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The demographic shift isn’t driving white people to the right

The demographic shift isn’t driving white people to the right

Mark R Reiff writes: Why are so many white people throughout the liberal democratic world moving to the illiberal Right? The conventional explanation is that they are being driven by fear of the ‘demographic shift’. That is, because of immigration, both legal and illegal, and differing fertility rates among the relevant groups, white people of specific ethnic and religious backgrounds will soon no longer make up the electoral majority in the regions they currently dominate. Losing their majority status, in…

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Inside the risky bat-virus engineering that links America to Wuhan

Inside the risky bat-virus engineering that links America to Wuhan

Rowan Jacobsen writes: In 2013, the American virologist Ralph Baric approached Zhengli Shi at a meeting. Baric was a top expert in coronaviruses, with hundreds of papers to his credit, and Shi, along with her team at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, had been discovering them by the fistful in bat caves. In one sample of bat guano, Shi had detected the genome of a new virus, called SHC014, that was one of the two closest relatives to the original…

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A lack of coronavirus genomes could prolong the pandemic

A lack of coronavirus genomes could prolong the pandemic

Puja Changoiwala writes: Back at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, before the disease had even drawn the attention of much of the world, researchers in China and Australia mapped the genome of the coronavirus isolated from one of the first patients in the Wuhan outbreak. This first genetic blueprint of the SARS-CoV-2 virus was publicly released soon after, on January 10, 2020. The disclosure of that genome, and others that soon followed, guided the vigorous international scientific response to…

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How the drug industry has exploited reforms started in the fight against AIDS

How the drug industry has exploited reforms started in the fight against AIDS

Robert Bazell writes: Three decades ago, a small group from within the AIDS activist organization ACT UP changed the course of medicine in the United States. They employed what they called “the outside/inside strategy.” The activists staged large, noisy demonstrations outside the Food and Drug Administration and other federal government agencies, demanding an acceleration of the drug-approval process. Others learned the minutiae of the science and worked quietly with receptive bureaucrats, bringing the patient’s perspective to the table toward the…

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The war on Indigenous rights in Brazil is intensifying

The war on Indigenous rights in Brazil is intensifying

Mark Harris and Denise Ferreira Da Silva write: Indigenous peoples in Brazil are under siege by the Brazilian government, which is waging war on two fronts. New legislation in the form of a bill known as PL 490/2007 threatens to cancel legal protections for Indigenous territories, while a landmark Supreme Court case over the so-called marco temporal, a 1988 cut-off date that threatens to strip the Indigenous peoples of existing land rights. Though not as visible as the effects of…

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The war on history is a war on democracy

The war on history is a war on democracy

Timothy Snyder writes: In March 1932, the cover of Fortune magazine featured a painting of Red Square by Diego Rivera. A numberless crowd of faceless men marched with red banners, surrounding a locomotive engine emblazoned with hammer and sickle. This was the image of communist modernization the Soviets wished to transmit during Stalin’s first five-year plan: The achievement was impersonal, technical, unquestionable. The Soviet Union was transforming itself from an agrarian backwater into an industrial power through sheer disciplined understanding…

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What Biden must do to right the wrongs of Guantanamo

What Biden must do to right the wrongs of Guantanamo

Benjamin R. Farley writes: Many Americans like to tell themselves a story about the choices the country makes in times of national crisis. We see our country’s policies as a pendulum. We may overreact at first, temporarily sacrificing principles and rights to meet the emergency at hand. But eventually the crisis recedes, and in restoring our commitment to foundational principles and the rule of law, we push the pendulum back toward equilibrium. This story is comforting; it makes sense of…

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Arizona ballot audit shows signs of backfiring on GOP

Arizona ballot audit shows signs of backfiring on GOP

Politico reports: When Arizona Republicans first pushed for a partisan audit of the 2020 presidential ballots cast in the Phoenix metropolitan area, they argued that they needed to know if any irregularities or fraud caused President Trump to lose this rapidly evolving swing state. But the audit itself could be damaging Republican prospects, according to a new Bendixen & Amandi International poll, which shows roughly half of Arizona voters oppose the recount effort. In addition, a narrow majority favors President…

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Congressman recruits Holocaust deniers into the Republican Party

Congressman recruits Holocaust deniers into the Republican Party

Jonathan Chait writes: Some of the most cartoonishly nutty members of the Republican caucus simply want to get famous, rich, or the affections of younger women. Representative Paul Gosar, on the other hand, has a plan. He wants to extend the rightward boundary of the Republican Party coalition and bring it right up to the edge of open Nazism. Gosar announced last night that he is holding a fundraiser with Nick Fuentes: Arizona GOP Congressman Paul Gosar isn’t even trying…

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The Justice Department is suing Georgia. Don’t expect Garland to end there

The Justice Department is suing Georgia. Don’t expect Garland to end there

Joyce White Vance writes: On Friday, Attorney General Merrick Garland delivered on his promise to use all his statutory authority to protect the right to vote: He announced he was suing the state of Georgia for enacting a law he said the legislature passed to deny Black people that right. The majority-Republican legislature adopted the law, S.B. 202, in the aftermath of historic Black turnout and the election of two Democratic senators in the last cycle. Originally just three pages…

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Fox News agrees to $1 million fine for violating human rights law

Fox News agrees to $1 million fine for violating human rights law

The Daily Beast reports: Despite Fox News’ claims to have repaired the company’s toxic workplace culture since the firing of founder and chairman Roger Ailes in July 2016, Rupert Murdoch’s media empire has effectively admitted to ongoing misconduct that includes sexual harassment, discrimination, and retaliation against victimized employees, and has agreed to pay a million-dollar fine for what New York City’s Commission on Human Rights called “a pattern of violating of the NYC Human Rights Law.” The settlement agreement, reached…

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The heat in Portland, Seattle and Vancouver is off the charts

The heat in Portland, Seattle and Vancouver is off the charts

The New York Times reports: Heat waves and the “heat domes” that can cause them aren’t rare, but the recent weather that’s been smothering the Pacific Northwest has little precedent in at least four decades of record-keeping. To understand the magnitude of the departure from historical norms, it helps to visualize it. The map above, created by Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, a climate scientist at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, analyzes temperatures since 1979. It shows the extent of the…

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We’re learning the wrong lessons from the world’s happiest countries

We’re learning the wrong lessons from the world’s happiest countries

Joe Pinsker writes: Since 2012, most of the humans on Earth have been given a nearly annual reminder that there are entire nations of people who are measurably happier than they are. This uplifting yearly notification is known as the World Happiness Report. With the release of each report, which is published by the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network, the question is not which country will appear at the top of the rankings, but rather which Northern European country…

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Pfizer and Moderna vaccines likely to produce lasting immunity, study finds

Pfizer and Moderna vaccines likely to produce lasting immunity, study finds

The New York Times reports: The vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna set off a persistent immune reaction in the body that may protect against the coronavirus for years, scientists reported on Monday. The findings add to growing evidence that most people immunized with the mRNA vaccines may not need boosters, so long as the virus and its variants do not evolve much beyond their current forms — which is not guaranteed. People who recovered from Covid-19 before being vaccinated…

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