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 S43Vivek Ramaswamy's Truth   The Millennial outsider Republican says he wants a revolution. To get there, he’d gut the federal government.This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.
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S40Scientists find evidence that Vlad the Impaler shed bloody tears  The eponymous villain of Bram Stoker's classic 1897 novel Dracula was partly inspired by a real historical person: Vlad III, a 15th century prince of Wallachia (now southern Romania), known by the moniker Vlad the Impaler because of his preferred method of execution: impaling his victims on spikes. Much of what we know about Vlad III comes from historical documents, but scientists have now applied cutting-edge proteomic analysis to three of the prince's surviving letters, according to a recent paper published in the journal Analytical Chemistry. Among their findings: the Romanian prince was not a vampire, but he may have wept tears of blood, consistent with certain legends about Vlad III.
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S59Two Tourists Fell Asleep in the Eiffel Tower and Woke Up to Police /https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/b4/be/b4be21fd-6866-4e9e-ad7e-1c0c54632474/gettyimages-1571001732.jpg) After jumping a security barrier, the visitors were found between the landmark’s second and third floorsIn the early hours of August 14, two American tourists were found asleep in an area—normally closed to the public—between the Eiffel Tower’s second and third floors. Security guards discovered the pair as they prepared to open the landmark up to the morning crowds.
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S54These Ancient Japanese Islanders Created a Signature Skull Shape by Molding Babies' Heads /https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/05/ee/05eeab3c-44cb-44de-a1e6-6efcf9c17502/hirota_remains_2.jpeg) Humans have been modifying their bodies for millennia. In some cultures, alterations like foot binding, neck lengthening and tattoos are related to class, beauty ideals or spirituality. But new research suggests the Hirota people of ancient Japan had a more practical reason for modifying their infants’ skulls: to facilitate trade.The study, published in the journal PLOS One, argues that the Hirota people purposefully distorted their children’s skulls. Previously, researchers were unsure whether the deformations were the result of “an unknown natural process,” writes Live Science’s Harry Baker.
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S52The Price of Sauce  Campbell Soup Company’s acquisition of Rao’s Specialty Foods is a reminder of the power of high costs.This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
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S51A Still-Shocking Masterpiece Worth Catching in Theaters  Many movies with notorious twist endings—such as The Sixth Sense or The Usual Suspects—face a steep challenge on rewatch. The impact of the finale evaporates, or is at least blunted, by the viewer’s knowledge of what’s coming. A second viewing is largely an exercise in detecting the breadcrumbs leading to the big surprise. When a rerelease of Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy was announced for this summer, I wondered if it would suffer from the same limitations. Oldboy has one of the nastiest gut-punch cinematic conclusions I’ve ever seen. Twenty years on, would that be sustainable?Back in the early aughts, when word of Oldboy first started to spread among American cineastes, Korean cinema was a few years into a flourishing renaissance led partly by Park, Bong Joon-ho, and Kim Ki-duk. Still, few projects had genuinely crossed over to the United States—Park’s prior film Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance played on a grand total of six screens in North America. Oldboy gained a little more steam, partly because of its success at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival, where a jury headed by Quentin Tarantino gave it the Grand Prix (the runner-up prize) and critics breathlessly noted its unusual intensity.
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S41Political polarization toned down through anonymous online chats  Political polarization in the US has become a major issue, as Republicans and Democrats increasingly inhabit separate realities on topics as diverse as election results and infectious diseases. An actual separation seems to underly some of these differences, as members of the two parties tend to live in relatively homogeneous communities, cluster together on social media, and rely on completely different news sources.
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S67Rich Men North of Richmond: The hit song that has divided the US  In the culture wars that continue to divide US politics, the right wing may have found its latest hero in Oliver Anthony, whether he likes it or not. Last week, Anthony's song Rich Men North of Richmond, which criticises Washington and big government, dropped on a West Virginia radio station's YouTube channel and the unknown singer-songwriter became a viral sensation with more than two million views over two days and more than 20 million so far. In the roughly produced video, Anthony, a burly guy with a big red beard and a guitar, stands in a wooded area, looking and sounding like an everyday blue-collar worker. "I've been sellin' my soul, workin' all day/ Overtime hours for bullshit pay," he sings. "It's a damn shame what the world's gotten to/ For people like me and people like you." More like this:- Can a parody song top the charts?- The film that has divided the US- The erotic drama too hot for the US censors
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S46The Right to Not Have Your Mind Read  Jared Genser in many ways fits a certain Washington, D.C., type. He wears navy suits and keeps his hair cut short. He graduated from a top law school, joined a large firm, and made partner at 40. Eventually, he became disenchanted with big law and started his own boutique practice with offices off—where else—Dupont Circle. What distinguishes Genser from the city’s other 50-something lawyers is his unusual clientele: He represents high-value political prisoners. If you’re married to a troublesome opposition leader in a place where the rule of law is thin on the ground, one night the secret police might kick in your door, slip a hood over your spouse, and vanish into the dark. That’s when you call Genser.Earlier this year, Genser helped obtain the release of two men who had run for president against Daniel Ortega, Nicaragua’s on-again, off-again strongman, and found themselves imprisoned for their trouble. He still remembers the early-morning call letting him know that his clients were airborne and headed for Dulles International Airport. But not every case ends in a euphoric release. Genser has represented the three most recent imprisoned winners of the Nobel Peace Prize, including the Chinese prodemocracy activist Liu Xiaobo, who died in custody at the age of 61, and Ales Bialiatski, who was just sentenced to 10 years in a grim penal colony in Belarus, where inmates receive beatings between long shifts of hard labor.
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S48Talking to Strangers About the Book of the Summer  Lizzie: One night several years ago, Kaitlyn and I and a group of other friends ended up at a party in the South Street Seaport. It was at the apartment of someone none of us knew, and I can’t say for sure how we got there. We were excited to see what kinds of people lived in this gift-shop neighborhood, and what their apartment would look like. Would every room feature its own ship in a bottle? Would there be portholes instead of windows?Of course, the reality couldn’t compare to our fantasy, as is standard for reality. It was a regular old apartment, with regular old IKEA furniture. There was a nice rooftop and cheap beer in the fridge. Eventually, the host requested that our group please leave the premises, probably because they’d realized that no one knew who we were, and also perhaps because Kaitlyn may have mildly insulted their taste in literature.
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S65Fifa 2023 Women's World Cup: 'Good, queer joy' on and off the pitch  Immediately after winning the 2019 Fifa Women’s World Cup game against the Netherlands, now-retired champion Megan Rapinoe ran towards the sidelines and kissed her long-time girlfriend, WNBA star Sue Bird. The moment was seen around the world – and it took the visibility of the LGBTQ+ community to a new level.Rapinoe is not the first openly gay football player – that was Lily Parr in the 1920s – and more than 96 athletes in the 2023 Fifa Women’s World Cup are out today. Experts and viewers alike say the door has increasingly swung open for LGBTQ+ athletes to express their true selves.
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S38S49The Most Disrespected Document in Higher Education  You may remember the syllabus. Handed out on the first day of class, it was a revered and simple artifact that would outline the plan of a college course. It was a pragmatic document, covering contact information, required books, meeting times, and a schedule. But it was also a symbolic one, representing the educational part of the college experience in a few dense and hopeful pages.That version of the syllabus is gone. It has been replaced by courseware, an online tool for administering a class and processing its assignments. A document called “syllabus” persists, and is still distributed to prospective students at the start of each semester—but its function as a course plan has been minimized, if not entirely erased. First and foremost, it must satisfy a drove of bureaucratic needs, describing school policies, accreditation demands, regulatory matters, access to campus resources, health and safety guidelines, and more.
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S45Love Is Magic--And Also Hormones  Next year, NASA’s Europa Clipper will travel 1.8 billion miles to Jupiter’s icy Galilean moon. Engraved on the spacecraft will be a poem by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón called “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa.” It may seem ironic, emblazoning a vessel on a fact-finding mission to outer space with an ode to mystery. Yet the vast puzzle of space remains exactly that. “I like a universe that includes much that is unknown,” the astronomer Carl Sagan wrote in a 1979 essay, “and, at the same time, much that is knowable.” This tension lies at the heart of all the sciences—perhaps, especially, the science of love.Since the 1980s, the study of romantic love and attraction has coalesced into a formal discipline. The interdisciplinary field of relationship science—which encompasses neuroscience, anthropology, psychology, and evolutionary biology—is currently experiencing a boom: A search of the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed database reveals that more than half of the papers written about romantic love since 1953 are from the past 10 years. Today, the findings of such studies are disseminated by popular and scientific media outlets; TED now has an entire playlist of recent talks on “the weird science of love.”
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S66The untold story of London's original fast food  In the 1740s, pleasure boaters would jauntily sail from central London down the River Thames to an islet once known as Twickenham Ait in Richmond, mooring at an inn that had built a reputation across the city for selling just one thing: eel pies.Eel Pie House was the grand tavern's name, and punting parties would drift along the shore and then congregate for merry picnics on the riverside. Inside, the inn's chefs would skin, debone and trim batches of Thames eels into three-inch chunks, before stewing them ready for pastry and the pie oven.
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S36S47Islands Have a Disaster-Response Problem  The death toll of the Maui fires, the deadliest in the U.S. in more than a century, now stands at 114 people. Another 1,000 people are still missing. About 1,800 in people are in temporary housing. Displaced or not, people in Maui need food, water, toiletries, and medications. And in the coming days, weeks, and months, all that and more—everything needed for a long, difficult recovery—will have to come from somewhere.“Imagine building the entire town of Lahaina from scratch, and how many hundreds of millions—or billions—of dollars are needed to recover and rebuild,” Joe Kent, the executive vice president of Hawaii’s Grassroot Institute, a nonprofit public-policy think tank, told me.
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S55S44Americans Vote Too Much  It’s always election season in America. Dozens of local contests are taking place across the country this month, from Montgomery, Alabama to the Mariana Ranchos County Water District in California. On August 8 alone, Custer County, Colorado held a recall election for a county commissioner; Ohio asked residents to consider a major ballot measure; and voters in Oklahoma weighed in on several ballot measures.America has roughly 90,000 local governing bodies, and states do not—at least publicly—track all of the elections taking place on their watch, making an exhaustive accounting nearly impossible. In many cases, contests come and go without any local media coverage, either. I came across a notice for an August 29 election in Marin County, California. When I called the Registrar of Voters for more information, the county assistant had to search a few moments before he could tell me that the town of Tiburon (population 9,000) was selecting a short-term council member.
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S50Scenes From the 2023 World Athletics Championships  More than 2,000 athletes from about 200 countries have gathered in Budapest, Hungary, for the 2023 World Athletics Championships, competing in 49 track-and-field events. The competition began on August 19 and continues through August 27. Gathered below are images from some of the events over this weekend. Second-placed Tara Davis-Woodhall of Team USA celebrates after competing in the women's long-jump final during the World Athletics Championships at the National Athletics Center in Budapest, Hungary, on August 20, 2023. #
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S33S70Ozempic, the 'miracle drug,' and the harmful ideaof a future without fat  We’ve encountered these headlines before. Time and again, dubious and ineffective solutions for obesity gain prominence. Pills, tonics, elixirs, Zumba, Noom and now Ozempic. The latest wonder drug is a semaglutide drug invented to help diabetics regulate blood glucose levels, but has the notable side-effect of severe weight loss. It has been heralded by many to culminate in the elimination of fat bodies.
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S69Zimbabwe's president was security minister when genocidal rape was state policy in 1983-4. Now he seeks another term  Zimbabwe will hold its elections on 23 August. The current president of Zimbabwe, Emmerson Mnangagwa, is running for re-election. This is despite his having oversight in the execution of the genocide of a minority group of Zimbabweans in the south-west region, as evidenced in my newly published study. My latest study explores a military operation, known as Gukurahundi, between 1983 and 1984 in Matabeleland and parts of the Midlands in Zimbabwe. Drawing on 36 in-depth interviews with survivors, my study provides new insights into Operation Gukurahundi. It identifies systematic patterns of rape and other forms of sexual violence in the operation.
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S64 Who Should Price a Gig?  Our summer special report helps leaders gain a comprehensive view of risks, learn how to overcome market disrupters, and manage the analytical tools that provide predictive insight for decision-making.Our summer special report helps leaders gain a comprehensive view of risks, learn how to overcome market disrupters, and manage the analytical tools that provide predictive insight for decision-making.Arriving at Boston’s Logan International Airport after a tiring journey, Mia opened the Uber app to find a ride home. Her relief at seeing the message “Your Uber driver is arriving in 3 minutes” was short-lived because the driver canceled. In the next 30 minutes, half a dozen Uber drivers accepted her ride request, then canceled, before one eventually arrived. What was happening?
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