In 2013, the Times columnist David Brooks, then in his early fifties, divorced his wife of twenty-seven years, Sarah, and moved into an apartment in Washington, D.C.The personal crisis that ensued overlapped with a spiritual one. He was writing a book called “The Road to Character,” offering guidance, through biographical case studies, for how a person might engage in moral self-improvement, and two of the chapters made examples of Christian lives: St. Augustine’s and Dorothy Day’s. His correspondence with a young research assistant, a Christian woman named Anne Snyder, grew intense. Brooks was a practicing Jew, if one on the downslope of belief—his wife had converted and then become more Orthodox than he—and Snyder, in elegant memos and correspondence, worked to persuade him that his account of Day’s sense of Christian grace missed the sublime core. “The foundational fact,” Snyder reminded Brooks, “is you cannot earn your way into a state of grace—this denies grace’s power, and subverts its very definition.” For Brooks, this carried the clarity of revelation, and soon he let it be known, among his acquaintances, that he was experiencing religious curiosity. An informal competition opened for David Brooks’s soul. He received, by his own estimation, three hundred gifts of spiritual books, “only one hundred of which were different copies of C. S. Lewis’s ‘Mere Christianity.’ ”
The Markthal is a residential and office building with a market hall underneath, located in Rotterdam.The building was opened on October 1, 2014, by Queen Máxima of the Netherlands.
Ron and Florence Schaffhauser stood in matching orange “I SURVIVED HURRICANE MICHAEL” T-shirts, waiting for the MAGA rally to begin, a Doppler radar image of the deadly storm emblazoned on their chests.
Last October, the behemoth Category 5 hurricane had churned towards this beautiful stretch of white-sand beaches on the Florida panhandle, eventually killing 59 Americans and causing $25 billion in damage.
“We lost the roof … the living room, dining room, kitchen,” said Ron Schaffhauser, a retired Marine, holding Florence’s hand as the couple recounted their ordeal to HuffPost.
“Our daughter’s house got totally destroyed,” said Florence Schaffhauser, who recently retired from a job at a local Winn-Dixie grocery store.
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ASSOCIATED PRESS
Supporters of President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Panama City Beach, Florida, on May 8, 2019.
Choosing a safe but effective sunscreen is becoming a pain in the brain.
While we spent decades happily applying the sunscreen of our choice, the chemical ingredients that manufacturers used to fight the sun have been under attack. The latest salvo: a study by the US Food and Drug Administration showing that we can absorb high levels of four of those chemicals into our bloodstream after just one day of sunblock use.
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Is that a problem for our health? No one knows. In February, the FDA reiterated its call for manufacturers to do safety investigations of 12 of the sunscreen chemicals most commonly used in the United States. Those tests could take months or even years.
By now, you’ve probably been taught to gird your sun-starved skin for battle with cancer-causing cosmic rays every time you go outside. Choose a spray, choose a lotion, but by heavens, choose something! Legions of doctors, parents, and YouTube beauty influencers are unanimous on this point. But with sunscreen application evolving from a week or two at the beach every year to a constant daily slather, US health regulators want to know more about how all those photoprotective chemicals interact with people’s skin.
If they sink into tissues and get absorbed into the bloodstream, that could be a problem. Then, like other over-the-counter drugs the Food and Drug Administration oversees, sunscreens should be studied to make sure they don’t mess up people’s hormones, affect their reproductive systems, or cause cancer. Such safety testing has never been done on the active ingredients in sunscreen, because those chemicals were approved decades ago, before anyone suspected they could be absorbed into the body. Now we know it’s more than just a suspicion.
Around two or three times a week, in a small open-plan office in London, Lilith* worked with a computer in her lap, crouching underneath her desk—a rectangular table that six people shared, with short dividers between each station.
“I get easily overwhelmed with noise or an excessive amount of people around,” she said. “People working with me mostly found it funny, if not a little odd, but they were polite about it.”
There is a gut doctor, and he begs Americans: “Throw out this vegetable now.” This news is accompanied by a different image nearly every time. This morning, the plea appeared at the bottom of an article on Vox next to a photo of a hand chopping up what appears to be a pile of green apples. At other times, it has been paired with a picture of a petri dish with a worm in it. Other times, gut bacteria giving off electricity. The inside of a lotus root. An illustrated rendering of roundworms.
The gut doctor’s desperation pops up over and over, on websites like CNN and the Atlantic (and as I said, this one), in what are known colloquially as “chumboxes.” These are the boxes at the bottom of the page that have several pieces of clickbaity “sponsored content” or “suggested reading.” They’re generated by a variety of companies, but the largest two are Taboola ($160 million in funding) and Outbrain ($194 million in funding), both founded in Israel in the mid-aughts.
A nisse (Danish: and Norwegian: , tomte (Swedish:, tomtenisse, or tonttu (Finnish: is a mythological creature from Nordic folklore today typically associated with the winter solstice and the Christmas season. It is generally described as being no taller than 90 cm (3 ft), having a long white beard, and wearing a conical or knit cap in red or some other bright colour. They often have an appearance somewhat similar to that of a garden gnome (which are also called trädgårdstomte in Swedish, havenisse in Danish, hagenisse in Norwegian and puutarhatonttu in Finnish).
The nisse is one of the most familiar creatures of Scandinavian folklore, and he has appeared in many works of Scandinavian literature. With the romanticisation and collection of folklore during the 19th century, the nisse would gain popularity. In the English editions of the fairy tales of H. C. Andersen the word nisse has been inaccurately translated as goblin (a more accurate translation is brownie or hob).
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
David Brooks
Rotterdam Market Hall
Choosing a sunscreen
Illustration: Hunter French
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Christmas gnomes
