The Washington Free Beacon published a report that detailed a syllabus and required reading for the school’s "Structural Racism and Health Equity" class.

Parents of Columbia University and Barnard students spoke out on the threat facing their children as anti-Israel protests continued.

Just a few months ago, America seemed to have licked the post-pandemic inflation surge for good. Then, in January, prices rose faster than expected. Probably just a blip. The same thing happened in February. Strange, but likely not a big deal. Then March’s inflation report came in hot as well. Okay—is it time to panic?The short answer is no. Core inflation (the metric that policy makers pay close attention to because it excludes volatile prices such as food and energy) is stuck at about 4 percent, double the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target. But that’s a long way from the crisis of 2022, when core inflation peaked at nearly 7 percent and the price of almost everything was going up dangerously fast. Instead, we seem to be facing a last-mile problem: Inflation has mostly normalized, but wringing out the final few percentage points in a handful of categories is proving harder than expected. There are two conflicting views of what exactly is going on, each with drastically different implications for how the Federal Reserve should respond. One camp worries that the Fed could lose control of inflation all over again; the other fears that the central bank will—whoops— unnecessarily bring the U.S. economy to its knees.The “vanishing inflation” view is that today’s still-rising prices reflect a combination of statistical quirks and pandemic ripple effects that will almost surely resolve on their own. This camp points out that basically all of the current excess inflation stems from auto insurance and housing. The auto-insurance story is straightforward: Car prices spiked in 2021 and 2022, and when cars get more expensive, so does insuring them. Car inflation yesterday leads to car-insurance inflation today. That’s frustrating for drivers right now, but it carries a silver lining. Given that car inflation has fallen dramatically over the past year, it should be only a matter of time before insurance prices stabilize as well.[Annie Lowrey: Inflation is your fault]Housing, which made up a full two-thirds of excess inflation in March, is a bit more complicated. You might think that housing inflation would be calculated simply by looking at the prices of new homes or apartments. But for the majority of Americans who already own their home, it is calculated using a measure known as “owners’ equivalent rent.” Government statisticians try to determine how much money homeowners would reasonably charge for rent by looking at what people in similar homes are paying. This way of calculating housing prices has all kinds of flaws. One issue is that inflation data are calculated monthly, but most renters have one- or two-year leases, which means the official numbers usually lag the real housing market by a year or more. The housing market has cooled off considerably in the past year and a half, but the inflation data are still reflecting the much-hotter market of early 2023 or late 2022. Sooner or later, they too should fall. “The excess inflation we have left is in a few esoteric areas that reflect past price increases,” Ernie Tedeschi, the director of economics at Yale’s Budget Lab, told me. “I’m not too worried about inflation taking off again.”The “hot wages” camp tells a very different story. Its members note that even as price increases appeared to be settling back down at the beginning of 2024, wages were still growing much faster than they did before the pandemic. When wages are rising quickly, many employers, especially those in labor-intensive service industries, raise prices to cover higher salary costs. That may show up in the data in different ways—maybe it’s groceries one month, maybe airfares or vehicle-repair costs another month—but the point is that as long as wages are hot, prices will be as well. “The increase in inflation over the last three months is higher than anything we saw from 1992 to 2019,” Jason Furman, the former director of Barack Obama’s Council of Economic advisers, told me. “It’s hard to say that’s just some fluke in the data.”Adherents of the “vanishing inflation” idea don’t deny the importance of wages in driving up prices; instead, they point to alternative measures that show wage growth closer to pre-pandemic levels. They also emphasize the fact that corporate profits are higher today than they were in 2019, implying that wages have more room to grow without necessarily pushing up prices.Although this dispute may sound technical, it will inform one of the most pivotal decisions the Federal Reserve has made in decades. Last year, the central bank raised interest rates to their highest levels since 2001, where they have remained even as inflation has fallen dramatically. Raising interest rates makes money more expensive for businesses and consumers to borrow and, thus, to spend, which is thought to reduce inflation but can also raise unemployment. This leaves the Fed with a tough choice to make: Should it keep rates high and risk suffocating the best labor market in decades, or begin cutting rates and risk inflation taking off again?If you believe that inflation is above all the product of strong wage growth, then cutting interest rates prematurely could cause prices to rise even more. This is the view the Fed appears to hold. “Right now, given the strength of the labor market and progress on inflation so far, it’s appropriate to allow restrictive policy further time to work,” Fed Chair Jerome Powell said in a Q&A session following the release of March’s inflation data. Translation: The economy is still too hot, and we aren’t cutting interest rates any time soon.[Michael Powell: What the upper-middle class left doesn’t get about inflation]If, however, you believe that the last mile of inflation is a product of statistical lags, keeping interest rates high makes little sense. In fact, high interest rates may paradoxically be pushing inflation higher than it otherwise would be. Many homeowners, for instance, have responded to spiking interest rates by staying put to preserve the cheap mortgages they secured when rates were lower (why give up a 3 percent mortgage rate for a 7 percent one?). This “lock-in effect” has restricted the supply of available homes, which drives up the prices.High rates may also be partly responsible for auto-insurance costs. Insurance companies often invest their customers’ premium payments in safe assets, such as government bonds. When interest rates rose, however, the value of government bonds fell dramatically, leaving insurers with huge losses on their balance sheets. As The New York Times’s Talmon Joseph Smith reports, one reason auto-insurance companies have raised their premiums is to help cover those losses. In other words, in the two categories where inflation has been the most persistent, interest rates may be propping up the exact high prices that they are supposed to be lowering.The Fed’s “wait and see” approach comes with other risks as well. Already, high rates have jacked up the costs of major life purchases, made a dysfunctional housing market even more so, and triggered a banking crisis. They haven’t made a dent in America’s booming labor market—yet. But the longer rates stay high, the greater the chance that the economy begins to buckle under the pressure. Granted, Powell has stated that if unemployment began to rise, the Fed would be willing to cut rates. But lower borrowing costs won’t translate into higher spending overnight. It could take months, even years, for them to have their full effect. A lot of people could lose their jobs in the meantime.Given where inflation seemed to be headed at the beginning of this year, the fact that the Federal Reserve finds itself in this position at all is frustrating. But given where prices were 18 months ago, it is something of a miracle. Back then, the Fed believed it would be forced to choose between a 1970s-style inflation crisis or a painful recession; today it is deciding between slightly higher-than-typical inflation or a somewhat-less-stellar economy. That doesn’t make the central bank’s decision any easier, but it should perhaps make the rest of us a bit less stressed about it.

How do you get the albatross off your neck? You know, your albatross. Your own dank collar of bird carcass, bespoke feathery deadweight of shame/rage/neurosis/solipsism/the past/whatever, the price of being you as it feels on a bad day … How do you let it drop?In Taylor Swift’s “The Albatross”—a bonus track on her new double album, The Tortured Poets Department—the albatross is a person. A woman, to be precise. “She’s the albatross / She is here to destroy you.” Which could be a trope from some slab of 1970s misogynist boogie, Bad Company or Nazareth howling about a faithless woman and her evil ways, etc., etc., but—because this is Taylor Swift—it isn’t.Let me quickly locate myself in the Taylorverse. I’m a “Bad Blood”/“We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” guy. I like the bangers, the big tunes. Midnights was not my cup of tea: overdetermined as to lyrics (too many words), underpowered as to melodies (not enough tunes). For me, it was as if she’d taken the DNA of a maundering, heavy-breathing, medium-Swift song like Reputation’s “Dress” and unraveled it over a whole album, abetted by the soupy skills of Jack Antonoff. But what do I know? Midnights was one of the biggest albums of all time. And now, less than two years later: The Tortured Poets Department. And: “The Albatross.”[Read: Taylor Swift is having quality-control issues]Sonically, musically, we’re in Folklore territory with this song: the strings; the wending, woodwindy vocal line; the tender electronica; the muted mood; the pewter wash of tastefulness. Chamber music, if the chamber in question has been decorated by Bed Bath & Beyond. Is there a tune? I mean, kind of. Not one you’re going to be bellowing in a toneless rapture at the wheel of your car, but it’s there.Lyrically, however, things are more lively. There’s this woman, the albatross: a bad habit, a bad relationship, a self-ensnaring situation, a bundle of familiar negatives (“Devils that you know / Raise worse hell than a stranger”). People have warned you about this person. She’s bad news! And Swift, ever-alert to the opprobrium of the herd, cannot help identifying with her. The voice shifts to the first person: “Locked me up in towers / But I’d visit in your dreams.” Reputation-style vibes of slander and persecution are felt: “Wise men once read fake news / And they believed it / Jackals raised their hackles …” As always, the Swifties are speculating: Who’s this song for? Who is it about? Joe Alwyn? Travis Kelce—and the warnings he got when he started dating Swift? Is she his own stubborn albatross?By the end of the song, the singer herself has assumed the form of the albatross, and is flapping in to perform a “rescue.” “The devil that you know / Looks now more like an angel.” Embrace your shadow? Embrace your albatross? Embrace your partner with your own long-feathered and doom-laden albatross wings?This is not how it usually goes with albatrosses.[Read: Travis Kelce is another puzzle for Taylor Swift fans to crack]Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is the source, the fons et origo, of the albatross metaphor. In the Rime, a sailor shoots an albatross, and brings a curse upon his ship. Why does he shoot the albatross? No reason, or none given in the poem. Maybe it’s the old existentialist acte gratuit, more than a century early: Maybe he does it because the sun is in his eyes, like Meursault in Camus’s L’Étranger. He shoots it, anyway, prangs it with his crossbow, and the wind drops, and the ship slides into a hell-sea, and the dead bird, as punishment and emblem of shame, is hung around his neck.Back, then, to our question: How do you get rid of the albatross?Coleridge, fortunately for us, was very clear on this: You bless the water snakes. It’s all in Part IV of the Rime. The ship is becalmed, the sea is rancid, the crew are dead, and the Mariner—albatross slung Björk-ishly around his neck—is sitting on the deck in a state of nightmare. Meaning, purpose, a following wind: all gone. Perished with his shipmates. Now he’s in a scummy realm, a realm of mere biological outlasting. “And a thousand thousand slimy things / Lived on; and so did I …”But. However. And yet. With nothing else to do, with no phone to look at, he watches the slimy things as they writhe and flare in the water, super-white in the moonlight, darker and more luxuriously hued when in the shadow cast by the ship itself. And something happens. His heart opens. Or perhaps it breaks. He is mutely, selflessly stirred and awakened. With his core, from his core, he spontaneously exalts what is before him: He blesses the water snakes.And with a complicated downy loosening, and maybe a glancing clang from its beak, the albatross—fatal baggage of a bird—falls off into the sea.Taylor Swift is not the first musician to engage with albatrossness. There’s Fleetwood Mac’s beautiful instrumental “Albatross” from 1968—slow celestial wingbeats, bluesy exhalations over a dazzling sea. There’s Public Image Ltd’s trudging, splintering “Albatross” from 1979, interpersonal, more in the Swift vein: “I know you very well / You are unbearable.” Corrosion of Conformity’s “Albatross” is a kind of sludge-rocking, negatively charged “Free Bird”: “You can call me lazy / You can call me wrong … Albatross, fly on, fly on.”But for the full Coleridgean thing, the full voyage, nothing beats Iron Maiden’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” The live version, preferably. This is a straight-up workingman’s adaptation of the poem, 14 minutes of galumphing rock opera, Coleridge’s words doggedly paraphrased by Maiden bassist–vision guy Steve Harris, and it succeeds spectacularly. Especially at the water-snakes moment, which the band orchestrates to perfection: a flicked and rushing pattern on the hi-hat, a trebly-warbly melodic figure on the bass, palm-muted chug-a-chug of one, then two (then three?) guitars, the tension blissfully building until Bruce Dickinson, with soaring all-gobbling theatricality, sings it out. “Then the spell starts to BREAK / The albatross falls from his NECK / Sinks down like LEAD / Into the SEA / Then down in falls comes the” [King Diamond–style infernal androgynous scream] “RAAAAAAIIN!!”So what are the water snakes? Coleridge’s Rime is not, for me, an allegory, so the water snakes are not representing or symbolizing something. They are something. A coiling and uncoiling beautiful-terrible, playful-awful force that breaks the surface in snaky loops and flashes. Wonderfully indifferent to us, horrifyingly indifferent to us. But mysteriously in relationship with us, because it is in our eyes that these water snakes, these incandescent reptiles, these limbless creatures of the deep, are made holy. We are the ones who can bless them.And you can’t decide to bless the water snakes, that’s the point. It’s not about gratitude. It’s not about improving your mental health. No squint of effort, no knotting or unknotting of the frontal lobes will get you there. The blessing arises by itself, or it doesn’t arise at all. Total brain bypass: a love so simple and helpless it barely even knows what it’s loving.[Read: James Parker on the Rick Rubin guide to creativity]So it becomes a question of orienting oneself to the possibility of this love. How to do it? I’m out of my depth here—which is just as it should be, for here we are in the zone of the mystics and the mega-meditators. We are full fathom five, where your feet don’t touch anything, because there’s nothing to touch. If you’re the Ancient Mariner—or perhaps if you’re addicted to opiates, as Coleridge was—you’ll have to go through it, all of it. You’ll have to be carried to the end of yourself. The blessing of the water snakes happens at the Mariner’s clinical bottoming-out: when he’s utterly isolated, on a suppurating sea, besieged by the forces of death.The rest of us, maybe we don’t have to go—or be taken—that far. Maybe there are other, less drastic, more everyday opportunities and invitations for us to be broken down and opened up. For our grip on the albatross to be unclenched. For the love to pour through us like Iron Maiden. For the albatross itself to wrap its angelic Taylor Swift wings around your inner Travis Kelce.One way or another, though, sooner or later, gently or with loud sunderings and burstings, it’s going to happen. Life, thank God—it’ll get you and get you again.This article has been adapted from James Parker’s upcoming book, Get Me Through the Next Five Minutes: Odes to Being Alive.

Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.The United States has long had a great deal of religious diversity, and was built on the idea of religious tolerance. But one type of belief was always rare: none. Until recently, that is. According to the Pew Research Center, the percentage of Americans who profess no religion (as opposed even to having one that they rarely or never practice) has risen from 16 percent in 2007 to 29 percent in 2021. (Back in the early 1970s, only about 5 percent of Americans espoused this position.)This phenomenon of declining belief is of great concern to many religious leaders, as one can easily imagine. The Catholic theologian and bishop Robert Barron has built an enormous internet-based ministry in no small part by seeking to reach these so-called nones. Rather than simply railing against a secular culture, Barron turns the criticism around and calls the growth of this disavowal “an unnerving commentary on the effectiveness of our evangelical strategies.”The growing phenomenon of the nones, however, is not evidence of a lack of interest in spiritual life. Many today who previously fell away from their faith—or never had one to begin with—are seeking something faith-like in their life. They are open to thinking about such commitments, but just don’t know what to look for. Maybe this describes you. If so, ironically, the research data on why people say they became nones in the first place might hold the answer of what to focus on to set you on your spiritual path.In tracking the rise of the nones in American religious life, Pew has also studied people who had faith in childhood but left it in adulthood. In 87 percent of the cases, this came down to one of three reasons: They stopped believing (49 percent), they felt too uncertain (18 percent), or they didn’t like the way the faith was practiced (20 percent). More concisely, most people leave their faith because of belief, feeling, or practice.[Derek Thompson: The true cost of the churchgoing bust]These are the reasons people quit religion, but we can also infer that these same three aspects of religious experience are central to maintaining faith—or to finding it anew and then keeping it. You might say that belief, feeling, and practice are the macronutrients—the necessary elements—of healthy faith. With only one of them, you will be spiritually malnourished: Belief alone is desiccated theory; by itself, feeling is unreliable sentimentality; practice in isolation is dogmatism. To build a new, sustaining spiritual diet, you need to focus on all three.Many great thinkers have made essentially this point. For example, the ardently religious Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy wrote in his book of daily pensées, A Calendar of Wisdom, that in times of trouble, “you have to embrace what the wisdom of humanity, your intellect, and your heart tell you: that the meaning of life is to serve the force that sent you into the world.”Feeling is fundamental to religious experience, as scholarship on emotion has shown. Some religions elevate trancelike states of ecstasy, such as samadhi in both Hinduism and Buddhism, which involves complete meditative absorption. Most faiths emphasize the role of the emotional adoration of the divine, as in the Prophet Muhammad’s teaching that believers should “love Allah with all of your hearts.” One cannot rely on feeling alone, however, because it is so mutable. As the 16th-century founder of the Jesuit Order, Saint Ignatius of Loyola, noted, faith features feelings of not only consolation but also desolation, at moments when God feels absent from one’s life.The second element of faith is belief, which are tenets you have accepted as truths, at least provisionally. These truths are not testable as scientific propositions are, so, in Thomas Aquinas’s definition, they are the “mean between science and opinion.” These are the propositions that you learn from reading and listening to other believers, and that you ultimately choose to accept; examples would be God’s laws for the Jewish people or the Eightfold Path to enlightenment for Buddhists.Accepting such beliefs as truth does not mean they’re impossible to revise. In fact, research has shown that spiritual people are generally open to reflection on existential questions and willing to modify their views. But these tenets of faith are based on considered arguments, rather than feelings, so they tend to be stable and enduring.[Peter Wehner: David Brooks’s journey toward faith]Finally, religious practice offers a set of actions and rituals that you commit to observing in order to demonstrate your adherence to the faith for yourself and others. This is the element of faith that takes it out of the realm of abstraction and makes it part of your real, physical life. You can say you believe in the ideas of Zen, but Zen itself will not become a meaningful part of your life until you practice Zen meditation. Similarly, you can say you believe in the divine inspiration of the Quran, but that doesn’t mean much if you don’t actually read it.You might assume that any practice requires both belief and feeling—entailing that, for example, you would feel impelled to go to a political demonstration only if you already believed in the cause. But you may have noticed the opposite occurring in your life: If you go to a demonstration uncommitted, you may find that the experience stimulates feelings and belief, which might then lead you to go to future demonstrations.This is a basic form of what academics call “path dependence,” a phenomenon in which past decisions lead to similar actions in future. The concept is usually used by economists and political scientists to explain institutional inertia or resistance to organizational change, but the same principle can suggestively be applied to individual human behavior. Such path dependence can be affected by both positive and negative feedback, the sense either that people’s choices elicit increasing returns or that they are self-reinforcing or “locked in.”That feedback loop can be a problem if your religious practice makes you become rigid in your ideology; economists, for example, have modeled that voter path dependence might be one of the causes of our increasing polarization. As it pertains to faith, the trick, then, is to be wary of your path dependence if it results in negative feedback: If you feel or behave like a “locked-in” party-line voter, you might be too rigid in your belief. Yet if you use path dependence on your faith exclusively for positive feedback—that is, your belief elicits increasing returns, perhaps boosting your altruism, community ties, or sense of meaning in life—then you will be using it as a force for good.Put simply, be completely honest with yourself about why you’re practicing your faith; if your belief spurs positive feedback, carry on.[Faith Hill: The messy line between faith and reason]A healthy faith thus requires all three sources of spiritual nourishment. The data suggest that when one or more of those elements—of belief, feeling, and practice—are missing, people fall away. So if you’re looking for faith in your life, you need to seek all three.Here is an optimal way to do so. In Tolstoy’s Calendar of Wisdom, he quotes an ancient Chinese proverb: “Those who know the rules of true wisdom are baser than those who love them. Those who love them are baser than those who follow them.” In other words, to develop a healthy faith, practice is more important than feeling, and feeling is more important than belief. This implies the reverse of what most people do to develop a spiritual life: They read and think to acquire knowledge and opinions—that is, beliefs—then they see if they “feel” their faith, and only then will they move on to practicing it. But as the proverb implies, this order of priorities won’t work very well.The right approach is to start practicing, notwithstanding your current state of belief and feeling. If the practice evokes sentiment in you, then study the faith to develop knowledge and opinions. This is an experimental, hands-on approach, much in the manner of how many inventions and innovations come about: An inventor tries something, sees whether it works, and then figures out precisely what’s going on.In a faith context, this means that you might go to a service of worship a few times. Then you could interrogate your feelings as to whether the services stimulated something deep within (or, alternatively, whether they left you cold). Finally, if the former feels true, you could start investigating the belief system intellectually.[Arthur C. Brooks: Jung’s five pillars of a good life]The three elements of faith can be useful to apply to many parts of life, not just your spiritual quest. Consider marriage, for instance: Without the feelings of love and affection, a relationship is dead; without knowledge and opinions about your spouse, it has no depth; without practicing the rituals of love, your partnership will wither. This same algorithmic progression of faith can also map out your path to marriage. You start out with practice in the form of a date; you continue the relationship if you feel attraction and the beginnings of love; the pairing develops as you gain knowledge and form favorable opinions about your partner.Obviously, this connubial example is not a random one. To find faith is to find a form of love—a love of the divine, or a rapturous spiritual connection with the universe. But like all good and worthwhile things in life, faith and love merit deep thought and serious effort.

Charlie Woods, the 15-year-old son of Tiger, will be playing in a U.S. Open qualifier on Thursday morning, aiming to play at Pinehurst No. 2 in June.

In the face of continued aggression from China, Taiwan president-elect Lai Ching-te appointed new foreign and defense ministers. China sees Taiwan as its sovereign territory.

A former minor league umpire is suing Major League Baseball, claiming a female colleague harassed him and claiming he was fired for being bisexual.

Before Wednesday night, the last homicide in D.C. occurred April 14.

More than 100 long-finned pilot whales that beached on the western Australian coast have returned to sea while 31 died on the shore, according to a researcher.

Hannah McNair, the wife of Houston Texans owner Cal McNair and vice president of the Texans Foundation, added more fuel to the rivalry with the Tennessee Titans.

Photo credit should read Umer Qadir/ Eyepix Group/Future Publishing via Getty Images It is almost hard to believe just how effective vaccines are at saving infants’ lives. The world has become a much safer place to be a young child in the last 50 years. Since 1974, infant mortality worldwide has plummeted. That year, one in 10 newborns died before reaching their first birthday. By 2021, that rate had fallen by over two-thirds. A lot of factors drove this change: lower poverty and better nutrition, cleaner air and water, and readily available antibiotics and other treatments. But one of the biggest contributors, a new study from the World Health Organization (WHO) concludes, was vaccines. Vaccines alone, the researchers find, accounted for 40 percent of the decline in infant mortality. The paper — authored by a team of researchers led by WHO epidemiologist and vaccine expert Naor Bar-Zeev — estimates that in the 50 years since 1974, vaccines prevented 154 million deaths. !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var e in a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var t=document.getElementById("datawrapper-chart-"+e)||document.querySelector("iframe[src*='"+e+"']");t&&(t.style.height=a.data["datawrapper-height"][e]+"px")}});window.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded',function(){var i=document.createElement("iframe");var e=document.getElementById("datawrapper-c6v50");var t=e.dataset.iframeTitle||'Interactive graphic';i.setAttribute("src",e.dataset.iframe);i.setAttribute("title",t);i.setAttribute("frameborder","0");i.setAttribute("scrolling","no");i.setAttribute("aria-label",e.dataset.iframeFallbackAlt||t);i.setAttribute("title",t);i.setAttribute("height","400");i.setAttribute("id","datawrapper-chart-c6v50");i.style.minWidth="100%";i.style.border="none";e.appendChild(i)})}() Of that 154 million, 146 million lives saved were among children under 5, including 101 million infants. Because the averted deaths were so concentrated among young people, who on average would go on to live for 66 years, vaccines gave their beneficiaries an astounding 9 billion additional years of life. The paper was commissioned on the 50th anniversary of the WHO’s Expanded Programme on Immunization, which launched in 1974 to build on the success of the agency’s work eradicating smallpox. It covers a critical period of time. The previous decades had seen a spree of important, newly developed vaccines: a joint diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus vaccine in 1948, a polio vaccine in 1955, a measles vaccine in 1963. While rolled out quickly in wealthy countries, these immunizations were, as of 1974, not broadly available in the Global South, even as the diseases they prevented wreaked massive damage. Over the ensuing half-century, through vaccination campaigns led by the WHO and later Gavi (a multilateral group formerly called the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization), that changed radically. In sub-Saharan Africa in 2021, 68 percent of 1-year-olds received a first dose of the measles vaccine, 78 percent received the tuberculosis vaccine, and 70–71 percent received the vaccines against hepatitis B, polio, and diphtheria/tetanus/pertussis. This progress yielded massive gains. The measles vaccine, in particular, deserves pride of place in this story. The researchers conclude that it averted 93.7 million deaths from 1974 onward, accounting for the most deaths averted by vaccines in general. In terms of lives saved, the runners-up — tetanus (28 million saved), pertussis (13.2 million), and tuberculosis (10.9 million) — pale in comparison. Stamping out measles through vaccination enabled it to go from an omnipresent, fast-spreading lethal threat to a relic of the past — though anti-vaccine activists threaten to undo some of that progress. The data is a reminder that vaccines have historically been one of our best tools for saving lives and that redoubling efforts to discover and distribute new ones for diseases like malaria and tuberculosis could have a similarly transformative effect. How the researchers tracked the benefit of vaccines Studying the effect of vaccines across all continents, and across a 50-year time frame, is a daunting project. It’s not for nothing that this paper has 21 authors. (And let’s give them the credit they’re due. They are: Andrew Shattock, Helen Johnson, So Yoon Sim, Austin Carter, Philipp Lambach, Raymond Hutubessy, Kimberly Thompson, Kamran Badizadegan, Brian Lambert, Matthew Ferrari, Mark Jit, Han Fu, Sheetal Silal, Rachel Hounsell, Richard White, Jonathan Mosser, Katy Gaythorpe, Caroline Trotter, Ann Lindstrand, Katherine O’Brien, and Naor Bar-Zeev.) The paper is essentially combining three separate kinds of data and research results: Actual infant, child, and overall mortality across countries from 1974 to 2024, based on the UN World Population Projections dataset through 2021 as well as its projections for mortality in 2022–2024. Vaccine coverage by country and year, using both WHO databases and those from the Vaccine Impact Modelling Consortium. Empirically verified models of how measles, polio, hepatitis B, and several other diseases spread in the absence of vaccines, as well as estimates from the Global Burden of Disease study of the effect of vaccination on diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, and tuberculosis. Put simply: They used what we know about how many people got vaccinated in the last five decades and how well vaccines work to construct a version of history where all that vaccination didn’t occur, and adjusted actual death rates and health statistics accordingly. This necessarily involves filling in some gaps in the data. They note that in many countries, our data on vaccine coverage starts in 1980, not 1974; in these places, they argue that vaccine coverage was so meager that assuming no coverage in 1974 and a steady increase thereafter is appropriate. They also conduct sensitivity analyses showing that other ways of handling this problem produce similar headline results. The years of health life data allows another vantage point on gains from vaccination. Some diseases, like polio, are less lethal than the likes of measles but can cause lifelong negative health impacts, up to and including muscle paralysis. (For instance, while many doctors no longer think Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s paralysis was due to polio, it easily could have been.) Any way you slice the data, vaccines saved a ton of lives and prevented a ton of suffering. The past few years have been wonderful for vaccination, mostly due to the tremendously positive impact of the rapidly developed Covid-19 vaccines, but also somewhat perilous. In the US, the share of adults saying all children should be vaccinated against measles, mumps, and rubella has fallen, specifically among Republicans, a likely aftershock of how polarized the Covid vaccine issue has gotten. In that context, it’s important to remember just how much immunization has given us. In a half-century, it’s given people 9 billion additional years to live their lives. That’s nothing short of miraculous.

"Prebunking" is Google's latest effort to combat misinformation ahead of the E.U. elections.

The University of Southern California requested for Los Angeles police to arrest agitators in a large anti-Israel protest on campus for trespassing after they refused to leave the area.

My dad had epilepsy. To keep from having his driver's license permanently revoked, he never told his doctor just how often he had seizures.

Supreme Court may not rule for Trump, but it could give him a win by putting off his trial until after the election.

The Bears have tried and failed to secure a franchise quarterback for years, and Chicago wonders whether Caleb Williams or J.J. McCarthy is the right choice.

Caleb Williams' unique style and emotional responses have spurred misconceptions. His top moments at USC reveal a clearer picture of the quarterback.

Take advantage of the public courses L.A. has to offer with a guide that considers conditions, location, price, accessibility, staff, services, difficulty and — most important — vibes.

Vector control officials in Southern California are starting to release sterilized male mosquitoes to combat the summertime onslaught of ankle biters.

This monthly outing satisfies an appetite for stepping out on the town while addressing the lack of comfortable social spaces for queer people of color in West Hollywood

Hulu's "Thank You, Goodnight" charts the good and the bad of Bon Jovi's 40-year career. The band's frontman says, "I have nothing to hide."

President Biden appeared to read the direction to “pause" after spurring a chant for “four more years" at his latest campaign event in D.C. on Wednesday.

Security glass once locked up electronics, Sudafed and a few other items. But stores have gotten more aggressive in efforts to confront retail theft.

Convenient and uncomplicated, this neighborhood tugs at your heart with its Main Street, Anytown, USA, feel.

Three teenagers, who have since been arrested by Glendora Police Department, are accused of vandalizing more than a dozen cars used by Pink Sponge Home Cleaning

For first time in 25 years, San Diego is the top spot in the nation for migrant border crossings, surpassing Tucson.

The Serra High School space team's second out-of-earth experiment was launched aboard the SpaceX Falcon 9 CRS-30 Rocket from Florida's Kennedy Space Center on March 21 and docked with the International Space Station two days later.

Suddenly, Democrats and (some) Republicans in the House have joined in unorthodox bipartisanship to get government functioning again.

A pipeline that starts with residential burglaries is transferring Birkins and other high-end handbags from the closets of the super-wealthy to those of the merely well-off.

Athletes and entertainers lose money because they're inattentive, make risky investments and overspend on loved ones and expensive toys, financial experts say.

Forget the 'split court' garbage. This Supreme Court is not going to protect even emergency abortions. Here's what you need to know.

On the occasion of her receiving AFI's Lifetime Achievement Award, the actor goes deep on the filming of one of her pivotal and signature roles.

Zendaya and her longtime stylist Law Roach have leaned into 'method dressing' with chic tennis-inspired looks for the actor's new film, 'Challengers.'

After California's governor and others called for the Supreme Court to take up the issue of homelessness, some now fear the outcome could amplify the proliferation of encampments in L.A. and other major cities.

Getty Images Seasonal allergies making you miserable? Here’s what you need to know. It’s a sneezy, snotty, itchy-eyed time for many Americans — perhaps more so than ever before. Seasonal allergies are the effects of the immune system’s overreaction to pollen spewed into the air by trees, grasses, and ragweed, most commonly in the spring (although really, year-round). Climate change is making allergy season worse: As warm seasons get warmer and last longer, more plants release more pollen for longer periods. Although the risk of developing allergies is hereditary, experts suspect higher pollen levels are tipping more genetically prone adults into developing seasonal allergies for the first time. If your airways are among the afflicted, you know that finding relief can be a challenge. There’s lots of advice and an overwhelming array of products out there, and it’s sometimes hard to know what’s true and where to begin. Here are a few tips for thinking through what’s causing your symptoms and what to do to stop the streams of liquid constantly coming out of your head. Not everything that makes your nose run is allergies Lots of things make people sneezy and snotty — who cares what the reason is? Well, you should. One of the biggest mistakes people make in the course of seeking relief from allergy symptoms is thinking they have an allergy when they don’t, says Jonathan Bernstein, a Cincinnati allergist and lead author on a recently published review article on allergic nasal symptoms. “So first and foremost, are they diagnosed properly?” When an allergic response is responsible for nasal symptoms, what’s happening in the background is an invisible biochemical cascade involving lots of moving parts, many of which are the targets of allergy medications. It’s a very different process from what happens when airways are just irritated (for example, by dust, smoke, or perfume), infected (as with a cold or another infection), or reacting to changes in temperature or pressure. Therefore, treating a non-allergic cause with an allergy medicine won’t work and can lead to unnecessary side effects, expense, and frustration. Allergic reactions to pollen don’t usually happen the first time you’re exposed to it. The first time your immune system meets those tiny particles, it merely determines that particular type of pollen is an outsider it doesn’t like. Your immune system might react a little bit in the moment, perhaps with a little sneezing and a mild runny nose. The most consequential work it’s doing at this stage is teaching the rest of your immune system to overreact next time the invader shows up and storing the memory of that invader in memory cells. This part of the allergic response is called sensitization. The next time your immune system meets that pollen, it’s primed — and it reacts fast, unleashing hellfire on the invader within 30 to 60 minutes. Some of the key players in this quick response are mast cells, which release histamine. This chemical dilates the nasal blood vessels, causing inflammation; gooses the sensory nerves in the face, causing sneezing and nasal itching; and stimulates mucus-producing glands in the nose, leading to water, water everywhere. One way to tell your symptoms aren’t allergic is by taking note of what they include: If a fever accompanies irritated airways, it’s more likely you have an infection (likely a viral cold) than allergies. Also, if your symptoms don’t respond well to allergy medications, that’s a good clue you might not be dealing with an allergy, says David Shulan, a retired allergist who used to practice in Albany, New York. When medications seem variably effective — or if they’re effective but you can’t figure out what you’re allergic to or your symptoms are severe — he says a helpful next step might be allergy testing. Severe symptoms are subjective, says Pedro Lamothe, a pulmonologist who treats and researches allergic asthma and lung disease at Emory University in Atlanta. “If the symptoms are resistant to treatment [or] are impacting your daily life because you can’t be going outside, because you can’t do your job,” he says, “that’s the definition of severe symptoms.” If you do get allergy testing, it’s best to get it done by a physician who’s an allergy specialist. “You have to correlate it with the individual’s history and their exposure,” Bernstein says. Letting allergy symptoms run their course won’t “build immunity” to the allergen. It just makes it worse next time. It’s not uncommon for people with seasonal allergy symptoms to just ride them out. The reasons for this vary, but sometimes, people power through because they believe doing so will make future allergic reactions land softer. That’s the opposite of the truth, says Lamothe. More allergic reactions just means more sensitization — that is, more opportunities for your immune system to learn how to overreact to a stimulus and to store that information so it can react even more ferociously next time. Letting allergic reactions run their course won’t make you stronger, he says, “You’re going to make your allergic responses stronger.” Another consequence of waiting to treat an allergic reaction: You’ll ultimately need much more medication to subdue your symptoms in their later stages than if you’d treated the response in its earlier stages. “These medications are much more effective at preventing the symptoms that are getting rid of them once they’ve already started,” says Lamothe. It’s best to stop the allergic reaction before the cascade gets into motion and before the immune system gets too smart for your own good — and it’s ideal to prevent the reaction altogether, says Lamothe. He recommends people with persistent seasonal symptoms actually start taking their medications before allergy season starts. In the relatively temperate climes of Georgia, that might mean starting the medications in February. Taking a proactive approach is particularly important for people with seasonal allergy-related asthma, which can be life-threatening. Asthma is effectively an allergic reaction localized to the lungs; in allergy-related asthma, the allergic reaction starts with the upper airways — the nose, mouth, and throat — and extends to the lungs, leading to wheezing, coughing, and shortness of breath. If you have seasonal allergies that lead to breathing problems, take note of how often you use your asthma medications, says Cherie Zachary, an allergist who practices in Minneapolis. If you’re using a rescue medication (like an albuterol inhaler) more than three times a week or you’ve needed to take an oral steroid like prednisone more than once in the past year, get additional help controlling both your asthma and your allergies, she says. People with allergy-induced asthma sometimes get so used to breathing poorly during certain seasons — or even year-round — that they forget it’s not normal to feel breathless at baseline. That may be especially true when many others around them also aren’t breathing well. Older patients may also have had bad experiences with ineffective treatments or with the medical system that administers them, leading them to put off getting care even when they’re feeling really ill. That should no longer be a deterrent. “We have good treatments now for allergies and asthma, which we certainly didn’t have 35 years ago,” says Zachary. The higher your risk of allergy-related asthma, the lower your threshold should be to seek care if you’re having uncontrolled symptoms during allergy season, she says. “Especially for the asthma patients, don’t ignore your symptoms.” Certain risk groups are more likely to have life-threatening outcomes from pollen exposure and should have a lower threshold for getting treatment Seasonal allergies play out differently in different racial and ethnic groups in the US. White adults are more likely to be diagnosed with seasonal allergies than are others, but in one study, Black people were twice as likely as white people to end up in an emergency room with pollen-related asthma exacerbations. More broadly, Black and Puerto Rican Americans are more likely than others to have asthma of any type, including severe and life-threatening flares. The reasons for these disparities are complicated, but are in part related to how well people’s allergies are controlled on a day-to-day basis — which is itself related to issues of insurance coverage and health care access and trust. Environmental factors may also be at play: Exposure to industrial toxins and air pollution is thought to increase people’s risk of developing allergies and asthma, including the kinds related to pollen. Higher concentrations of these pollutants in neighborhoods and workplaces where people of color live could in part explain the higher prevalence of seasonal allergies — and their most severe consequences — in these groups. “When you look at the risk factors and you look at redlining, they really do correlate,” says Zachary. Your first-line allergy medication might not be one you take by mouth The best treatment for allergies is prevention, and experts have lots of strategies for reducing your face time with whichever allergen is your particular nemesis. Shulan suggests minimizing your time outdoors during peak pollen time, which is typically around midday; there’s usually less pollen in the air before dawn, after sunset, and during or immediately after rain. You can also try wearing a face mask outdoors if the air temperature doesn’t make it intolerable, says Lamothe. As best you can, avoid tracking pollen into your home: Wipe down your face (including eyebrows and any facial hair), change your clothes and remove your shoes when coming home (and keep them outside the bedroom), and consider removing makeup, which pollen loves to stick to. Keeping bedroom windows closed and running an air conditioner with or without a separate air filtration unit can also help minimize nighttime symptoms. If you typically hang your clothes outside to dry, avoid doing so during allergy season. Cleaning the surfaces of your upper airways with saline nasal spray or nasal irrigation (like with a Neti pot) can also be helpful. While some people advocate eating local honey to reduce allergy symptoms, several experts told me there isn’t great data to support this practice, but “the placebo effect is remarkably powerful,” said Shulan. Even with these preventive measures, many people need pharmaceutical help to manage their symptoms, and the array of over-the-counter allergy medicines to choose from is literally dizzying. For many people with moderate to severe seasonal allergies, a nasal spray containing a corticosteroid is a good place to start, says Lamothe. These include fluticasone (Flonase), triamcinolone (Nasacort) mometasone (Nasonex), and budesonide (Benacort). Unlike steroids taken by mouth, these act only on the interior surfaces of the nostril and upper airways where they land, so they’re relatively low-risk. Still, aim the nozzle outward when you spray to avoid drenching the nasal septum, which can lead to nosebleeds. It might take a few days to feel relief from these medications, so don’t expect immediate results. Antihistamines are faster-acting and are available as nasal sprays, eye drops, and oral medications. Again, the formulations you don’t take by mouth are less likely to have systemic effects. Modern, second-generation oral antihistamines — which include cetirizine (Zyrtec), fexofenadine (Allegra), and loratadine (Claritin) — are much less likely to cause sleepiness than diphenhydramine (Benadryl), the most common of their first-generation counterparts. Some people find cetirizine somewhat sedating; levocetirizine dihydrochloride (Xyzal), a variant of the drug, avoids this effect. Although some people appreciate the sedating effects of Benadryl, experts advise against taking it on a regular basis due to emerging data about its associations with dementia. They also recommend caution with decongestants: Occasional doses of pseudoephedrine are safe for many adults, but they can raise blood pressure and heart rate and are not safe for children. Antihistamine nasal sprays like oxymetazoline (Afrin) are dependency-forming and should not be used for more than a few days running. If allergy meds aren’t controlling your symptoms or you need more medication than you want to take to control your symptoms, immunotherapy might be an option for you, says Shulan. Most people know this treatment as allergy shots, which involve getting progressively higher amounts of the protein you’re allergic to injected under your skin until your immune system stops overreacting to it, usually for around three to five years. More recent oral formulations mean this treatment can be administered without needles for certain allergies. To date, the Food and Drug Administration has approved oral immunotherapy to treat people allergic to ragweed, grasses, and dust mites. Oral allergy drops are also on the retail market, often marketed as a “natural” solution to allergies. However, these often-pricey products are not FDA-approved and the evidence to show they make things better and not worse just isn’t there, says Zachary. “Natural is not always neutral,” she says.

New data out this morning is expected to show GDP grew at an annualized rate of 2.7 percent in the first three months of the year, as Americans kept spending.

In January, the writer Gary Shteyngart spent a week of his life on the inaugural voyage of the Icon of the Seas, the largest cruise ship ever. Like many a great novelist before him, he went in search of the “real” America. He left his Russian novels at home, bought some novelty T-shirts, and psychically prepared to be the life of the party. About halfway through, Shteyngart called his editor and begged to be allowed to disembark and fly home. His desperate plea was rejected, resulting in a semi-sarcastic daily log of his misery.In this episode of Radio Atlantic, Shteyngart discusses his “seven agonizing nights” on the cruise ship, where he roamed from mall to bar to infinity pool trying to make friends. He shares his theories about why cruise lovers nurture an almost spiritual devotion to an experience that, to him, inspires material for a “low-rent White Lotus.” And he shares what happened when cruise lovers actually read what he wrote about their beloved ship.Listen to the conversation here:Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Google Podcasts | Pocket CastsThe following is a transcript of the episode:Gary Shteyngart: Hi.Hanna Rosin: Hi. It’s Hanna.Shteyngart: Hi, Hanna. How are you?Rosin: Good.Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic.Shteyngart: It’s cloudy here.Rosin: It is? In a good way? In a way that makes your hair look full and rich?Shteyngart: Oh, yeah.(Laughs.) It does add fullness to my hair, which is always a good thing at this point. I think spring has finally sprung. And I teach in the spring semester, and I’m like, God, I just want this to be over. I just want to go out and play.Rosin: You teach fiction?Shteyngart: Yeah. I can’t teach rocket science.Rosin: (Laughs.)Shteyngart: Cruising technology.Rosin: This is writer Gary Shteyngart.Rosin: There’s just a Russian stereotype.Shteyngart: (Laughs.)Rosin: I’m like, You could teach astronomy or physics. I don’t know.Shteyngart: Chess.Rosin: Chess. Exactly.Rosin: Gary Shteyngart grew up in the Soviet Union and immigrated to the U.S. when he was 7. He’s written several award-winning novels, and he was a “literary consultant” on Succession, the HBO show.Mostly, he is known for his satire, which can range from gentle to deadly. So who better to write an article about the inaugural voyage of the largest cruise ship ever built?Shteyngart: This whole thing came about because I was on Twitter, and I saw a tweet that just showed the—may I use salty language here?Rosin: Yes.Shteyngart: The ass of the ship is how I describe it. I don’t know any of these terms, but, you know, with all the water parks and crap on it. And so I reposted the tweet, and I said, If somebody wants to send me on this cruise, please specify the level of sarcasm desired.Rosin: Really? (Laughs.)Shteyngart: And then—God bless The Atlantic—within seconds, I had an assignment.Rosin: That ass belongs to the Icon of the Seas, a ship that can hold more than 7,000 passengers and 2,000 crew. It has 20 decks with seven swimming pools and six waterslides. The ship itself is about five times bigger than the Titanic. And I’m pretty sure the Titanic did not have a swim-up bar, much less the world’s largest swim-up bar.In a recent piece for The Atlantic, Gary describes it this way: “The ship makes no sense, vertically or horizontally. It makes no sense on sea, or on land, or in outer space. It looks like a hodgepodge of domes and minarets, tubes and canopies, like Istanbul had it been designed by idiots … This is the biggest cruise ship ever built, and I have been tasked with witnessing its inaugural voyage.”To prepare for that voyage, Gary wore a meatball T-shirt he found in a store in Little Italy. More specifically, the shirt read: “Daddy’s Little Meatball.”Shteyngart: You know, I grew up in Queens and, being a spicy meat-a-ball, I thought it was funny. A lot of cruisers were angry. They thought I was being sexual or sexualizing. It’s very interesting because I thought that T-shirt was the bond between a child and his daddy or her daddy.Rosin: (Laughs.) You thought it’d just be a conversation starter.Shteyngart: I thought it’d be a conversation starter. If they had a “Mommy’s Little Meatball” T-shirt, that would’ve been preferable. I feel much more a mommy’s little meatball. But they only have daddy.I actually thought, My expectations are low, but I bet I’m going to run into awesome people. And I love to drink and chat, and this is—I guess that’s what you do on a cruise ship. And I knew I was going to have a suite, so I was like, Maybe I’ll throw a suite party.Rosin: (Laughs.)Shteyngart: Invite some people over. On land, I really am quite sociable. I remember I was just leaving a Columbia—I teach at Columbia—leaving a Columbia party, and somebody was saying, Well, there goes 75 percent of the party.Rosin: Oh, that’s a compliment.Shteyngart: It’s a compliment. I’m kind of a party animal. So I was super—I thought, you know, Look, 5,000 people. I’m going to find a soulmate or two.Rosin: Great writers before Gary have deluded themselves in this way before. Most notably: David Foster Wallace, who ended up spending much of his cruise adventure alone in his cabin. They venture out, looking to swim with some “real Americans.” And instead, they are quickly confronted by the close-up details, like the nightly entertainment—Shteyngart: There was a kind of packaged weirdness in the shows. Goddamn—the ice-skating tribute to the periodic table. What the hell was that?Rosin: The food—Shteyngart: It did not have the consistency of steak. It was like some kind of pleathery, weird—like this poor cow had been slapped around before it died.Rosin: And the physical touch of an actual “real American.”Shteyngart: He’d throw his arms around them drunkenly, and they’d be like, Ehh.First of all, I just want to say, Royal Caribbean—the people that run it are geniuses. The CEO’s name is—I’m not making this up—Jason Liberty.Rosin: (Laughs.)Shteyngart: His name is Liberty! I mean, I don’t know. What the hell? Like, exactly, if I was to write a novel character with, you know, Jason Liberty, people would be like, Oh, he’s being pretentious. But no. That’s his actual name.I think they know the tastes of their clientele so well and are able to mirror it back to them, but also to give them this feeling that they’re awesome for doing something like this. One of my favorite slogans—you get all this literature—This isn’t a vacation day spent. It’s bragging rights earned.Rosin: Mmm. It’s velvet ropey, like you’re in a club.Shteyngart: It’s a velvet ropey situation. You are an adventurer. You’ve earned this. You have bragging rights. But when you enter the ship, you’re in a mall. And the mall is large and multileveled, and you can buy a Rolex at three times what it would cost on land and all this other crap.And then there’s all these neighborhoods, and you can do whatever the hell you want. You can get trashed or have sex, which, whatever—I mean with your spouse, although there were some swingers on board. But you could do whatever you want in a way that you can’t on land, in a way, I think, because so many of these people are just working their asses off.Rosin: Right.Shteyngart: That was a topic of conversation that came up. People were like, Yeah, I work 90 hours a week, and this is my chance to just, you know, be blotto.Rosin: You’re hinting at this. Part of being on a ship is being inducted into the language and the levels of the ship, and can you walk us through that? You mentioned, for example: You walk in, you’re in a mall. But I bet, eventually, you start to see more. What are the neighborhoods? You said the word neighborhoods. What does that even mean? And what are the distinctions?Shteyngart: I think this ship and other Royal Caribbean ships of this size—although this is the biggest—try to create this idea of a city, like you’re in a city that happens to be at sea.One of the funniest neighborhoods is called Central Park, which is literally another mall but with a couple of shrubs growing out here and there. I thought that was really funny—also, using a New York City landmark in one of the least New Yorkiest milieus in the world.Rosin: I guess it just has to be terms—a word—people recognize. And people vaguely recognize it. They don’t need to know about Olmsted or live in Brooklyn.Shteyngart: (Laughs.) No, no.Rosin: They just vaguely recognize Central Park.Shteyngart: It’d be funny if I asked—boy, would I get a lot of flak if I came up to a cruiser and be like, I don’t think this really matches Olmsted’s vision of Central Park. I don’t know. Meatball not happy. Maybe I should have used a Russian accent. Like, Hello. I am Meatball.Rosin: Meatball not happy.Shteyngart: Meatball not happy with Olmsted. So there’s that. There’s Surfside, which is a very funny kind of Disneyland for kids with—Rosin: And are you walking—like, I still don’t get it. So you go in, and how big is a neighborhood? And then how do you get to the next neighborhood?Shteyngart: Right, so everything’s on decks, so you take these elevators. I think I spent half the cruise on elevators just going from one place to another.Rosin: Yeah.Shteyngart: But I thought I would be in the Suites neighborhood. Because this whole thing—and Royal Caribbean is also brilliant at this. These people—really, a Nobel Prize in Economics. It’s a constant scramble. You constantly want a higher status, especially if you’ve been cruising forever. You want to reach Pinnacle status, which you have to do after 700 days (or nights, rather) on the ship, which is two years, right? Almost.Rosin: Wow. And so what does that get you?Shteyngart: So the Pinnacles have their own—I mean, there’s some priority things they get. Like, I was not allowed to go into one dining room at one point, and the guy—I didn’t know what Pinnacle was, so I thought the guy was saying, It’s just pendejo dining. He had a thick accent. I was like, I’m wearing a meatball T-shirt. I am the essence of pendejo. And he was like, No, no, pendejos only. But he was trying to say Pinnacles, I guess. So that kind of stuff.They have their own little lounge, which I wasn’t allowed into. And some of the other cruisers who are not Pinnacles but have somehow gotten into the lounge, they’re very angry about being denied. And they’re like, There’s nothing in there. There’s just a coffee machine in there.But the other thing is the suite status, which I had because by the time The Atlantic commissioned this piece, almost all the cabins were sold out. Everybody wanted to be on this ship, and all that was left was a $19,000—Jesus Christ—$19,000 suite that didn’t even look out on the sea.Rosin: Wow.Shteyngart: It looked out on the mall or whatever. But it looked like the Marriott, in a way, which—I like Marriotts—I’m just saying.Rosin: So it’s just a plain—it’s like a hotel room.Shteyngart: It’s like a hotel room.Rosin: With a window.Shteyngart: And I had two bathrooms.Rosin: For yourself?Shteyngart: Just for myself, I know. Well, I think the idea of these suites is that more than one person goes on them, right?But there’s this—the Royal Bling. The Royal Bling is the jewelry store, such as it is, on board. And they introduced this thing called the something chalice. It’s a $100,000 chalice, and it entitles you to drink for free on Royal Caribbean once you’ve bought it.So this thing is hilarious. Just the concept of it is insane. Everyone’s trying to figure out: Should I buy this? What’s up with this? Should I get it for my 28-year-old kid? Will it earn out? How much does he drink? How much can I drink?So I talked to the wonderful Serbian sales lady. Everyone’s country of origin, if you’re on the crew, is listed on their tag.Rosin: Really?Shteyngart: Yeah, yeah, yeah.Rosin: That’s weird.Shteyngart: So you’re like, Oh, it’s Amir from Pakistan, or whatever.Rosin: That’s so weird.Shteyngart: Yeah. And she was, I don’t know, something Olga from Serbia, and she was amazing. They’re all amazing. Every crew member is excellent.And she was like, Well—she was trying to sell me the $100,000 chalice. I said, It’s really gold? And she’s like, No, it’s gold-plated. We couldn’t afford. She said, If it was really gold, it would be, like, a million dollars. I’m like, Okay. And then it has diamonds, and she’s like, Well, they’re actually cubic zirconia, again, because it would cost, like, $10 million if they were diamonds. I’m like, All right, this thing is sounding worse and worse.And then she said, But, you know, if you already have everything, this is one more thing you can have. And I thought that was almost like a Zen haiku, but about the American condition. If you already have everything, this is one more thing you can have.[Music]Rosin: So the ship has neighborhoods and levels and status in a very explicit way. And cruisers care about that. They care about it in a very deep, almost spiritual way that Gary didn’t quite appreciate until after he’d written the story.Shteyngart: One of the funniest things—somebody was telling me to look this up on, I guess, Reddit.Rosin: Mm-hmm.Shteyngart: There’s a huge cruising community. I think half a million people are on that thing and, boy, were they pissed!Rosin: That’s after the break.[Break]Rosin: During his time on the Icon of the Seas, Gary Shteyngart met a few memorable characters. There was the younger couple he called, “Mr. and Mrs. Ayn Rand,” who he drank with a few times. And the couple’s couple friends, he described as quote: “bent psychos out of a Cormac McCarthy novel.” And then, there was “Duck Necklace.”Shteyngart: He’s fascinating. He was drunk all the time, and he was being arrested—there is a security force—for photobombing.Rosin: I wonder if the laws are different on the ship. Like photobombing is a felony.Shteyngart: I’d love to do Law & Order: Icon of the Seas. That would be amazing.Rosin: (Laughs.) Right.Shteyngart: But then he went on this long, drunken, very elegiac thing about, Well, I’m 62, and if I fall off the ship, I’m fine with that. I just don’t want a shark to eat me. And I believe in God, and the Mayans have a prophecy. He just went on and on. And then I looked him up and, when not drunk and getting arrested on a ship, he’s the pillar of his community in North Chicago. There’s so much more to this guy. So he was my favorite, I think.Rosin: So maybe the ship creates a space where, if you’re grinding and working every day and being a pillar of the community, the ship is your space to contemplate and be philosophical or be an idiot or whatever it is you can’t be elsewhere.Shteyngart: Yeah. And I think you’re right. And I think a couple of people, especially older people—I mean, 62 isn’t that old—but a couple of the older people were trying to summarize their lives through their cruising experiences, including, for one woman, realizing that she wanted to divorce her husband. All these things happened on cruises.It’s like the cruise is the time when they’re—the way people say when you’re off land, it’s the rules of the sea. You’re in international waters; you can do whatever you want. I think for some people, the cruise affords them some weird way to look back on their lives and to make large decisions or to celebrate either happy moments or sometimes almost-elegiac moments. There were all these people who looked like they were about to die.Rosin: Literally?Shteyngart: Literally about to die, clearly coming off of chemo or on an oxygen tank. Or they had T-shirts celebrating a good cancer remission. So definitely there’s—and I hope this article, despite its very satirical tone, lends some of that poignancy. Because people are people, and this is the kind of stuff that they want to do, either to make an important moment in their lives or to think on the things that have happened to them.But I think that’s one of the reasons people were so butt hurt on that Reddit—to use a term of art—because I wasn’t just going after a hobby or something. I was going after something that is so key to their identity.Rosin: That’s interesting that people perceived it so badly. You both appreciated the earnestness of it and made fun of it at the same time. It was satirical but also present.Shteyngart: I don’t know. I think people really wanted a quote-unquote “journalist” to give an honest review of the ship. But look, I got this assignment by saying, What level of sarcasm do you want? But I didn’t deliver 11 on the sarcasm scale. I think it was, like, six or seven.I realized the humor part of this—and this is what I talk about in my humor class—the human comedy is that no one understands quite who they are. So I may go around thinking I’m a giraffe, and I keep talking about, Oh, I’m so tall, and I eat leaves off of tall trees. But in reality, I’m an aardvark. I’m a small furry creature, burrowing in the bush.And that, to me, felt like a lot of what people were saying on the ship. People would say, I feel like I’m on an adventure. And I’m like, Yes, but we’re in a mall, as you say this, that’s slowly steaming to all these islands. But many of the passengers wouldn’t even get off on these islands. They love the ship so much they wouldn’t leave.And I’ll say this, also: One of the most important things that happened to me—I was in Charlotte Amalie, which I guess is the capital of the U.S. Virgin Islands or Saint Thomas, and I’d wandered off the beaten path. And this elderly Rastafarian gentleman looked at me, and with the most—I’ve never been talked to like this—but with a sneer beyond anything, he said, Redneck.And I guess I did have a red neck at this point, and I was wearing this vibrant cap with the Icon of the Seas Royal Caribbean logo. But I realized, also, that people hate these cruisers. They hate what they do to their islands, their environment, everything. There’s just so much more happening here than just a bunch of drunken Americans on a ship.And this also goes to the fact that, obviously, there’s all these people, mostly from the global South, working below decks. They work nonstop. And it’s interesting because a lot of the passengers, they would say, Wow, these people work so hard, with a kind of like, Oh, I wish everybody back home would work so hard, or something like that. But at the same time, I was listening to a comedy act, and the comedian was making fun of quote-unquote “shithole countries.”So there’s definitely a kind of—even though cruisers keep talking about how much they love the people on the ship, it doesn’t translate.Rosin: It doesn’t translate. It doesn’t translate into politics.Okay, I’m turning it back on you—your story. You came into the boat with the story that Gary is a party guy, and Gary’s gonna have parties in Gary’s suite. So what did you realize along the way?Shteyngart: Yeah, it was like being an immigrant all over again. And, for me, assimilation into America was a very, very long process. So the meatball, or the lack of success of the meatball, really reminded me of that, too—like I’m always a step behind.And this did feel like, Oh, I was always a step behind. People would have casual conversations in the elevators, just shooting the shit, and I would try to banter with them. But I would always get it a little bit wrong, and I would realize it, too. Like, there was a lot of wind one day, and I was like, Oof, the frost is really on the pumpkin.Rosin: (Laughs.)Shteyngart: But I realized that that’s probably said in the fall, right? Before Thanksgiving. Is that right? The pumpkin is, you know—Rosin: So Immigrant Gary comes roaring back in those moments.Shteyngart: Oh, my god.Rosin: You want to be, like, Sophisticated Writer Gary.Shteyngart: Absolutely. So I was always sweating bullets. Like, I want to get into the conversation. And this was a big thing because there was a big contest, several contests—the semifinals or something? Quarterfinals? I don’t know—between the big teams. And I had no idea what the hell was going on, but everybody was talking about it. And everybody was wearing paraphernalia—that’s the other thing.Rosin: Paraphernalia. (Laughs.) You’re referring to team T-shirts.Shteyngart: But also everything! I don’t know. Name it: hats, T-shirts, all kinds of crap. And I had nothing. I had meatball, you know.Rosin: Right.Shteyngart: Look, the preparation for this article should have—I should have bought T-shirts with sports.Rosin: (Laughs.) T-shirts with sports.Shteyngart: And then I should have talked to people about all the rules of football. Maybe there’s a documentary that I can watch, something like that. And then maybe that would have been it.Rosin: Okay, so I’m reading this essay about this cruise ship, which has a little bit of politics, a little bit of cult, a little bit of status obsession. What am I understanding about America?Shteyngart: Well, I think we are, in some ways, a country that has been losing religion for a while. I know this is a strange approach to it, but people are looking for something to fill the void. Especially, among the hardworking middle class I think is where you feel it quite a bit. And I think because Americans are never satisfied, everyone’s always looking for, What’s my ancestry? Where do I come from? Somehow just the term American is not enough to fulfill people’s expectations of what life is.Rosin: Of what they belong to. Like, what they’re rooted in. Yeah.Shteyngart: And for me, this is an easier question because I actually just want to be an American. I’m an immigrant who just wants to be an American, right?So, on this ship, what I was seeing was people desperately trying to belong to some kind of idea. And I feel like the cruising life, because these people are so obsessed with the cruises that they wear these—half the people or more were wearing T-shirts somehow commemorating this voyage on the first day of the cruise. So I think I really offended a religion. I insulted not just a strange hobby that people engage in, but a way of life.And I think that’s the future. Trying to understand America today is to try to understand people desperately grasping for something in the absence of more traditional ideas of what it means to an American, right? And this is one strange manifestation of that. But it was, for me, an ultimately unfulfilling one.[Music]You know, God bless David Foster Wallace for being brilliant enough to start the genre, although there were a couple pieces before him, but the modern incarnation of this. Let’s stop this. I did not solve the question of what America is. None of that got solved.Rosin: So what are we R.I.P.ing? We’re not just R.I.P.ing the cruise ship piece? I just want to end the episode this way. R.I.P. what?Shteyngart: No, no, no, no. I don’t have that kind of cultural might.Rosin: (Laughs.)Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid, fact-checked by Isabel Cristo, and engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.Rosin: But was there a monkey on the ship?Shteyngart: No, there wasn’t. The monkey was on Saint Kitts.Rosin: Oh, okay. I remembered that wrong.Shteyngart: No, no, no. The Royal Caribbean did not spring for a monkey. They had a golden retriever, and he wore, like, a cap or something? But see, so everybody was going gaga, and I’m like, You’ve never seen a golden freaking retriever? What kind of lives do you live on land?Rosin: Right, right. But it’s an Icon golden retriever, so it’s different.Shteyngart: It’s an Icon golden retriever, and he’s, like, I guess, an emotional support dog for these people.

Jay Hartzell said unequivocally after more than 30 people were arrested on campus amid an anti-Israel protest Wednesday that rules would continue to be enforced.

Finnish Major General Harri Ohra-aho said Russia's deployment of Iskander missile systems "won't change anything."

Ready for some wordplay? Sharpen your skills with Slate’s puzzle for April 25, 2024.

Witness testimony will continue Thursday in Donald Trump's hush money criminal trial. Follow here for the latest live news updates from court, analysis and more.

Eighteen people, including former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, have been charged in connection with the alleged 2020 election plot.

Trump Jr. was allegedly forming a plant to use alternative electors before votes were even counted in the 2020 election.

Recent state supreme court decisions restricting abortion have supercharged the stakes on some crucial down-ballot races.

“The thing I like least about myself would be any feelings of jealousy,” the “Friends” alum, 59, revealed, adding that she "hates" the feeling of being "replaced."

Prosecutors have finally homed in on their strategy.

Experts reacted to Tennessee failing to pass a school choice bill in the state after momentum was building up after several years of struggle to fulfill the effort.