Browsed by
Author: From elsewhere

Once a Covid hotspot, Italian village now intrigues researchers with ‘super-immune’ cases

Once a Covid hotspot, Italian village now intrigues researchers with ‘super-immune’ cases

NBC News reports: Paola Bezzon thought her sniffles in December were just a seasonal cold until a serology test months later found coronavirus antibodies in her blood. And not just normal levels of antibodies. Researchers say she is “super-immune” — a person whose body seems to make more antibodies than normal. “I don’t know why I have all these antibodies, but they are such a lifeline for me,” she said. “They make me feel safe even though I haven’t had…

Read More Read More

Why rising diversity might not help Democrats as much as they hope

Why rising diversity might not help Democrats as much as they hope

Nate Cohn writes: The Census Bureau released two important sets of data last week that have big implications for American politics — and that challenge some prevailing assumptions for both Democrats and Republicans. The first set of data lays out long-term demographic trends widely thought to favor Democrats: Hispanics, Asian-Americans and multiracial voters grew as a share of the electorate over the last two presidential races, and white voters — who historically tend to back the G.O.P. — fell to…

Read More Read More

How companies rip off poor employees — and get away with it

How companies rip off poor employees — and get away with it

The Associated Press reports: Already battered by long shifts and high infection rates, essential workers struggling through the pandemic face another hazard of hard times: employers who steal their wages. When a recession hits, U.S. companies are more likely to stiff their lowest-wage workers. These businesses often pay less than the minimum wage, make employees work off the clock, or refuse to pay overtime rates. In the most egregious cases, bosses don’t pay their employees at all. Companies that hire…

Read More Read More

Republicans are purging Liz Cheney for opposing Trump’s insurrection

Republicans are purging Liz Cheney for opposing Trump’s insurrection

Jonathan Chait writes: In the few days after January 6, it appeared the Republican establishment that had tolerated four years of naked corruption and frequently undisguised racism had finally lost its patience with Donald Trump. A Mike Pence adviser said the vice-president was “done with Trump’s bullshit.” Kevin McCarthy, whom Trump customarily addressed as “My Kevin” as though he were his manservant, had a private screaming match. Several candidate members publicly resigned, and Murdoch-owned media outlets called for his resignation….

Read More Read More

Proud Boys saw wave of contributions from Chinese diaspora before Capitol attack

Proud Boys saw wave of contributions from Chinese diaspora before Capitol attack

USA Today reports: The donations started coming in about 10 p.m. on Dec. 17. A donor named Li Zhang gave $100. A few minutes later, someone named Jun Li donated $100. Then Hao Xu gave $20, followed shortly by $25 from a Ying Pei. In all, almost 1,000 people with Chinese surnames gave about $86,000 to a fundraiser on the crowdfunding platform GiveSendGo for members of the extremist street gang the Proud Boys. Their gifts made up more than 80%…

Read More Read More

Is music what makes us human?

Is music what makes us human?

Kevin Berger writes: In the past two years, the debate over whether music is universal, or even whether that debate has merit, has raged like a battle of the bands among scientists. The stage has expanded from musicology to evolutionary biology to cultural anthropology. This summer, in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences, more than 100 scholars sound off on evolution and universality of music. I love the din. The academic discord gives way to a symphony of insights into…

Read More Read More

Reaching ‘herd immunity’ is unlikely in the U.S., experts now believe

Reaching ‘herd immunity’ is unlikely in the U.S., experts now believe

The New York Times reports: Early in the pandemic, when vaccines for the coronavirus were still just a glimmer on the horizon, the term “herd immunity” came to signify the endgame: the point when enough Americans would be protected from the virus so we could be rid of the pathogen and reclaim our lives. Now, more than half of adults in the United States have been inoculated with at least one dose of a vaccine. But daily vaccination rates are…

Read More Read More

Why are millions of Americans saying no to vaccines?

Why are millions of Americans saying no to vaccines?

Derek Thompson writes: Several days ago, the mega-popular podcast host Joe Rogan advised his young listeners to skip the COVID-19 vaccine. “I think you should get vaccinated if you’re vulnerable,” Rogan said. “But if you’re 21 years old, and you say to me, ‘Should I get vaccinated?’ I’ll go, ‘No.’” Rogan’s comments drew widespread condemnation. But his view is surprisingly common. One in four Americans says they don’t plan to take the COVID-19 vaccine, and about half of Republicans under…

Read More Read More

Facebook and the normalization of deviance

Facebook and the normalization of deviance

Sue Halpern writes: When the sociologist Diane Vaughan came up with the term “the normalization of deviance,” she was referring to nasa administrators’ disregard of the flaw that caused the Challenger space shuttle to explode, in 1986. The idea was that people in an organization can become so accepting of a problem that they no longer consider it to be problematic. (In the case of the Challenger, nasa had been warned that the shuttle’s O-rings were likely to fail in…

Read More Read More

Cheney stokes GOP rift with ‘big lie’ rebuke of Trump

Cheney stokes GOP rift with ‘big lie’ rebuke of Trump

Politico reports: Rep. Liz Cheney on Monday escalated her feud with former President Donald Trump and his supporters in Congress, issuing a less-than-subtle swipe at the former president’s latest attempt to claim the 2020 election was stolen from him. On Monday morning, Trump issued a statement from his Save America PAC proclaiming that the presidential election “will be, from this day forth, known as THE BIG LIE!” — an attempt to appropriate the label given to the false claim by…

Read More Read More

Giuliani raids signal accountability is coming for the Trump era

Giuliani raids signal accountability is coming for the Trump era

Norman Eisen writes: Former President Donald Trump and his cronies should beware. The search warrants executed against Trump’s former personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, mark a leap forward in the Department of Justice’s look into the past four years of potential illegalities. It signals turbulent waters ahead for Giuliani and his former client alike. These warrants are not easy to get. You need to convince a judge there is probable cause of wrongdoing. The warrant must also pass tough review at…

Read More Read More

Trump’s secret rules for drone strikes and presidents’ unchecked license to kill

Trump’s secret rules for drone strikes and presidents’ unchecked license to kill

Hina Shamsi writes: On Friday night, in response to transparency lawsuits filed by the ACLU and the New York Times, the Biden administration released a redacted version of President Trump’s rules for the use of lethal force against terrorism suspects abroad. During the Trump administration, the Times and other media reported that the Trump rules weakened even the loose policy safeguards put in place by the Obama administration in 2013, which were also released in response to litigation in 2016….

Read More Read More

With constructor theory, the physicist, Chiara Marletto, invokes the impossible

With constructor theory, the physicist, Chiara Marletto, invokes the impossible

Amanda Gefter writes: They say that in art, constraints lead to creativity. The same seems to be true of the universe. By placing limits on nature, the laws of physics squeeze out reality’s most fantastical creations. Limit light’s speed, and suddenly space can shrink, time can slow. Limit the ability to divide energy into infinitely small units, and the full weirdness of quantum mechanics blossoms. “Declaring something impossible leads to more things being possible,” writes the physicist Chiara Marletto. “Bizarre…

Read More Read More

We still don’t know who the coronavirus’s victims were

We still don’t know who the coronavirus’s victims were

Ibram X. Kendi writes: To reflect on the racial pandemic of the past year is to reflect on the ravages of multiple viruses, all mutating from the original American virus: racism. People of color—already forced into the shadows of society—were infected, hospitalized, impoverished, and killed at the highest rates by COVID-19. All the while, they received the fewest medical and economic protections—prolonging, deepening, and spreading their suffering. The groups of people who suffered the most from COVID-19 in the United…

Read More Read More