The Atlantic

Careful, deliberate reasoning can get you only so far in good decision making. You also need to know how to listen to your feelings, Arthur Brooks writes.

Viktor Orbán is building a quasi-dictatorship in a place where most people believe in democracy, Zack Beauchamp writes: “This is the playbook to watch for when Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, and many other prominent Republicans cite Hungary as a ‘model.’”

A number of surprising factors may be contributing to the modern obesity epidemic. (From 2019)

President Joe Biden tested positive for COVID-19. He's likely to be fine, but his illness is a grim reminder of the impacts COVID still has on elderly Americans, Rachel Gutman writes.

Amazon Prime Day is yet another arbitrary, invented celebration. But the holiday, Ian Bogost writes, can also be a moment for reflection on the delight and absurdity of the online-shopping age. https://lnkd.in/ezNZ8Kjz This year marks the tenth Prime Day, a shopping holiday that Amazon invented for itself in 2015 to honor the company’s 20th anniversary. The event has only grown since its launch—both in revenues and in meaning. Unlike Black Friday, which has commercialized holiday gifts, “Prime Day, as a ritual observance, has a different focus: not the desirable, but the ordinary,” Bogost writes. “It celebrates the stuff you buy for boring reasons, or for no particular reason at all.” It can feel like almost every day of the year is some kind of holiday—Prime Day, corn-fritters day, National Ian Day. These events “have become so numerous that they descend into parody,” Bogost continues. “To make every day a holiday is to undermine the very idea of allocating a day on the calendar to mark something notable.” But Prime Day, Bogost argues, is different: Although Amazon “was not the first to sell goods via the internet, it did become the world’s symbol for doing so,” he writes. “Prime Day makes me think back to all the purchases I made before the holiday existed, when the mere act of buying something from a website felt miraculous.” Amazon “seems more or less indifferent to the meaning that Prime Day has accrued,” Bogost writes, and tries only to supersize the holiday. Customers today will find Prime Day deals on Amazon Echo devices, prebiotic sodas, dietary-supplement powders, electric toothbrushes, pickleball paddles, and more. “There is no logic to this sale,” Bogost continues. “The ritual is randomness.” But the holiday’s spirit is simple: “It doesn’t matter what I buy, so long as I buy something,” Bogost continues. “But Amazon’s accomplishment, and the cultural gravity of its annual event, comes from having done the opposite. It has given me a way to find what matters in the things I buy.” Read more: https://lnkd.in/ezNZ8Kjz 🎨: Paul Spella / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

The Secret Service “had one job—to protect a major political figure from physical harm—and failed,” Juliette Kayyem writes. Here are five questions that should guide a review of what happened:

The places that could most help scientists find evidence of extraterrestrial life are being threatened by climate change, Marina Koren writes. https://lnkd.in/eMC7cV6i “In Antarctica, the Arctic, and lower latitudes around the world, scientists use extreme environments to test ideas and techniques for ambitious space missions. Such places, known as analog sites, resemble environments on Mars and certain moons of Jupiter and Saturn—celestial bodies where microbial life may have once arisen, or may even be alive right now,” Koren writes. “Knowledge about the little organisms living in these strange places on Earth gets funneled into efforts to detect alien life elsewhere in the solar system.” Scientists did not seriously consider the possibility of extraterrestrial life until the mid-20th century, when they found ecosystems thriving without sunlight or significant oxygen on Earth. One scientist, for example, found secret realms of life by drilling through the ice of subglacial lakes in Antarctica. “Similar communities may exist in oceans beneath the icy exteriors of Europa, a moon of Jupiter, and Enceladus, a moon of Saturn,” Koren writes. “Antarctic lakes provide necessary practice for missions to sample those oceans.” But Antarctic ice is thinning rapidly, and a warming world could eventually obscure the subglacial lakes, barring scientists from developing the tools and techniques necessary to export their efforts to space. Although scientists could artificially recreate some environments, the variations in microbiology and geochemistry would make them poor substitutes. “The faster that extreme ecosystems disappear from our planet, the more limited astronomers’ concept of life may be, raising the risk that we overlook a faraway spark somewhere else,” Koren continues. “No amount of sophisticated scientific instruments can make up for that.” Read more and sign up for The Weekly Planet newsletter here: https://lnkd.in/eMC7cV6i 📸: Sergio Pitamitz / VW Pics / Getty

Meta is granting access to data on Instagram to a small number of researchers investigating the effect of the app on teens and young adults—“a baby step forward in the direction of data transparency,” Caroline Mimbs Nyce writes.

“For a child of the 1980s—like myself—the deaths of Ruth Westheimer and Richard Simmons over the past few days have been a reminder that we live in an era with a serious deficit in goofballs,” Gal Beckerman writes. https://lnkd.in/eQNTBw3B “Dr. Ruth and Richard Simmons were as brightly colorful as my Saturday-morning cartoons or my bowl of Trix,” Beckerman continues. “But looking back at them now as caricatures risks obscuring the subtle revolutions they helped bring about. Dr. Ruth pushed intimate conversations about sex into the open, discussing orgasms and premature ejaculation with Johnny Carson. Simmons took exercise and loving your body from the reserve of the chiseled and gave them to anyone unafraid to twist their hips with him along to the strains of ‘Great Balls of Fire.’” “At the core of their celebrity was a total lack of self-consciousness,” Beckerman writes. “They broke taboos, not by judging society for its hang-ups, but by being game to say or do anything—even becoming the butt of the joke themselves. Did they know we were often laughing at them? Probably. But that seemed to be the point; that’s how they broke through.” Read more: https://lnkd.in/eQNTBw3B 🎨: The Atlantic. Sources: Roy Rochlin / Getty; Bobby Bank / WireImage / Getty.

A new documentary examines Simone Biles’s decision to exit the 2021 Olympics, and the lessons she’s taking to the upcoming Summer Games. Hannah Giorgis on the criticism Biles received and the unrealistic, uninformed expectations placed on young athletes: