Music: Arve Henriksen — ‘Waders’
How to live in a climate ‘permanent emergency’
David Wallace-Wells writes: The phrase Jay Inslee used was “permanent emergency.” This was before Lytton — the town that had, days earlier, set Canada’s all-time heat record, drawing waves of “heat tourists” as witnesses to “desert heat” north of 120 degrees in a place where typical June highs were in the mid-70s — burned to the ground just 15 minutes after the arrival of smoke. It was before wildfires raging in British Columbia produced their own pyrocumulus thunderstorms, which produced…
Democrats have one option left
Ronald Brownstein writes: Today’s Supreme Court decision further weakening the Voting Rights Act affirmed that the only way Democrats can reverse the wave of restrictive voting laws in GOP-controlled states is to pass new federal voting rights by curtailing the Senate filibuster. Congressional action has long seemed the only realistic lever for Democrats to resist red states’ surge of voter-suppression laws, which are passing, as I’ve written, on an almost entirely party-line basis. In the state legislatures, Democrats lack the…
The Supreme Court is putting democracy at risk
Richard L. Hasen writes: In two disturbing rulings closing out the Supreme Court’s term, the court’s six-justice conservative majority, over the loud protests of its three-liberal minority, has shown itself hostile to American democracy. In one case, Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, the court has weakened the last remaining legal tool for protecting minority voters in federal courts from a new wave of legislation seeking to suppress the vote that is emanating from Republican-controlled states. In the other, Americans for…
Why the law is strong enough to take on Trump
Donald Ayer, Norman Eisen and E. Danya Perry write: A 15-count indictment for tax fraud and other charges filed in New York on Thursday against the Trump Organization and its longtime chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, has already stimulated as much hand-wringing as satisfaction from those who have called for accountability for Donald Trump. Some express concern that Mr. Trump himself was not charged and may never be. Others note that these are “only” state tax fraud counts against his…
The looming stagflationary debt crisis
Nouriel Roubini writes: In April, I warned that today’s extremely loose monetary and fiscal policies, when combined with a number of negative supply shocks, could result in 1970s-style stagflation (high inflation alongside a recession). In fact, the risk today is even bigger than it was then. After all, debt ratios in advanced economies and most emerging markets were much lower in the 1970s, which is why stagflation has not been associated with debt crises historically. If anything, unexpected inflation in…
Beyond coronavirus: the virus discoveries transforming biology
Nature reports: Mya Breitbart has hunted novel viruses in African termite mounds, Antarctic seals and water from the Red Sea. But to hit pay dirt, she has only to step into her back garden in Florida. Hanging around her swimming pool are spiny-backed orbweavers (Gasteracantha cancriformis) — striking spiders with bulbous white bodies, black speckles and six scarlet spikes that make them look like a piece of medieval weaponry. Even more striking for Breitbart, a viral ecologist at the University…
Music: Richard Bona & Metropole Orkest — ‘O Sen Sen Sen’
Trump was not indicted. But the charges still threaten him
The New York Times reports: After all the suspicion and anticipation, it was not a conspiracy involving Russia, widespread money laundering or a sweeping allegation of racketeering and corruption. Instead, it was an investigation that uncovered the alleged abuse of run-of-the-mill perks — like car leases, apartments and school tuition — that transformed Donald J. Trump’s family business from real estate branding empire to criminal defendant. On Thursday, prosecutors from the Manhattan district attorney’s office announced charges against the Trump…
Big oil and gas kept a dirty secret for decades. Now they may pay the price
Chris McGreal reports: After a century of wielding extraordinary economic and political power, America’s petroleum giants face a reckoning for driving the greatest existential threat of our lifetimes. An unprecedented wave of lawsuits, filed by cities and states across the US, aim to hold the oil and gas industry to account for the environmental devastation caused by fossil fuels – and covering up what they knew along the way. Coastal cities struggling to keep rising sea levels at bay, midwestern…
I’ve been a critical race theorist for 30 years. Our opponents are just proving our point for us
Gary Peller writes: Some 25 states have already enacted or are considering laws to ban teaching what they call “critical race theory” (“CRT”) in public schools, a concept that school officials around the country deny they even teach. A parents’ group in Washoe County, Nevada wants teachers to wear body cams, just to make sure. And Ted Cruz just charged that CRT is “every bit as racist as the klansmen in white sheets.” As a law professor closely associated with…
The glue that holds the internet together is coming undone
Jonathan Zittrain writes: The internet’s distinct architecture arose from a distinct constraint and a distinct freedom: First, its academically minded designers didn’t have or expect to raise massive amounts of capital to build the network; and second, they didn’t want or expect to make money from their invention. The internet’s framers thus had no money to simply roll out a uniform centralized network the way that, for example, FedEx metabolized a capital outlay of tens of millions of dollars to…
The Republican senator who decided to tell the truth
Tim Alberta writes: Right around the time Donald Trump was flexing his conspiratorial muscles on Saturday night, recycling old ruses and inventing new boogeymen in his first public speech since inciting a siege of the U.S. Capitol in January, a dairy farmer in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula sat down to supper. It had been a trying day. The farmer, Ed McBroom, battled sidewinding rain while working his 320 acres, loading feed and breeding livestock and at one point delivering a distressed…
Kamala Harris’ office — ‘not a healthy environment’ — is rife with dissent
Politico reports: When Vice President Kamala Harris finally made the decision to visit the Mexico border last week, people inside her own office were blindsided by the news. For days, aides and outside allies had been calling and texting with each other about the political fallout that a potential trip would entail. But when it became known that she was going to El Paso, it left many scrambling, including officials who were responsible for making travel arrangements and others outside…
Calls grow for an investigation into FDA approval of Biogen’s Alzheimer’s drug
STAT reports: Former health secretary Donna Shalala called for a federal investigation into the Food and Drug Administration’s polarizing approval of a Biogen treatment for Alzheimer’s disease, citing STAT’s revelation Tuesday that regulators were far more closely aligned with the company than previously disclosed. “When you see a report like this, you have to investigate it,” said Shalala, a former member of Congress who led the Department of Health and Human Services under President Clinton. “You cannot hesitate and you…
Music: Gonzalo Rubalcaba — ‘Son XXI’