What [Trump] missed, though, was the recent change that “nasty” has undergone. It’s an ugly word, perhaps—it requires the mouth of its utterer to catch and gape and hiss—but it is also, now, a hopeful one. When women, after Wednesday’s debate, attested to their own nastiness, they were echoing a reclaiming of the word that has already been taking place in pop culture.
Megan Garber writes in ‘Nasty’: A Feminist History
(photo credit: Francois Nel / Getty)
Robinson Meyer offers a new way of understanding Trump in his essay Donald Trump Is the First Demagogue of the Anthropocene:
He not only represents a white racial backlash, and he has not only opened the way for an American extension of the European far right. Insofar as his supporters are drawn to him by a sense of global calamity, and insofar as his rhetoric singles out the refugee as yet another black and brown intruder trying to violate the nation’s cherished borders, Trump is the first demagogue of the Anthropocene.
(illustration: Scott Olson / Getty / Iakov Filimonov / Mavrick / Shutterstock / Katie Martin / The Atlantic)
In this photo project, Mark Bennington explores Bollywood from a different vantage point: What did the Indian acting community look like off the screen? View the excerpts from his new book, Living the Dream: The Life of the ‘Bollywood’ Actor, in this photo essay, Behind-the-Scenes Bollywood.
Throwback Thursday:
Men today are free, as in the Illinois case, to take advantage of strangers they accost in isolated settings. Lawyers in most states can exact sexual cooperation from clients who depend on them for essential help in divorce, child-custody, and criminal cases. A man in a bar or a fraternity house can get a woman drunk, undress her, and penetrate her before she can resist. In cases like these men continue to escape conviction by claiming that they never threatened physical violence and that the woman failed to make her unwillingness clear. Only when our laws and culture acknowledge the importance of affirmative, uncoerced permission will we afford women and men the right to control the boundaries of their own sexual lives. Until then sexual autonomy will remain the missing, unprotected entitlement.
–– Stephen Schulhofer, “Unwanted Sex” from the October 1998 issue, illustrations by Ivan Chermayeff
Can researchers harness the power of protective bacteria in the vagina to guard against a common infection? Read Kendall Power’s story The Superhero in the Vagina to find out.
(illustration: Laura Breiling / Mosaic)
In Looking for North Korea, photographer Fabian Muir tried to show as much of North Korean life as he could, balancing images heavy with statues, monuments, and mass performances in Pyongyang with more intimate shots of farmers and children in outlying villages.
View the entire photo story here in Looking for North Korea.
Today The Atlantic’s editors made history by choosing to endorse Hillary Clinton for president. Since the magazine’s founding in 1857, the only other candidates to receive an official endorsement were Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 and Abraham Lincoln in 1860. Here’s an excerpt from the editors’ note Against Donald Trump:
Donald Trump, on the other hand, has no record of public service and no qualifications for public office. His affect is that of an infomercial huckster; he traffics in conspiracy theories and racist invective; he is appallingly sexist; he is erratic, secretive, and xenophobic …
Read the entire note here.
SPOTLIGHT: Mustafah Abdulaziz has spent the last five years examining humanity’s relationship to one of the most basic and precious natural resources: water. Traveling to nine countries, Abdulaziz photographed the polluted rivers of Brazil, the fisheries of China, and the elaborate sewers of New York City for his essay “Water Stories.”
See more of Abdulaziz’s photographs in this week’s Spotlight series, titled All Is Water: The Global Crisis in Photographs.
“Rather than sticking with turgid socialist clichés, in 1958 East German...
Listen to MIke D yell at an ill-informed radio producer because sometimes it’s really fun to be wrong: http://bit.ly/UralXA
–Sean, Sideshow
From Cats Dressed as People, 100 Years Ago, one of 15 photos. The Aviator. (Harry Whittier Frees/Library of Congress)
Memento Mori by Henrik Hondius (1626)
Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey - Part 1
Some claim that evolution is just a theory, as if it were merely an opinion.
MESSRS. MOONY, WORMTAIL, PADFOOT AND PRONGS…