The National Weather Service on Monday began testing new, scarier storm warnings in Kansas and Missouri, two of the most tornado-prone states. The messages beamed to news outlets now might say a tornado will cause “mass devastation” or “complete destruction” or that a particularly foreboding twister is “not survivable.” Why weren’t the old warnings scary enough
It bears pointing out that for all of the six-plus hours of Supreme Court oral argument on the Affordable Care Act, the titans of the legal world—congressmen, appellate litigators, and heads of major national advocacy groups—were forced to surrender their cell phones, newspapers, and personal assistants in order to sit in perfect silence in the Supreme Court chambers. If you were to strip them of the sober gray suits and swap in a bowl of lentils, the last three days could well represent the legal world’s highest powered silent meditation retreat. Some of these folks haven’t been quiet for two consecutive waking hours since the 1960s.
At some point in your restaurant-going life, you’ve probably felt a pang of doubt when you handed over your Visa card.
Everybody who gets cancer in Japan over the next 40 years will no doubt blame their misfortune on radiation from Fukushima Daiichi.
BRANDON, Miss.—“There’s a show,” says Newt Gingrich, “that uses the word Christian in a deliberately hostile way.”
Last fall, Gordon Yeager, 94, and his wife, Norma, 90, died together, holding hands in the Iowa hospital where they had been taken after a car accident. The final chapter of the couple’s seven-decade love story made headlines around the world. What the fulsome tributes to the couple’s 72-year marriage generally failed to note was that the crash nearly ended another long love story
Listen to “Hang Up and Listen” with Stefan Fatsis, Josh Levin, and Mike Pesca by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:
The previous 24 hours had been rough on the political tycoons. Foster Friess, the cowboy-hat wearing backer of Rick Santorum, appeared on MSNBC twice: once to joke about women preventing pregnancy by putting Bayer aspirin “between their knees,” once to apologize. Sheldon Adelson, whose previous $10 million investment in Newt Gingrich hadn’t netted much, spun the media ‘round again by promising $10 million more
“Story-truth,” Tim O’Brien wrote, “is truer sometimes than happening-truth.” He wrote that in a story called “Good Form,” in his collection The Things They Carried , a hybrid of memoir and fiction that was a touchstone for a generation of writers looking for new ways to tell stories. That book was published 20 years ago this month, and in February of 1992 I met Tim O’Brien at a reading at the Milwaukee Art Museum on the shore of Lake Michigan. It was so cold that day that water blown off the lake encased rows of trees by the shore in ice, and, depressed and 16 years old, that’s how I felt—as if a thin shell covered me, dulling the outside world, chilling me to the bone
America is fat, but Americans disagree about what this means. Either the country’s obesity rates—one third of all adults are obese—are a dangerous health crisis, or they show that the nation is healthier and wealthier than ever. Either the government must act immediately to curb our waistlines, or we must act to curb our bloated government.
