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Atlantic
2 days ago
- Atlantic
Has Air Travel Ever Been Good?
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic 's archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here. Of YouTube's many microgenres, one of the most popular and most enduring is the airplane meltdown. There are thousands or maybe millions of these videos online: Passengers going nuts over spilled drinks or supposedly bad service; flight cancellations turning grown adults feral; tiny inconveniences disrupting the brittle peace of the temporary societies that exist in the air above us all the time. Sometimes, if you're lucky, you'll find a compilation, a clip show of modern misery. The Atlantic 's early aviation writers would have a lot of questions about this. Those questions would probably start with 'What is a YouTube?,' but I suspect they'd get more philosophical pretty quickly. In the early 20th century, flying was a source of intense curiosity and great wonder; if anyone was melting down, it was probably because they were simply so dazzled by it all, or maybe very scared—not because someone used their armrest. 'For some years I have been afflicted with the belief that flight is possible to man,' Wilbur Wright wrote in a letter to a friend in 1900, eventually published in The Atlantic. Three years later, he and his brother, Orville, managed to get a biplane in the air for 12 seconds. Only 18 years after that, Kenneth Chafee McIntosh wrote that 'aviation has superposed itself upon civilization. Its future is limitless, not predictable.' Its present, however, was not fun. Early airplanes were used mostly for warcraft and mail carrying; occasionally, a passenger might come along for some reason or another, but they had to sit with the pilot in an open cockpit, exposed to whatever the weather was. Even once we figured out how to put more people inside planes, cabins weren't pressurized, so they flew low and jiggled everyone around. Until 1930, there were no flight attendants, which I suppose means there was no one to scream at. Some engines were loud enough to cause permanent hearing damage. Even so, the airplane's world-changing potential was obvious. By 1941, people were writing poetry collections about it, and The Atlantic was reviewing them. After 1945, the era of mass air travel began, aviation having been 'transformed by the war from a government-subsidized experiment into an economically sound transportation industry.' In the '50s, airplanes overtook trains, and then ships, as America's preferred means of long-distance transportation. This era is now widely considered to be commercial aviation's golden age, when the technology was established enough to be comfortable, safe, and fast, but still novel enough to feel remarkable: human ingenuity made material. In the popular imagination, at least, this was the last time flying was dignified. Stewardesses wore fabulous outfits and meals were served on real plates and nobody knew what a vape was. But that moment existed more in theory than it did in reality. In the century's middle decades, flying was significantly more expensive and more dangerous than it is today. Airports were segregated until the early 1960s. Every new advance seemed to come with a downside. As soon as planes got faster and flights got longer, passengers started reporting strange symptoms, ones they would later learn to call jet lag. As more people flew, the experience became both more banal and more crowded—just another form of mass transit. More flights and faster speeds meant mounting safety concerns (some warranted, some not). In 1978, the airline industry was deregulated, which resulted in less stability, lower quality of service, and, eventually, higher fares. By June 2001, three months before air travel was to change forever, it was already pretty bad, per the pilot and longtime Atlantic writer James Fallows. The industry was 'nearing the limits of its capacity,' he wrote, having routed more and more flights through hub airports in an effort to keep planes full and maximize profits. Delays were reaching record levels. After 9/11, security theater turned flight attendants into cops and passengers into would-be criminals. The airlines continued to cut costs, squooshing seats closer together and charging for just about everything they could: legroom, internet, checked bags, overhead space, food, even water, as Ester Bloom reported in 2015. 'To travel by air,' Lenika Cruz wrote in 2022, 'is to endure a million tiny indignities.' Flying really has gotten worse, due to greed and war and corporate decision making. But the truth is, the experience has always been somewhat unpleasant, because transporting human bodies through the air at hundreds of miles an hour is so difficult, it almost shouldn't be possible. I looked in our archives expecting to find stories about air travel's supposed midcentury glamor. I didn't find much. But I did find a piece from 2007, in which Virginia Postrel examines the collective longing for such a time, a time 'before price competition, security checks, and slobs in sweatpants ruined everything.' She quoted Aimée Bratt, who, as a flight attendant with Pan Am in the mid-'60s, 'was struck by 'how crowded it was on an airplane, no place to put anything, lines for the lavatories, no place to sit or stand … Passengers got their food trays, there was no choice of meals, drinks were served from a hand tray, six at a time, pillows and blankets were overhead, and there were no extra amenities like headsets or hot towels.'' But people didn't complain. 'Travel itself,' Postrel wrote, 'was privilege enough. Airline glamour was not about the actual experience of flying but about the idea of air travel—and the ideals and identity it represented.' Flying was budding internationalism, uncomplicated awe, wide skies, endless potential, the future made present and the impossible made real. Flying wasn't thrilling because the stewardesses dressed amazing—it was thrilling because up until very recently, the very concept of a waitress in the sky had been science fiction. Air travel has changed, but so have we. This is the noble life cycle of any technology: It is unimaginable, and then it is imaginable, and then it is just there. Fire, windmills, eyeglasses, the steam engine, pasteurization, cars, air-conditioning, microwaves, miniskirts, email, smartphones, bubble tea—every miracle eventually becomes mundane. It has to, I think: We need to make room for new miracles. We need to find new things to write poems about. When this magazine was first printed, in 1857, our species thought we were stuck on Earth. We eventually figured out how to liberate ourselves from the laws of physics and fly through the air, and then we figured out how to get live television and cold orange juice and fully reclining beds up there. And then we figured out how to make all of this dreadfully tedious. That's a remarkable human achievement, too.
Yahoo
12-06-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
The Best Wellness Advice Has Always Been Free
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. This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic's archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here. Allow me to make myself sound very dainty and attractive: Last year, I was diagnosed with inflammatory bowel disease. This was an unfortunate development, I decided, and so not in line with 'brat summer.' I handled the news like any journalist might—with compulsive research and fact-checking. My fear directed me to Reddit threads and scientific studies, to new diet plans and workout regimens and supplement orders, until my unremitting quest for answers landed me in the Zoom office of a functional-medicine doctor, a woman who charged me a couple of hundred bucks to tell me that I should eat more boiled plantains. My search for wellness had gone too far. I was spending money I didn't have to try to fix an illness with origins I'd never understand, much less control. Yet I trust that I'm far from alone in this desire to feel good. Every year, the average American spends more than $6,000 on 'wellness,' an imprecise category that includes both fads and legitimate endeavors, with offerings as varied as diagnostic technologies and protein popcorn. Across the world, wellness is a $6.3 trillion business—outpacing even the pharmaceutical industry—and Americans are by far the biggest spenders. Although some health issues require interventions or specialists (which can be exorbitantly expensive), the wellness industry tells Americans that no matter their condition—or lack thereof—there's always some treatment they should be buying. There's always more Googling and optimizing to be done. Take the journalist Amy Larocca's book, How to Be Well, which details her wellness-industry misadventures, including 'gravity' colonic cleanses, $200-a-month prescription herbs, and $1,000 Goop events. In a recent Atlantic review of the book, the writer Sheila McClear observed how widespread the 'wellness craze' has become, noting that 'in a nation known for its relatively poor health, nearly everybody seems to be thinking about how to be healthy.' Yet, like the human body's frailty, America's obsession with wellness is far from new. In our archives, I found a letter addressed to someone else facing an unsexy stomach ailment: 'A Letter to a Dyspeptic,' published in 1859, includes some remarkably sassy advice from an anonymous writer to a 19th-century gentleman with indigestion. This writer is all tough love, unafraid to call the gentleman an 'unfortunate individual,' a man of 'ripe old age, possibly a little over-ripe, at thirty-five,' and, due to the fellow's unique bathing habits, an 'insane merman.' The dyspeptic man had spent the past years suffering, quitting his business and doling out cash to questionable doctors and therapies, to little avail. 'You are haunting water-cures, experimenting on life-pills, holding private conferences with medical electricians, and thinking of a trip to the Bermudas,' the author writes. But this search for a cure came at a high cost: 'O mistaken economist! can you afford the cessation of labor and the ceaseless drugging and douching of your last few years?' Any hyperfixation on wellness can be draining and futile; an endless search for answers to one's ailments might be alluring, but 'to seek health as you are now seeking it, regarding every new physician as if he were Pandora,' the writer warns, 'is really rather unpromising.' In lieu of expensive treatments, the writer advises that the dyspeptic man do three things: bathe, breathe, and exercise. (Another suggestion is to purchase 'a year's subscription to the 'Atlantic Monthly,'' one of the 'necessaries of life' for happiness—it seems we writers have never been above the shameless plug.) Notably, all of these (except the Atlantic subscription, starting at $79.99) are more or less free. Written almost two centuries later, Larocca's book ends on a similar note, championing the kind of health advice that doesn't hurt your wallet. After her tiresome and expensive foray into the world of wellness, she 'doesn't recommend a single product, practice, or service, although she does name one tip that helped her,' McClear notes. 'It's a simple breathing exercise. And it's free.' America's wellness methods have changed over time—sometimes evolving for the better. (The 1859 letter, for instance, details how some philosophers believed in being as sedentary as possible because 'trees lived longer than men because they never stirred from their places.') Even so, as skyrocketing costs and medical mistrust plague American health care, the wellness industry churns out a carousel of treatments, touting sweeping benefits that are often dubious at best. Compared with the many big promises that 'gravity' colonics and supplement companies might make, most health tips that have stood the test of time are far more quotidian: sleep, exercise, breathe. Their simplicity can be both healing and accessible. The body has 'power and beauty,' the anonymous writer noted more than a century ago, 'when we consent to give it a fair chance.' 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
01-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
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
- Yahoo
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.
