#the atlantic

[soracities]

—Julie Beck, "Why We Forget Most of the Books We Read", pub. The Atlantic [ID'd]

#q #quotes #essays and articles #typography #id included #julie beck #why we forget most of the books we read #the atlantic #m #x

[mysharona1987]

#democracy #democrats #republicans #politics #the Atlantic #star wars #journalism #lolz

[lisamarie-vee]

#donald fagen #walter becker #steely dan #nada hayek #illustration #the atlantic #rock and roll hall of fame

[tlwsarchive]

“Aristotle’s 10 Rules for a Good Life” via The Atlantic

#archives #rules for life #aristotle #the atlantic

[hussyknee]

This is, bar none, the funniest fucking completely unironic shit published by a legitimate news outlet:

In recent months, orcas in the waters off the Iberian Peninsula have taken to ramming boats. The animals have already sunk three this year and damaged several more. After one of the latest incidents, in which a catamaran lost both of its rudders, the boat’s captain suggested that the assailants have grown stealthier and more efficient: “Looks like they knew exactly what they are doing,” he said. Scientists have documented hundreds of orca-boat incidents off the Spanish-Portuguese coast since 2020, but news coverage of these attacks is blowing up right now, thanks in part to a creative new theory about why they’re happening: cetacean vengeance. Now that’s a story! “The orcas are doing this on purpose,” Alfredo López Fernandez, a biologist at the University of Aveiro in Portugal, told LiveScience last month. “Of course, we don’t know the origin or the motivation, but defensive behavior based on trauma, as the origin of all this, gains more strength for us every day.” López Fernandez, who co-authored a 2022 paper on human-orca interactions in the Strait of Gibraltar, speculates that a specific female, known to scientists as White Gladis, may have suffered a “critical moment of agony” at the hands of humans, attacked a boat in retaliation, and then taught other whales to do the same. Whatever the truth of this assertion, White Gladis and her kin have quickly ascended to folk-heroic status on the internet. “What the marine biologists are framing as revenge based on one traumatic experience may be a piece of a larger mobilization towards balance,” the poet Alexis Pauline Gumbs tweeted before referring to the killer whales as “revolutionary mother teachers.” Media figures and academics are expressing solidarity with their “orca comrades” and support for “orca saboteurs.” One widely circulating graphic shows a pod smashing a boat from below, above the words “JOIN THE ORCA UPRISING.” (You can even purchase it in sparkly sticker form.) Yet all of this fandom and projection tends to overlook important facts: First, these orcas are likely to be playing with the boats rather than attacking them, and second, if one insists on judging killer whales in human terms, it’s plain to see they aren’t heroes but sadistic jerks.

A shark wrote this.

The recent incidents, none of which has resulted in any injuries to humans, are simply the result of curiosity, Monika Wieland Shields, the co-director of the Orca Behavior Institute in Washington, told me. A juvenile may have started interacting in this way with boats, she said, and then its habit spread through the local community of killer whales. Such cultural trends have been observed before: In the Pacific Northwest, orcas have been playing with buoys and crab pots for years; in the late 1980s, one group of orcas there famously took to wearing salmon hats. Is ramming boats the new donning fish? Shields believes that theory makes more sense than López Fernandez’s appeal to orca trauma. White Gladis shows no physical evidence of injury or trauma, Shields told me, so any “critical moment of agony” is purely speculative. Also, humans have given orcas ample reason to retaliate for hundreds of years. We’ve invaded their waters, kidnapped their young, and murdered them in droves. And yet, there is not a single documented instance of orcas killing humans in the wild. Why would they react only now? And though recent events may fit the story of these orcas’ being anti-colonial warriors, you can’t just anthropomorphize animals selectively. What about all the other “evidence” we have of orcas’ cruelty, or even wickedness? Scientists say they hunt and slaughter sharks by the dozen, picking out the liver from each one and leaving the rest of the carcasses to rot uneaten. Orcas kill for sport. They push, drag, and spin around live prey, including sea turtles, seabirds, and sea lions. Some go so far as to risk beaching themselves in order to snag a baby seal—not to consume, but simply to torture it to death. Once you start applying human ethical standards to apex predators, things turn dark fast.

Oh no, they gleefully torment other animals for sport!! Does this species deserve to have any redeeming qualities???

Perhaps #orcauprising was inevitable. Humanity does have, after all, a long history of freighting cetaceans with higher meaning. Moby Dick is, among other things, a symbol of the sublime. The biblical whale—or is it a large fish?—that swallows Jonah is an instrument of divine retribution, a means of punishing the wicked in much the same way some have framed the boat-wrecking orcas. The whale 52 Blue, known as the loneliest whale in the world because she speaks in a frequency inaudible, or at least incomprehensible, to her brethren, has become a canvas for all shades of human sorrow and angst. Orcas in particular have long been objects of both fear and sympathy, in some cases with an explicitly anti-capitalist tint. The 1993 classic Free Willy centers on a conniving park owner’s scheme to profit off of the bond between a child and a young killer whale. And more recently, the 2013 documentary Blackfish chronicles SeaWorld’s real-life exploitation of captive orcas. The “orca uprising” narrative fits neatly into this lineage. In our present era of environmental catastrophe, Shields told me, it’s appealing to think that nature might fight back, that the villains get their just deserts. But projection and anthropomorphization are only shortcuts to a shallow sympathy. Orcas really are capable of intense grief; they are also capable of tormenting seal pups as a hobby. They are intelligent, emotionally complex creatures. But they are not us.

Someone paid this dude actual money to conclude that Orcas aren't human.

In conclusion:

#this is a White Gladis stan account sorry #I don't care if she's doing it for shits and giggles in fact that would be even better #support orca rights and orca wrongs #orca splatoon #the atlantic #capitalism #joining the war on orcas on the side of the orcas #yachts #orcas #marine life #ecology #marine animals #class war #eat the rich #anti capitalism #cetaceans #knee of huss

[woman-for-women]

#w4w post #quotes #feminism #feminist #medical misogyny #the atlantic #car crash #stats

[heavenlyyshecomes]

Tara Monjazeb, Drinking Coffee in a Church, in The Atlantic

#tara monjazeb #the atlantic #poetry #readings #mine #brief glimpses of beauty

[bluegrassmagnolia]

#the atlantic #i/p #israel hamas war #articles #yascha mounk

[garadinervi]

Mosab Abu-Toha, Younger Than War, «The Atlantic», November 9, 2023

Younger Than War Mosab Abu-Toha Tanks roll through dust, through eggplant fields. Beds unmade, lightening in the sky, brother jumps to the window to watch warplanes flying through clouds of smoke after air strikes. Warplanes that look like eagles searching for a tree branch to perch on, catch breath, but these metal eagles are catching souls in a blood/bone soup bowl. No need for radio. We are the news. Ants’ ears hurt with each bullet fired from wrathful machine guns. Soldiers advance, burn books, some smoke rolled sheets of yesterday’s newspaper, just like they did when they were kids. Our kids hide in the basement, backs against concrete pillars, heads between knees, parents silent. Humid down there, and heat of burning bombs adds up to the slow death of survival. In September 2000, after I had bought bread for dinner, I saw a helicopter firing a rocket into a tower as far from me as my frightful cries when I heard concrete and glass fall from high. Loaves of bread went stale. I was still 7 at the time. I was decades younger than war, a few years older than bombs.

«I wrote this poem last year, reflecting on my childhood under Israeli military occupation. I'm now staying in Jabalia, a United Nations refugee camp, with my wife and three kids. I'm reading this poem to myself and wondering if my children will be able to write poems about the bombs and explosions they are seeing. I was 8 the first time I witnessed a rocket. Now my youngest child, born in America in May 2021, is living through the third wave of Israeli bombing. Not only are he and his older brother and sister smelling death around them, but they have also lost their house in Beit Lahia 10 days ago. Luckily no one was at home. My son Yazzan, who is 8 years old, asks me, "Are our toys still alive?"» – Mosab Abu-Toha

#poetry #magazine #mosab abu toha #the atlantic #2020s

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

"Marilyn Monroe was baptized by Aimée Semple McPherson, analyzed by Anna Freud, befriended by Carl Sandburg and Edith Sitwell, romanced (if you can call it that) by Jack and Bobby Kennedy, painted by Willem de Kooning, taught acting by Michael Chekhov and Lee Strasberg, photographed by Richard Avedon, Cecil Beaton, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. 

She managed—on the strength of limited dramatic talent and within a studio system that paid no attention to individual ambition—to work with some of the greatest directors in movie history: twice with John Huston, Billy Wilder, and Howard Hawks, and once each with George Cukor, Joseph Mankiewicz, and Laurence Olivier. 

She was the first Playboy centerfold and one of the first women to own her own production company; she was a nudist and a champion of free love long before these concepts emerged into the national consciousness. 

She maintained a deep association with the American military that, all on its own, lent her a mythic stature. When the Second World War broke out, she became both a teenage war bride and an actual Rosie the Riveter (long days spent working in the fuselage-varnishing room of the Radioplane plant in Burbank); her first cheesecake photographs were taken in the spirit of “morale boosters” for the boys overseas; her famous appearance in Korea—wriggling onstage in her purple sequined dress, popping her glorious platinum head out of the hatch of the camouflaged touring tank rolling her to the next appearance—remains the standard against which any American sex symbol sent to entertain the troops is measured. 

She was the first celebrity to talk openly about her childhood sexual abuse, a kind of admission that has become so common today that we hardly take notice of it. But to tell reporters in the 1950s that you had been raped as an 8-year-old—and to do so without shame, but rather with a justifiable sense of fury and vengeance—was a breathtaking act of self-assurance." 

From "Inventing Marilyn Monroe," by Caitlin Flanagan, in "The Atlantic," March 2013. (Photograph by Ed Feingersh.) 

[Follies Of God]

#Marilyn Monroe #Caitlin Flanagan #The Atlantic #Follies of God #Ed Feingersh #articles #words and writing

[deadpresidents]

"Twenty men have served as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs since the position was created after World War II. Until Milley, none had been forced to confront the possibility that a President would try to foment or provoke a coup in order to illegally remain in office. A plain reading of the record shows that in the chaotic period before and after the 2020 election, Milley did as much, or more, than any other American to defend the constitutional order, to prevent the military from being deployed against the American people, and to forestall the eruption of wars with America's nuclear-armed adversaries. Along the way, Milley deflected Trump's exhortations to have the U.S. military ignore, and even on occasion commit, war crimes. Milley and other military officers deserve praise for protecting democracy, but their actions should also cause deep unease. In the American system, it is the voters, the courts, and Congress that are meant to serve as checks on a President's behavior, not the generals."

#History #The Atlantic #Jeffrey Goldberg #Mark Milley #General Milley #Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff #U.S. Military #U.S. Constitution #President Trump #Donald Trump #Trump Administration #January 6th Insurrection #2020 Election #Politics #Law #Democracy

[mitchipedia]

Residents of North Sentinel Island off India are one of the few suriviving tribes that resist contact with the outside world. When a missionary successfully contacted them in 2018, in violation of international law, they killed him brutally.

Turns out they (or their neighbors) were in contact with the outside world previously—a Victorian English adventurer—and it went badly for them, tragically and unsurprisingly.

#anthropology #history #The Atlantic

[mysharona1987]

#News #politics #democrats #republicans #palestine #free palestine #idf #human rights #the atlantic

[brandoooom]

I photographed radical animal rights activists DxE for The Atlantic 📸

Direct Action Everywhere uses disruptive protests and direct action tactics, such as breaking into factory farms to rescue animals.

#vegan #animal rights #the atlantic #brandon tauszik #photojournalism #documentary photography #dxe

[shakespearenews]

Teenagers, we can be quite certain, will think about sex and snicker at dirty jokes no matter what, so why not let them read in Romeo and Juliet that “the bawdy hand of the dial is now upon the prick of noon”? After all, many of them will be more like Mercutio than the sulky Romeo. And if some parts of Shakespeare are not merely uncomfortable but offensive, why not confront them? I went to an orthodox Hebrew day school, and we read Merchant of Venice in a spirited English class—and it did not only no harm but some real good. Shylock gets most of the best lines, and his “Hath not a Jew eyes?” speech—including its chilling last line, “The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction”—gave us enough to occupy an entire class.

#shakespeare #william shakespeare #teaching #education #the atlantic

[porterdavis]

Well worth a read.

#the atlantic #tom nichols