The Atlantic

What will it take to stop a spike in armed car thefts? Jamie Thompson reports on an elite police unit combatting a wave of carjackings:

Bob Woodward’s books have taken a lot of hits in recent years, including from Franklin Foer. But, as Foer writes now, the Watergate journalist’s new Biden chronicle, “War,” is earnest, thorough, and fair:

Sports fandom has always had a quantitative component, but it has become much more pronounced in recent decades. ESPN's 'win probability' goes too far, Ross Andersen reports:

Ariana Grande's celebrated voice is a comedy instrument, a trait that puts her in the company of many “SNL” greats, writes Esther Zuckerman:

Sibling therapy isn’t common, Faith Hill writes—but maybe it should be. https://lnkd.in/eeJ3b4cH It’s surprising how unusual this kind of therapy is, “considering how common childhood sibling conflict is,” Hill writes. “The tenor of the bond can affect people for their whole lives, either protecting them through hardship or leaving them vulnerable to it.” Sibling relationships are also very formative—they can make a difficult home situation much better or much worse. And studies have shown that closeness to a sibling in childhood or early adulthood can predict lower levels of depression symptoms. “Still, psychologists tend to overlook the influence of siblings,” Hill writes. Roughly 80 percent of Americans have at least one sibling, yet most researchers focus on relationships with parents, spouses, or peers. “And few resources or training materials exist for clinicians who might be interested in sibling work,” Hill continues. “As a result, few practice it.” But clinicians who do practice sibling therapy have said that sibling relationships are starting to get more public attention. “We have a generation of people who are more and more interested in repairing relationships,” said Erin Runt, a therapist who works with siblings. “Sibling therapy isn’t all about hashing out current conflicts,” Hill writes. “It also involves going back in time. Because siblings typically grow up in the same home, they tend to assume they had similar childhoods. But often, that’s not true.” Sibling therapists ask questions to see where narratives match and diverge. The goal is not necessarily to have siblings become best friends, Hill writes; “sometimes it’s to survive family gatherings or to come together to care for a sick parent.” “The siblings I spoke with said that their relationships hadn’t been completely transformed by therapy so much as subtly shifted, enough to delicately start again,” Hill continues. “They don’t need to talk all the time, or agree on all the things that once tore them apart. But they’re moving ahead.” Read more: https://lnkd.in/eeJ3b4cH 🎨: Karlotta Freier

Dark money, anonymous companies, and secretive elites with hidden wealth aren’t limited to distant dictatorships. They’re here in America—and they’re enabling democracy’s decay, Anne Applebaum and Peter Pomeranzev argue. In this episode of Autocracy in America, Pomerantsev shares how he saw this himself while living in Moscow in the mid-2000s. On a glitzy street, every few meters, stood a bank—one that wouldn’t open checking accounts. Pomerantsev didn’t understand why. “Because it was deliberately made incredibly complicated,” Applebaum says. “Ordinary citizens, ordinary people aren’t meant to know where the money is or what the bank does. They’re not meant to have any influence or understanding or knowledge of politics at all, because the essence of modern autocracy and modern dictatorships is secrecy.” The kleptocrats that run this kind of political system have ways of stealing and extracting money, Applebaum says: through shell companies that are able to move money quickly—“from Cyprus to the Virgin Islands to the Bahamas to Delaware and back again in a blink of an eye.” In the United States, that kind of dark money has the potential to make American citizens feel powerless, apathetic, disengaged, and cynical. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a guest on the podcast, argues that this same, unhealthy secrecy has crept into America’s political landscape through the use of super PACs. “The super PAC only has to report the last screen through which the money came, not the actual donor, and you can dump unlimited amounts of money into politics through it,” he says. “It shifts power to those big special interests and away from ordinary voters.” Listen to the full episode to hear more from Applebaum and Pomerantsev about how America is fighting the temptation to become more corrupt and less democratic—and how that affects the rest of the world. https://lnkd.in/eetDq-UT

“It’s called the ‘longest-swim problem’: If you had to drop someone at the place in the ocean farthest from any speck of land—the remotest spot on Earth—where would that place be?” Cullen Murphy writes. That spot would be Point Nemo. “In Latin, ‘nemo’ means ‘no one,’ which is appropriate.” https://lnkd.in/e9dZz7uV Hrvoje Lukatela, a Croatian-born engineer, put it on the map in 1992. “As Lukatela saw it, the logic of the search process was simple,” Murphy writes. “It takes three points to define a circle. Lukatela needed to find the largest oceanic circle that met two criteria: The circumference had to be defined by three points of dry land. And inside the circle there could be no land at all.” The remotest spot on Earth would be the center of that circle. The three points Lukatela found define a circle of ocean larger than the old Soviet Union. Once he finished his calculations, the engineer named it after the mysterious captain in the Jules Verne novel he had loved as a boy. “But Captain Nemo couldn’t entirely stay aloof from the rest of the planet,” Murphy continues. “And neither can Point Nemo.” Last year, Murphy met a five-person crew who had just passed by Point Nemo on a round-the-world yachting competition. “The crew described sensations of rare clarity and acuity brought on by the sheer scale of risk,” Murphy continues—there is no help near if a mast breaks or an engine needs fixing. “At this far-southern latitude, the interplay of light and cloud can be intense: the darks so very dark, the brights so very bright.” Simon Fisher, the crew’s navigator, described feeling like a trespasser. “There’s something very special,” Fisher said, “about knowing you’re someplace where everybody else isn’t.” Read more: https://lnkd.in/e9dZz7uV

Han Kang, who has never shied away from criticizing Korean culture, has also given South Korea its first Nobel Prize in Literature. Ed Park on how the prize recognizes not only an extraordinary writer but also a subversive tradition in Korean literature:

“All money is good money when it comes to happiness, right? Maybe not,” writes Arthur C. Brooks. Unearned dollars “might be the least helpful of all to improve your life satisfaction.” https://lnkd.in/ejQCMrmF The concept of universal income—that everyone should get a guaranteed minimum salary—has been a hot topic for several years. Now, we have evidence of its effects: In an experiment funded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, 1,000 low-income people received $1,000 a month with no strings attached for three years. One finding was that, on average, this monthly stipend did not encourage people to invest in education or find better employment—rather, it enabled additional leisure time. Unearned money is a type of “windfall,” a term economists use to describe unexpected or sudden gains—and research shows that people tend to use this kind of money toward leisurely purposes. “To economists, this seems irrational: You should make the same spending decisions no matter what the income source is,” Brooks writes. “But that’s not how humans think”—and windfall income “brings us less well-being than earned income.” Think about the lottery: Although people often report higher happiness right after they win, their measured mental health declines afterward. If, then, unearned income is inferior as a happiness multiplier, there are other steps you can consider to improve your happiness. Try to “avoid spending any time, effort, or resources seeking out unearned income,” Brooks writes. Then, “keep an inventory of the unearned benefits you currently receive but don’t truly need.” You can also try to get rid of unearned income streams and monitor how it makes you feel about yourself and your relationships. “A little poorer in financial terms but richer in self-esteem? There you go,” Brooks continues. And when it comes to what you earn, remember that just as your own success can be good for you, “it can also be good for the people you love.” Read more: https://lnkd.in/ejQCMrmF

John Steinbeck beat Sanora Babb to the great American Dust Bowl novel—using her field notes. What do we owe her today? Mark Athitakis asks: https://lnkd.in/eTnGsX3P It is likely, but by no means certain, that in May 1938, the two writers met in a café near Arvin, California. “Both were in town to chronicle the plight of migrants who were flooding the state to escape the decimation of the Dust Bowl. Both were writing fiction about it—Steinbeck had abandoned two novels on the subject earlier that year, while Babb had received an enthusiastic response from Random House for the opening chapters of her novel in progress, ‘Whose Names Are Unknown.’ And both were connected to Tom Collins, a staffer at the Farm Security Administration (FSA), a federal agency providing aid to the migrants. To Steinbeck, Collins was a friend and a passkey to the migrant experience. To Babb, he was a mentor and supervisor; she had volunteered to document living conditions in the camps.” “What happened next is in some ways clear as day, in others frustratingly fuzzy,” Athitakis writes. “The clear part is a tale of profound literary unfairness: Steinbeck received FSA field notes, compiled largely (but not entirely) from Babb’s observations and interviews, after which he began a punishing 100-day writing sprint to produce ‘The Grapes of Wrath,’ the foundational American novel about the Great Depression. Babb’s book, delivered later, would be scotched.” “Over time, an understandably frustrated Babb would insist that she, not Collins, had personally handed over the reports to Steinbeck—an act that would make his appropriation look more brazen and personal,” Athitakis continues. “Tom asked me to give him my notes,” Babb would write 40 years after that alleged café meeting. “I did. Naïve me.” “It doesn’t appear that Steinbeck ever wrote about meeting Babb, or even mentioned her by name, though it’s plausible that two diligent reporters on the same beat would want to compare notes,” Athitakis writes. But questions remain about how much of “Grapes” was written on the back of the FSA notes, how much of that research was Babb’s, and how much it matters. https://lnkd.in/eTnGsX3P