The Atlantic

“Still Life,” by Sarah Winman, does what most good novels do: make you consider something about your own life, Kristen V. Brown writes in the Sunday Daily.

John Ratcliffe—a political operator who pushed the boundaries of a historically apolitical position to serve Donald Trump’s interests—is likely to be confirmed to lead the CIA. How much further is he willing to go? Shane Harris reports:

Walls really do tumble. But the cause of freedom is a call to action for each new generation, Bono writes. https://lnkd.in/eHRzMF2P

Becoming aware of your invisible habits can help you live a life dictated more by what you enjoy and less by what you’re used to, Shayla Love writes:

The resolution Daniel Engber made for the year ahead: "I will not take my kids' temperature. No parent should be taking temperatures."

The dread of extinction has always been with us, Adam Kirsch writes—only the mechanism changes. https://lnkd.in/e-YY8BKS “The term ‘apocalypse’ comes from an ancient Greek word meaning ‘unveiling,’ and it was used in a literary sense to describe biblical books such as Daniel and Revelation,” Kirsch writes. “Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World,” by Dorian Lynskey, a British journalist and critic, traces how humanity’s favorite methods of annihilation have evolved “in tandem with scientific progress.” An element of self-accusation “makes an apocalypse story distinctively modern,” Kirsch writes. “When we imagine the end of the world in a nuclear war or an AI takeover, we are not just the victims but also the culprits.” In “A Century of Tomorrows: How Imagining the Future Shapes the Present,” the historian and museum curator Glenn Adamson surveys stories told by 20th-century “futurologists.” “The conclusion that Adamson draws from his illuminating forays into cultural history is that any claim to be able to control the future is an illusion; the more scientific it sounds, the more dangerous it can be,” Kirsch writes. “Young people today are no less obsessed with climate disasters than Gen X was with nuclear war. Where we had nightmares about missiles, theirs feature mass extinctions and climate refugees, wildfires and water wars,” Kirsch writes. Lynskey quotes the environmentalist Bill McKibben’s complaint that “global warming has still to produce an Orwell or a Huxley, a Verne or a Wells … or in film any equivalent of ‘On the Beach’ or ‘Doctor Strangelove’.” “Climate change is hard to dramatize for the same reason that it is hard to solve: It happens slowly and in the background, until it doesn’t,” Kirsch writes. “Confronted with melting glaciers and vanishing species, our promises to use paper straws or shut off the faucet while we brush our teeth feel less like solutions than superstitious gestures.” Reading “Everything Must Go” can serve as a kind of therapy for this fatalism. “The unrealized fears of the past can be a comfort,” Lynskey writes, “because the conviction that one is living in the worst of times is evergreen.” 🎨: Paul Spella

“The effort [Mike Johnson] expended to keep the speaker’s gavel portends a tough slog for Trump, who endorsed Johnson’s bid,” Russell Berman writes:

After decades of dysfunction, Los Angeles’s twin housing and transportation crises are starting to look fixable, M. Nolay Gray writes. https://lnkd.in/eg_dgSsR In L.A., the average driver spends 62 hours a year in traffic, homeownership is unaffordable for many middle-class families, and rents are steep. “The city’s recent population decline might make you think that nobody wants to live there,” Gray writes. “But, really, Los Angeles hasn’t let anybody in.” “The city’s traffic and housing crises date back a century, when Los Angeles first became dependent on the automobile and exclusionary zoning,” Gray writes. “Ever since, municipalities across the country—from Las Vegas to Miami, and nearly every suburb in between—have followed L.A.’s example, prioritizing cars over public transit and segregating housing by income. Predictably, Los Angeles’s problems have become urban America’s problems.” “In recent years, a critical mass of state policy makers, housing reformers, and urban planners understood that L.A.’s problems are reversible, and started to lay out an alternative path for the future,” Gray continues at the link in our bio. “The city has made massive investments in transit and—partly because of pressure from statewide pro-housing laws—experienced a surge of permitting for new homes. Even though rampant NIMBYism remains a barrier, the breadth of the city’s progress is becoming clearer: Los Angeles is gradually revamping America’s most infamous sprawl.” Rail service to Los Angeles International Airport is scheduled to open by the end of the decade, and new trains are set to extend across the city. The number of housing permits is increasing, and rents have fallen by about 5 percent compared with late 2023. Although “fixing the crisis will require much more work,” Gray writes, “reform continues bubbling up locally thanks to a growing YIMBY movement.” “A century ago, Los Angeles pioneered an urban model that much of America made the mistake of replicating,” Gray writes. “Now, after many decades of strict zoning and car-centric growth, Los Angeles is figuring out what comes next.” https://lnkd.in/eg_dgSsR 📸: Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times / Getty

“You are never too clever or conscientious to be swept off your feet by love, or felled by heartbreak. Falling in love doesn’t make you foolish. It makes you human,”Miranda Feathers writes:

Why is it so hard to get men to do domestic labor? Olga Khazan details her and her husband Rich’s attempt to implement the “Fair Play” system and what went wrong. https://lnkd.in/eUyfY6ZZ Eve Rodsky’s “best-selling 2019 book, and its companion card deck, lay out all the chores a family could conceivably have—everything from buying birthday gifts to doing the dishes to taking out the trash—on 100 cards, which the couple is meant to divide,” Khazan writes. “Though the resulting division might not quite be 50–50, it should feel equitable.” “I heard about Fair Play during the pandemic, and I thought it could help settle the chore wars that had been simmering between Rich and me for years already,” Khazan continues. “Within a few weeks, we’d read the book, bought the cards, and scheduled a weekly check-in on our Google Calendars. It worked for a while. But after I got pregnant, I suddenly felt the need to, for example, research the difference between strollers and ‘travel systems,’ while Rich did not. We thus found it virtually impossible to play fairly for more than a few weeks at a time. After Evan was born, it didn’t seem possible at all.” In one instance, Rich was tasked with researching backup child care for when their son was sick and couldn’t go to day care and both parents had to work. “The thing is, Rich never did research backup child care,” Khazan writes. “I had done what the pop-feminist chore-management gurus suggested. I had tried to reduce my mental load by foisting ownership of and accountability for tasks onto my husband. The only slight hiccup in this plan is that if your husband doesn’t do the tasks, the system falls apart.” “Instead, our strategy is not one that Rodsky would like,” Khazan continues at the link in our bio. “I bark out orders, and Rich kinda-sorta fulfills them, most of the time. He doesn’t understand Evan’s needs the way I do, and it would be too hard for me to explain them to him. I’m pickier and cleaner than he is, and it will probably always be this way. Rodsky referred to this kind of thinking as being ‘complicit in your own oppression.’ I call it getting our kid to middle school in one piece.” Read more: https://lnkd.in/eUyfY6ZZ 🎨: Tim Enthoven