likewise be considered intelligent.” “Not so long ago, treading even lightly in this domain could upend a scientist’s career,” Schlanger continued. The popular 1973 book “The Secret Life of Plants” included real science, but also featured wildly unscientific projection; many scientists were unable to reproduce its claims, Schlanger wrote, causing a decades-long avoidance of plant-behavior studies. A decade later, a paper by David Rhoades, a zoologist and chemist at the University of Washington, proposed that trees were communicating with one another to defend against a caterpillar infestation. Rhoades was ridiculed by peers; his discovery ended up buried, even as it opened new lines of inquiry. “Four decades on, the idea that plants might communicate intentionally with one another remains a controversial concept in botany,” Schlanger wrote. Definitions of communication are slippery; intentionality is even harder to show. The essential question of plant intelligence is “How does something without a brain coordinate a response to stimuli?” Schlanger continued. “How does information about the world get translated into action that benefits the plant? How can the plant sense its world without a centralized place to parse that information?” To learn more, she spoke with scientists studying plant agency, memory, and other avenues of research. Read more: https://lnkd.in/euPQmhkr

Every woman on “Dune: Prophecy” is loathsome, writes Emma Stefansky. That’s by design:

A new kind of repression has gripped Venezuela since the summer's election—one whose logic is menacingly opaque, Gisela Salim-Peyer writes:

“James Mangold’s ‘A Complete Unknown,’ like all the best movies about rock stars ... is a fairy tale,” James Parker writes. “It dramatizes, mythicizes, elides, elasticizes, and tosses twinkling magic showbiz confetti over the period between Dylan’s absolutely unheralded arrival in New York in 1961 and his honking, abrasive, ain’t-gonna-work-on-Maggie’s-farm-no-more headlining appearance, four years later, at the Newport Folk Festival, where his new electric sound drove the old folkies berserk and the crowd (at least in Mangold’s movie) bayed for his blood.” https://lnkd.in/e84S8viK One of the young Bob Dylan’s foundational fibs “was that he had learned his songcraft while traveling with a carnival,” Parker continues. Carnies “understand instinctively—animalistically, sometimes—that life is theater, that people will believe what they want to, and that all the most essential things happen in the imagination.” “Was young Bob a carny? He wanted to be,” Parker writes. “His identity was a performance. His writing was sleight of hand. He wowed and bamboozled his own audience. And when, in ‘A Complete Unknown,’ he tries out the carnival story on Joan Baez (played by Monica Barbaro) … she looks at him and says—thrillingly deadpan—‘You are so completely full of shit.’ Which is exactly what you say to a carny.” In the Newport scenes, the movie really does “some fancy shuffling of events,” Parker writes: No one at the festival shouted “Judas!” at Dylan (that wouldn’t happen until a show the following year in Manchester, England); one biographer has argued that much of the Newport audience would have known what to expect from Dylan, and his keyboardist has said that most of the crowd enjoyed Dylan’s performance. “But so what? ‘A Complete Unknown’ is a movie, and a movie—or a movie like this, which in one sense is a parable of artistic ruthlessness—needs a climax. And Bob Dylan, more than most rock stars, is a myth,” Parker continues. “He made himself up, he disappeared himself, and in doing so, he became a lens: Rays of otherworldly insight poured through him, and he trained them upon us like somebody frying ants with a magnifying glass.” Read more: https://lnkd.in/e84S8viK 🎨: Liz Hart. Source: Getty.