The FDA’s New ‘Don’t Say Gay’ Policy for Blood Donation

For decades now, gay men have been barred from giving blood. In 2015, what had been a lifetime ban was loosened, such that gay men could be donors if they’d abstained from sex for at least a year. This was later shortened to three months. Last week, the FDA put out a new and more inclusive plan: Sexually active gay and bisexual people would be permitted...

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AI Is About to Dump More Work on Everyone

Have you been worried that ChatGPT, the AI language generator, could be used maliciously—to cheat on schoolwork or broadcast disinformation? You’re in luck, sort of: OpenAI, the company that made ChatGPT, has introduced a new tool that tries to determine the likelihood that a chunk of text you provide was AI-generated.I say “sort of” because the new...

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Tyre Nichols Wanted to Capture the Sunset

Vincent van Gogh’s painting Willows at Sunset is a dazzling kaleidoscope of twilight. The canvas is awash in orange and yellow brushstrokes, as if the painter meant to depict the world ablaze. An asymmetrical sun hovers in the background while beams of light shoot across the sky. Terra-cotta grass leans in the wind that I imagine van Gogh felt slide...

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Can I Teach Faulkner in DeSantis’s Florida?

In my senior Southern Literature class, I’m about to teach Go Down, Moses, William Faulkner’s great novel about how racism has warped America. I ask my students to think about the stories Faulkner tells: the dispossession of the Chickasaw people, the enslaved woman who drowns herself in despair, and the white family struggling to accept that the admired...

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Biden’s Document Issue Is Nothing Like Trump’s

No equivalence exists in the ways that President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump have respectively handled the classified documents found in their possession. Yet panicky Democrats—ruled either by a thirst for TV airtime or by a knee-jerk defensive reflex—are suggesting that one does.Biden’s enemies might be expected to use an argument of...

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We’re Bungling the COVID Wind-down

Stephen B. Thomas, the director of the Center for Health Equity at the University of Maryland, considers himself an eternal optimist. When he reflects on the devastating pandemic that has been raging for the past three years, he chooses to focus less on what the world has lost and more on what it has gained: potent antiviral drugs, powerful vaccines,...

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Someday, You Might Be Able to Eat Your Way Out of a Cold

When it comes to treating disease with food, the quackery stretches back far. Through the centuries, raw garlic has been touted as a home treatment for everything from chlamydia to the common cold; Renaissance remedies for the plague included figs soaked in hyssop oil. During the 1918 flu pandemic, Americans wolfed down onions or chugged “fluid beef”...

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Do They Not Know He’ll Betray Them?

Updated at 9:20 a.m. ET on February 2, 2023House Republicans are preparing for a big confrontation with the Biden White House over the debt ceiling—a confrontation that could, if played wrong, collapse the U.S. financial system and drag down the world economy. President Joe Biden has been preparing for this fight since 2011, the last time Republicans...

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The Hidden Link Between Workaholism and Mental Health

“How to Build a Life” is a column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life.Winston Churchill was many things: statesman, soldier, writer. He was one of the first world leaders to sound the alarm about the Nazi menace in the 1930s, and...

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The Man Who Moves Markets

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.      When the investor Carson Block arrived for an appointment at the Pierre hotel, in Manhattan, in 2017, he knew he was about to meet with an impostor. In the elegant Rotunda...

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