Like migratory birds guided by the stars, hundreds of thousands of Americans have flocked in the direction of today’s total solar eclipse. They have settled within a narrow strip of Earth where the moon will blot out the sun almost completely. For a few precious minutes, if the clouds don’t interfere, eclipse watchers will experience the surreality of being held by the shadow of the moon. The sky will suddenly be cast in twilight, the sun appearing as a radiant, pearl-white ring. Then the light will wobble, shifting to a shimmery gold, and the sun will burst through, reclaiming its place in the sky.
Reviewer: Chidera Ejikeme
May 15, 2024
News from: theatlantic
In the summer of 2022, several researchers with USDA Wildlife Services held their breath as a drone pilot flew a large drone, equipped with a camera, toward a wolf standing in a pasture in southwestern Oregon. The team members, watching from a distance, expected the wolf to freeze or run away the minute the whirring rotors approached it. But to their disbelief, it did neither.
Reviewer: Chidera Ejikeme
May 15, 2024
News from: theatlantic
Her dad, Brenden Lake, is a cognitive scientist at New York University, where he thinks about better ways to train artificial intelligence. At home, he trains human intelligence, by which I just mean that he’s a dad. On a recent Sunday morning, he held up a robot puppet and asked Luna, who was meting out her wooden toys, “That’s for robot?” “Oh, goodness!” he added in a silly Muppet voice. Luna seemed only half-interested—in the way small children are always sort of on their own planet—but a couple of minutes later, she returned to pick up the puppet. “Robot,” she said. “Robot,” she repeated, dispelling any doubt about her intentions. Her dad turned to me, surprised; he’d never heard her say “robot” before. Had she learned the word just now?
Reviewer: Chidera Ejikeme
May 15, 2024
News from: theatlantic
Good chocolate, I’ve come to learn, should taste richly of cocoa—a balanced blend of bitter and sweet, with notes of fruit, nuts, and spice. My favorite chocolate treat is nothing like that. It’s the Cadbury Creme Egg, an ovoid milk-chocolate shell enveloping a syrupy fondant center. To this day, I look forward to its yearly return in the weeks leading up to Easter.
Reviewer: Chidera Ejikeme
May 15, 2024
News from: theatlantic
At Hopscotch, Daryl Collins’s bottle shop in Baltimore, he happily sells wine to 18-year-olds. If a customer isn’t sure what variety they like (and who is, at that age?), Collins might even pull a few bottles off the shelves and pop the corks for an impromptu tasting. No Maryland law keeps these teens away from the Tempranillo, because at this shop, none of the drinks contains alcohol.
Reviewer: Chidera Ejikeme
May 15, 2024
News from: theatlantic
The legalization of cannabis in the United States—the biggest change in policy for an illegal substance since Prohibition ended—has been an unqualified success for approximately no one. True, the drug is widely available for commercial purchase, many marijuana-related charges have been dropped, and stoner culture has become more aligned with designer smoking paraphernalia featured on Goop than the bumbling spaciness of Cheech and Chong. But a significant part of the market is still underground, medical research is scant, and the aboveground market is not exactly thriving. Longtime marijuana activists are unhappy. Entrepreneurs are unhappy. So are people who buy weed, as well as those who think weed should never have been legal in the first place.
Reviewer: Chidera Ejikeme
May 15, 2024
News from: theatlantic
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