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Yahoo
01-05-2025
- Politics
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When Presidents Sought a Third (and Fourth) Term
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic's archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here. President Donald Trump has been back in the White House for just more than 100 days, and he's already thinking about a third term. For much of American history, the notion would have been laughable. Nearly a century ago, the historian John Bach McMaster surveyed the first 138 years of the presidency and hazarded a prediction in the pages of The Atlantic: 'Should the time come when a president who has twice been elected to office seeks a third election, he will surely meet great opposition, for the no-third-term doctrine is still strong.' Within 13 years, he would be proven wrong. In 1940, Franklin D. Roosevelt coasted to an unprecedented third term, capturing 55 percent of the popular vote and a whopping 85 percent in the Electoral College. As the writer Gerald W. Johnson observed the following year, 27 million voters 'trampled down the thitherto sacred third-term tradition in order to reëlect the chief New Dealer.' Roosevelt was breaking no law at the time he sought a third term. The two-term presidential limit was a mere custom established when George Washington stepped down voluntarily after eight years in office. Two presidents—Ulysses S. Grant in 1880, and FDR's fifth cousin Theodore Roosevelt in 1912—had previously tried (and failed) to return to the White House for third, nonconsecutive terms. Roosevelt's victory was not a surprise, and certainly not to readers of this magazine at the time. Barely a year into FDR's second term, the journalist J. Frederick Essary made a prediction that would hold up much better than McMaster's: 'If Mr. Roosevelt runs a third time,' Essary wrote, 'he will be renominated and reëlected.' But no president would do so again. Roosevelt won a fourth term in 1944, as the nation chose not to replace its commander in chief during the height of World War II. The president's worsening health was unknown to the public, and he died less than three months after his fourth inauguration, in April 1945. His death, and the end of the war soon after, revived a debate over whether to formalize what McMaster called 'the unwritten law of the Republic.' America's founders had considered writing a term limit into the original Constitution as a way to prevent a power-hungry president from becoming too much like a king. After Roosevelt's death in office, and after having just fought a war to defeat dictators in Europe, that argument gained new momentum. In 1951, the states ratified the Twenty-Second Amendment, which says that 'no person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.' Such an ironclad prohibition would seem to rule out a third term for President Donald Trump. But that hasn't stopped him or his biggest supporters from musing about the possibility of another run in 2028. 'I'm not joking,' he told NBC News last month. 'There are methods which you could do it.' (As if to prove the point, or to troll his critics, the official retail website of Trump's company is now selling Trump 2028 hats.) When my colleague Ashley Parker asked Trump about a possible third term last week, he said it was 'not something that I'm looking to do.' But he was clearly intrigued by the idea: 'That would be a big shattering, wouldn't it?' To get around the Twenty-Second Amendment, Trump's allies have floated the idea that he could run for vice president on the ticket of, say, J. D. Vance in the next election. If Vance won, he could resign, thereby making Trump president without him having to be 'elected' to the office more than twice. (The Twelfth Amendment, however, seems to cut off that path, because it states that 'no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.') Or Trump could simply run for president and dare the Supreme Court to throw him off the ballot in the middle of an election. Should the Supreme Court blink, the decision of whether two terms of Trump are enough would fall to voters. The president has never been as popular as FDR was during his years in the White House. But if history is a guide, it would be wrong to assume the public would automatically uphold a long-established limit. Just ask Essary: 'It is difficult to believe that the mass of the people care very deeply about the third term in itself,' he wrote in 1937. 'There is nothing in our experience as a nation to prove that they do care; and there is much to indicate how little the average man concerns himself about the matter.' It's a sentiment that, some nine decades later, Trump might be willing to bet on. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Yahoo
27-03-2025
- Entertainment
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Susan Sontag's Vision
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic's archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here. Some of Susan Sontag's photographs: Corpses of tortured Chinese rebels ('Five white men standing behind them,' she writes, 'posing for the camera'). A woman whose right foot has been transplanted onto her left leg ('This is not a surgical miracle'). Her father in a Tianjin rickshaw, 1931 ('He looks pleased, boyish, shy, absent'). Her father posing with his business partners, his wife, his mistress ('It is oppressive to have an invisible father'). These images are the narrative ligaments of 'Project for a Trip to China,' a fragmentary and diaristic short story that appeared in The Atlantic in 1973. Although it was taxonomized as fiction, it turns out to be one of the most plainly autobiographical pieces of writing that Sontag published. This is partly why it has often been considered not only in relation to her other short stories, but also to an earlier essay: 'Trip to Hanoi,' a roughly 25,000-word recounting of her visit to North Vietnam, printed in Esquire just a few weeks after Richard Nixon was elected president and a few months before he ordered the bombing of Cambodia. In 'Hanoi,' Sontag recounts a visit east; in 'Project,' she anticipates one. Each work is concerned with the reliability of the images she carries in her head: a foreign country, a far-off war, a people visible to her only in photographs and newsreels. Already an intellectual celebrity for her collections Against Interpretation and Styles of Radical Will (which included 'Hanoi'), Sontag had not begun to publish the essays that would form her third anthology, On Photography, in which she dramatized the question of what a person could take away from the images consumed daily in newspapers, television, art galleries, and advertisements. Sontag composed 'Project' around the same time that she made a series of visits to a retrospective of the photographer Diane Arbus. Arbus's portraits of unconventional subjects—in Sontag's term, 'freaks,' or sufferers who do not quite know they are suffering—struck her for their inability to arouse 'any compassionate feelings'; the images became the subject of a central critique in On Photography. 'Project,' meanwhile, illustrated Sontag's growing preoccupation with the medium and can be read as an elegiac prologue to those essays. In 'Hanoi,' she'd described 'napalmed corpses, live citizens on bicycles, the hamlets of thatched huts, the razed cities like Nam Dinh and Phu Ly,' depicted in newsreels and The New York Times. Before she arrived in North Vietnam, the media's images had been her only means of 'seeing' the conflict; already she'd sensed that the same images might also be alienating her from it. In 'Project,' she adjusted her focus. 'A China book? Not Trip to Hanoi—I can't do the 'West meets East' sensibility trip again … I'm not a journalist,' she recorded in a 1972 journal entry. Instead, she turned to her own collection of photographs, at the center of which was her father, a Manhattan-born Jewish fur trader who operated an office in Tianjin, China, and died of tuberculosis there shortly before her sixth birthday. The loss was the onset of an enveloping obsession, and the story evinces the way in which she long fantasized about China from the tinted vantage of the West as a mecca of salvation and annihilation, metaphorically and (she believed) literally 'the place where I was conceived.' The surprise of 'Project' is that photographs are less a force of alienation and moral quandary than they are a means of writing through the peculiar pain of absence. Sontag went on to argue that photos aestheticize human suffering by nature; at the same time, our condition of image-inundation dulls our reactions, limiting any capacity to meaningfully respond to them. 'To suffer is one thing,' she wrote in the opening essay of On Photography. 'Another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. It can also corrupt them.' Sontag did not actually visit China until January 1973, when the Chinese Communist Party entreated a handful of members of the American press to tour the country's schools, hospitals, and factories. She composed 'Project' in a few weeks, when she'd been told the trip was canceled. 'I wrote a story that started 'I am going to China,'' she recalled the summer after her visit, 'precisely because I then thought I wasn't.' Not much is extant in Sontag's journals from her trip. Reflecting on it years later, in an essay that became On Photography's final chapter, she described observing a gruesome operation unfold in a Shanghai hospital without flinching. A less gory surgery in Michelangelo Antonioni's film about Maoist China, by contrast, made her wince. 'Like a pair of binoculars with no right or wrong end,' she concluded, 'the camera makes exotic things near, intimate; and familiar things small, abstract, strange, much farther away.' 'Project' is about suffering; it is also about how to live with images of suffering. In the story, Sontag casts off critical distance and finds relief in lingering over the photos. 'Travel as decipherment,' goes one of her fragments. 'Travel as disburdenment.' The pivotal metaphor is not travel but excavation. Sontag introduces her collection of fragments as an 'archaeology of longings'; by unearthing them, she prepares the ground for a poetic interment. 'By visiting my father's death, I make him heavier,' she wrote. 'I will bury him myself.' When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Yahoo
08-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Lawrence Transit teams up with community partners to expand food access
Kansas City, Mo. – Lawrence Transit hopes that their new program will help provide access to food for bus riders and other needed items at the Central Station. Just Food and Harvesters will each host a food distribution at the site once a month. Thriving Thursdays was launched last November and has seen positive results. Just Food has served 75 households and 95 individuals so far, and Harvesters has served 135 households and 201 individuals. Furniture Mall of Missouri to open new store in Kansas City's Northland 'We bring groceries, personal care items, home-goods, and long-term resources like SNAP and food resource information we know would be desired,' said Danon Hare, Food Security Programs Manager for Harvesters. 'It is a joy to have partners like this in a local transit authority and to be invited into the intimate community they've fostered. Through daily interactions with neighbors, genuine trusting relationships are built, and their staff is enthusiastic to share this opportunity with anyone who could fully utilize this resource.' Transit riders catch a bus to Central Station on their way home and pick up free food and groceries. Central Station is accessible via bus routes 2, 4, 5, 8, 10, 11, and 12. Thriving Thursdays occur on the 2nd and 3rd Thursday of the month, from 3:00 p.m. to 5 p.m. or as long as supplies last. 'Thriving Thursdays allow us to expand access to fresh, healthy food so our community can grow stronger together,' said Aundrea Walker, Executive Director of Just Food. 'In partnership with Lawrence and Harvesters, we're building a future where everyone has what they need to thrive.' For more information contact Lawrence Transit info@ or (785) 864-4644. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
13-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Brilliant Stupidity of Internet Speak
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic's archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here. I love the way that people talk online. And on a good day, I genuinely think the internet has made people funnier and more creative. For instance, take this fairly anodyne post on X from 2023: 'Financially, whatever happened in July can't happen again.' For whatever reason, the people of the internet saw one man's budgeting struggles as a blank template for their own posts, which got stranger and more ornate as they went on—until we reached what, for me, was the post of the year: 'What happened to my ankles tonight mosquitologically can never happen again.' 'Mosquitologically'—it's so good. Over and over, we come up with amazing things to say. That is why I felt moved earlier this year to write a defense of what some call 'brain rot' language, a type of internet-inflected speech full of grammatical oddities and references to memes. I called it both mind-numbing and irresistible; when I talk the way that people talk online, I feel a little dumb, but also funny and current. Sometimes, these novel internet phrases—it's giving; if you even care—are the best way to express what I'm thinking, and so it would be counterproductive and masochistic not to use them. But long before the internet, there was spoken slang, the result of various cultures' and identity groups' innovations. This type of language originated in the margins, my colleague Caleb Madison wrote. In 14th-to-17th-century England, many people were pushed to the fringes of society as the country transitioned to capitalism. Over time, they 'developed a secret, colorful, and ephemeral cant' to allow them to speak freely in front of law enforcement or rival groups. Throughout The Atlantic's history, writers have kept a close eye on American slang; sometimes, they've fretted about it. An un-bylined piece from a 1912 issue bemoaned the state of American conversation and the laziness of 'canned language' (apparently too many people were saying 'It is a benediction to know him' at the time). Similarly, last year, the writer Dan Brooks argued that the internet is awash in 'empty slang,' and that the country is facing a 'language crisis.' The Brooks story distinguished between valuable slang and useless slang, a distinction that also came up in another un-bylined essay, titled just 'Slang,' from 1893. The writer posited that people use slang 'whenever one's own vocabulary falls short of the demands of one's thought.' They argued that good slang replaces 'inadequate' existing words, while bad slang is meaningless. Good slang is valuable, in the end, because it solves a problem—'Every new word which has a new meaning of its own, and is not a vain duplicate or pedantic substitute for a sufficient old one, enriches the language.' This is not to say that all linguistic innovation should receive a warm welcome. Over the years, The Atlantic has also covered plenty of bad slang and uninspired turns of phrase, of which the internet has produced oodles. In a 2014 issue of this magazine, the writer Britt Peterson unpacked the linguistics of 'LOLspeak,' a formerly common internet dialect that has thankfully fallen out of favor in the years since. It originated from 'I Can Has Cheezburger?' cat memes—a relic from a simpler and cringier time in online history. LOLSpeak was 'meant to sound like the twisted language inside a cat's brain,' Peterson wrote, but 'ended up resembling a down-South baby talk with some very strange characteristics, including deliberate misspellings (teh, ennyfing), unique verb forms (gotted, can haz), and word reduplication (fastfastfast).' The rise of social media in the mid-2010s led to all sorts of experiments like this (remember the 'Because Internet' phenomenon?), many of which were similarly so annoying that they couldn't possibly last. It's very obvious to say that language is always evolving, whether through misunderstanding or appropriation or relentless posting. But not all change lasts. We keep throwing things at the wall to see what sticks, and what usually does are the words and phrases that are instantly intelligible, useful, and simply funny. 'Mosquitologically': Why didn't we have a word for that? Article originally published at The Atlantic
Yahoo
30-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Nicholas Carr: Is the Internet Making Us Stupid?
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic's archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here. 'Over the past few years I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain,' Nicholas Carr wrote in 2008, 'remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn't going—so far as I can tell—but it's changing. I'm not thinking the way I used to think.' Carr's cover story for The Atlantic, 'Is Google Making Us Stupid?,' helped crystallize a sense of unease that had just started to dampen widespread enthusiasm for online life and its possibilities. New means of communication and knowledge transmission—the printing press, radio, television, now the internet—have always been met with fears about what may be lost with their adoption. Although these concerns can be overblown, they are not unfounded. Because communication technologies mediate our understanding of other humans and the outside world, changes in those technologies really do affect the way we think—sometimes profoundly. Carr's cover story was the first in a long line of explorations in The Atlantic about the unintended consequences of online life on our minds and behaviors. (Our February cover story, 'The Anti-Social Century,' by Derek Thompson, is one of the latest installments.) Recently, I spoke with Carr about his essay, and about how the digital world continues to change the way we read, think, and remember. This conversation has been edited for concision and clarity. The Honeymoon Is Over Don Peck: In 2008, before iPhones were widely used, before social media was ubiquitous, you made the argument that the internet was changing our brains, chipping away at our ability to think deeply. The tech environment then was in many ways very different from the one we live in today. How has that argument aged? Nicholas Carr: When I wrote the article, I saw it as a personal essay built on my own sense that I was losing my ability to concentrate because I was spending so much time online. And I knew I was being speculative. Unfortunately, I think my speculations have been proved correct. Look at how technology has changed since 2008: As you said, the iPhone had just come out. Social media was mainly used by kids. The kind of distractions and interruptions that I described—which back in 2008 kind of only happened when you were sitting in front of your laptop or desktop—now happen all the time. So I think that, if anything, disruptions to our train of thought and our ability to put information into context and to interpret things deeply—it's now much worse than it was 17 years ago. Peck: What have you done in your own life, since then, to resist the problems of scatter and superficiality? And has any of it worked? Carr: I wish I could say I've solved the problem. When I wrote the article, we were still in a honeymoon phase with the internet, and most people assumed that by getting greater access to information, you'd make people smarter. But I think we all struggle today, because society has reshaped itself around the assumption that everybody is online all the time. It's very hard to break free of that. Social media is particularly good at distracting us, so I try to keep my presence there to a minimum. I try not to keep my phone on my person all the time: If I'm going out for a walk or going out to dinner, I'll try to leave it behind. If your phone's always with you, it grabs a permanent hold on your attention—even if you're not looking at it, you're thinking of looking at it because you know something new is always there. But I don't want to present myself as some model of a person who's solved this problem. And I have to say, I think the struggle is getting harder rather than easier, even though we kind of see the problem more clearly now. Peck: You have a new book out, Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart. It follows, to some extent, from some of the inquiries you began all those years ago. What's the main message of the book? Carr: So, ever since the Enlightenment, if not earlier, we've taken an idealistic view of communication. We believe that if communication among people is generally good, then more communication is going to be better. It's going to bring more understanding and ultimately more social harmony. In the book, I argue that that assumption is catastrophically wrong. When you speed up the exchange of messages and information beyond a certain point, you actually overwhelm the mind's ability to make sense of it all in a deep way. To keep up with the flow, people have to sacrifice emotional and intellectual depth. We become reactive and impulsive, and that ends up triggering misunderstanding and animosity and, in general, misanthropy. The book looks at how the internet affects our social lives—the way we converse, the way we develop relationships, the way we socialize in general—from a perspective that is kind of similar to the way that my 2008 cover story looked at our intellectual lives. In both, what I'm arguing is that there's a fundamental conflict between how the technology works and how our minds work. And it's a conflict that I'm not sure can be remedied. Peck: Some of the changes involve not just the way we read or receive information, but also the way we write and post. Can you talk about how that affects our thinking as well? Carr: In the 1980s and early 1990s, as email was becoming popular, I think most people initially saw it as a substitute for the postal system. And people wrote long, careful emails, in a very similar form to what they would have written in a personal letter. But as the intensity of email picked up, they became shorter, sloppier, and more superficial. And yet they displaced letters—very few people write personal letters anymore. The flow of messages through social media and texting intensified all that, and telegraphic exchanges have become the default language we use today. In one sense, you can understand that. We've adopted this new way of speaking to one another because it's the only way to stay afloat in the flood of messages we have to deal with. But self-creation comes through language, through expressing yourself. By constantly compressing the way we speak, we've lost a lot of nuance, and I think we've also compressed ourselves in a way. And we've let this all happen with very little resistance. Article originally published at The Atlantic
