Music: Snarky Puppy — ‘Flood’
Trump’s rush to abandon a leadership role in confronting the pandemic
The New York Times reports: Each morning at 8 as the coronavirus crisis was raging in April, Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, convened a small group of aides to steer the administration through what had become a public health, economic and political disaster. Seated around Mr. Meadows’s conference table and on a couch in his office down the hall from the Oval Office, they saw their immediate role as practical problem solvers. Produce more ventilators. Find more…
‘Invictus’ was among John Lewis’s favorite poems. It captures his indomitable spirit
David Greenberg writes: Some children have an uncanny sense of their destiny. As a boy, John Lewis loved William Ernest Henley’s poem “Invictus.” His sister Ethel Mae Tyner once told an interviewer that she remembered her big brother reciting it around the house. In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed. Could the boy reciting those lines have imagined that he would famously endure…
How to fix the Covid-19 dumpster fire in the U.S.
STAT reports: There’s no point in sugar-coating this. The U.S. response to the Covid-19 pandemic is a raging dumpster fire. Where a number of countries in Asia and Europe have managed to dampen spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus to the point where they can consider returning to a semblance of normalcy — friends from Paris just emailed me pictures from their Sicilian vacation — many international borders remain closed to Americans. On Sunday, Florida reported more than 15,000 cases —…
Rancor between scientists and Trump allies threatens pandemic response as cases surge
The Washington Post reports: This week’s remarkable character assault by some top White House advisers on Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious-disease expert, signified President Trump’s hostility toward medical expertise and has produced a chilling effect among the government scientists and public health professionals laboring to end the pandemic, according to administration officials and health experts. As novel coronavirus cases surge out of control coast to coast, the open rancor between the scientific community and a White House determined…
Portland officials decry aggressive tactics of federal agents in their city
The Washington Post reports: City officials on Friday demanded the Trump administration remove what they called a heavy-handed army of federal agents who have been grabbing protesters off the streets — tactics that federal officials defended as legal and necessary to quell ongoing unrest. The fight between the White House and the left-leaning city government intensified Friday amid videos and firsthand accounts of mysterious federal agents driving around in unmarked rental minivans and detaining protesters. Friday night saw additional clashes,…
Federal officers deployed in Portland didn’t have proper training, DHS memo said
The New York Times reports: The heavily armed federal agents facing a growing backlash for their militarized approach to weeks of unrest in Portland were not specifically trained in riot control or mass demonstrations, an internal Department of Homeland Security memo warned this week. The message dated Thursday was prepared by the agency for Chad F. Wolf, the acting secretary of Homeland Security, as he arrived in Portland to view the scene in person, according to a copy of the…
Social media and the death of good-faith debate
Lili Loofbourow writes: A number of public thinkers are pining for a culture capable of hosting spirited debate in a neutral “marketplace” of ideas. In this vision, intellectual exchange is unencumbered by personal attacks or harsh judgment or, indeed—to preserve freedom of inquiry—the risk of professional consequences. And at the moment, many intellectuals seem most focused on curbing these “illiberal” tendencies on the left. The left, they say, have declared certain ideas off-limits for debate, dismissing those who want to…
Music: Wes Montgomery — ‘Angel’
Trump’s secret police abducting protesters in Portland
The Washington Post reports: When several men in green military fatigues and generic “police” patches sprang out of an unmarked gray minivan in front of Mark Pettibone in the early hours of Wednesday morning, his first instinct was to run. He did not know whether the men were police or far-right extremists, who frequently don militarylike outfits and harass left-leaning protesters in Portland, Ore. The 29-year-old resident said he made it about a half-block before he realized there would be…
A century ago, schools beat a pandemic with outdoor classes. We should, too
Ginia Bellafante writes: In the early years of the 20th century, tuberculosis ravaged American cities, taking a particular and often fatal toll on the poor and the young. In 1907, two Rhode Island doctors, Mary Packard and Ellen Stone, had an idea for mitigating transmission among children. Following education trends in Germany, they proposed the creation of an open-air schoolroom. Within a matter of months, the floor of an empty brick building in Providence was converted into a space with…
White House task force report says 18 states in coronavirus ‘red zone’ should roll back reopening
CNN reports: An unpublished document prepared for the White House coronavirus task force and obtained by the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit newsroom, recommends that 18 states in the coronavirus “red zone” for cases should roll back reopening measures amid surging cases. The “red zone” is defined in the 359-page report as “those core-based statistical areas (CBSAs) and counties that during the last week reported both new cases above 100 per 100,000 population, and a diagnostic test positivity result…
Colorado’s police now have a legal incentive to think before they act
The Atlantic reports: In Loveland, Colorado—the nation’s self-proclaimed “Sweetheart City,” about an hour’s drive north of Denver—a young police officer paused earlier this month as he was arresting a pregnant woman who had outstanding warrants. Should he handcuff her, the officer asked his supervisors, or, under a new Colorado policing law, would that now be considered excessive force? To officers like Rob Pride, a Loveland patrol sergeant who relayed that example to me last week, that kind of hesitation is…
White supremacy was her world. Then she left
Seyward Darby writes: Hate always exists, but it surges during periods of social upheaval, offering racist explanations for seismic change. The Ku Klux Klan formed after the Civil War and reached its zenith in the 1920s, in an expanding, diversifying country. “Its allures were manifold,” the historian Linda Gordon writes of the Klan. “They included the rewards of being an insider, of belonging to a community, of expressing and acting on resentments, of participating in drama, of feeling religiously and…
Netanyahu’s annexation plan turning into fiasco
Al Monitor reports: “Right now, I put the chances of Israeli annexation of any part of the West Bank at low to nonexistent,” a top Israeli security official told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity. “There are too many conditions and circumstances that have to occur and ripen before that can happen.” The first condition is a green light from Washington, which is currently nowhere in sight. US President Donald Trump appears to have lost interest in the issue he so…
How the first Americans made their way from Siberia to Patagonia
Gillen D’Arcy Wood writes: In the summer of 1977, on a field trip in northern Patagonia, the American archaeologist Tom Dillehay made a stunning discovery. Digging by a creek in a nondescript scrubland called Monte Verde, in southern Chile, he came upon the remains of an ancient camp. A full excavation uncovered the trace wooden foundations of no fewer than 12 huts, plus one larger structure designed for tool manufacture and perhaps as an infirmary. In the large hut, Dillehay…