The Atlantic

“The year since Hamas’s brutal massacre and the carnage wrought by Israel’s response has reduced the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to its most elemental feature: a demand for recognition,” Gal Beckerman writes. “What has been revealed in the aftermath is the desperation of this need … There were pleas to be seen and then the purposeful, often malicious refusals to see. And I found this interplay—the desire and the withholding—to be one of the most devastating aspects of this awful year.” https://lnkd.in/ehX8Nbpw Beckerman considers books written about the October 7 massacre and Israel’s retaliation. “One Day in October,” by Yair Agmon and Oriya Mevorach, gathers 40 stories, told from the perspective of survivors of the attacks. “The narratives all seem to follow a three-act structure,” Beckerman writes. “We meet someone who is wonderfully idiosyncratic; we follow them through the horrors of that day; we learn something of their bravery and decency.” In “Recognizing the Stranger,” Isabella Hammad considers “what it has meant for the Palestinian people to be endlessly seeking this acknowledgment of their humanity.” “Forest of Noise,” the new book by the Gazan poet Mosab Abu Toha, collects his recent writing, the best of which “describes the everyday experience of a waking nightmare” among Gazans. “It is hard to ever imagine an end to the suffering competition; both groups are too locked into the idea that the recognition they each seek is a scarce commodity, that if one side claims it, the other side loses. But they’re wrong,” Beckerman continues. “And this heartbreaking mistake, more than anything else, is what stands in the way of their suffering’s end.” 🎨: Mark Harris. Sources: Mahmud Hams / Getty; Anadolu / Getty; Alexi J. Rosenfeld / Getty; Dan Kitwood / Getty.

In The Atlantic Memo, we catch you up on the best Atlantic stories about work, business, productivity, creativity, and more. This week: Is reading a relic?

In recent years, rainfall flooding has overtaken storm surge as the leading cause of death in tropical cyclones—and climate change is poised to make the rain worse, Marina Koren reports:

Would you go to therapy with your sibling? It’s not a common practice—but maybe it should be, Faith Hill writes:

“We heard shouting in Arabic outside our house—a commander telling one of his men to try to break in. We had woken up to a nightmare: The border had been breached. Hamas was here,” Amir Tibon writes:

Ever feel like your life is determined by powerful forces beyond your reach? HBO has a show for that.

Sometimes workplace culture requires you to leave the rest of your life at the door. What if there are better ways to structure time? In this episode of “How to Keep Time,” hosts Becca Rashid and Ian Bogost explore why so many of us prioritize work over everything else, and what we can learn from the happiest countries in the world. ⁠ ⁠ While working less may seem like the obvious solution, that’s unrealistic for many people—and it may not be the true root of the problem anyway, they say. The average hours worked in three of the world’s happiest countries—Finland, Denmark, and Iceland—isn’t far off from the average American work week. This fact “suggests that we don’t require a whole lot of additional time, necessarily, but figuring out a different way of conceptualizing that time,” Bogost says. What if cultural and social practices around time at work are a barrier to using our time in a cohesive way?⁠ ⁠ A useful frame of reference can be seen in Mexico, where there is a culture that values hard work yet places less of an emphasis on defining oneself by that work, says Ignacio Sánchez Prado, a professor of Latin American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis: “People see their job as a means to an end, and the end is their family life, their social life, their leisure, their hobbies. I think the difference is not the hard working, but also the understanding that putting limits to your work is a right. And if you don’t, you’re just giving up your rights.”⁠ ⁠ Listen to the full episode: https://lnkd.in/eVtGfuZN

Ellen DeGeneres’s final Netflix special has some amusingly frank moments, but when it comes to owning her mistakes, she struggles to find the humor, writes Fran Hoepfner:

In Texas and other Republican-led states, new laws and policies have encouraged neighbors to report neighbors to the government, Adam Serwer writes. https://lnkd.in/egR3S6Gf Texas’s abortion “bounty law” rewards individuals who successfully sue someone who “aids or abets” abortion. In 2022, Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered the state’s Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate the parents of minors who were receiving gender-affirming medical care; the order encouraged the public to report families of trans children to the government. And Texas conservatives have undertaken an unprecedented campaign of censorship in schools and libraries against books and ideas involving LGBTQ and racial issues—a campaign whose enforcement is largely enabled by tattling. For the time being, women “can still travel elsewhere—if they can afford it—to legally receive the [abortion] care they need. Similarly, families with trans children can move out of state, and library patrons can go to court when books are removed from the shelves,” Serwer writes. (In response to a lawsuit, a judge blocked enforcement of Abbott’s DFPS order in 2022, and two years later, a state appeals court upheld the injunction.) “But for how long? In September, Texas sued to overturn federal privacy regulations that prevent investigators from seizing the medical records of women who leave the state to get an abortion.” Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a second Trump administration, “outlines a plan for forcing states to report abortion and miscarriage data to the federal government … Presumably, executing these plans would depend on a steady supply of willing informants,” Serwer writes. And in his foreword to Project 2025’s 900-page Mandate for Leadership, the president of the Heritage Foundation describes gender-affirming care as “child abuse,” and echoes the language used to ban “critical race theory” in places such as Texas. “These policies have chilling effects whether or not they are strictly enforced,” Serwer continues. “The mere threat of having one’s privacy invaded and one’s life potentially destroyed is sufficient to shape people’s speech and behavior.” Read more here: https://lnkd.in/egR3S6Gf

Vegetables have never been so cheap, tasty, or accessible. Enough with powdered greens, writes, Yasmin Tayag.