Music: The KutiMangoes — ‘A Snake Is Just a String’
All across America, Black and Latino people have been disproportionately affected by the coronavirus
The New York Times reports: Teresa and Marvin Bradley can’t say for sure how they got the coronavirus. Maybe Ms. Bradley, a Michigan nurse, brought it from her hospital. Maybe it came from a visiting relative. Maybe it was something else entirely. What is certain — according to new federal data that provides the most comprehensive look to date on nearly 1.5 million coronavirus patients in America — is that the Bradleys are not outliers. Racial disparities in who contracts…
How Hong Kong beat coronavirus and avoided lockdown
CNBC reports: When Apple closed its retail stores around the globe amid the coronavirus pandemic, a handful of outlets were exempt, including its six locations in Hong Kong. In fact, much of Hong Kong has felt relatively normal this year compared with its peers, which enacted strict lockdown measures. Since its first confirmed case of Covid-19 on Jan. 22, Hong Kong went through phased closures of government offices, schools, gyms and bars. But other services were relatively unaffected, including dine-in…
Mounting evidence the coronavirus is airborne, 239 experts say
The New York Times reports: The coronavirus is finding new victims worldwide, in bars and restaurants, offices, markets and casinos, giving rise to frightening clusters of infection that increasingly confirm what many scientists have been saying for months: The virus lingers in the air indoors, infecting those nearby. If airborne transmission is a significant factor in the pandemic, especially in crowded spaces with poor ventilation, the consequences for containment will be significant. Masks may be needed indoors, even in socially-distant…
Going to the beach during the pandemic may not be as reckless as it’s portrayed
Zeynep Tufekci writes: We’ve entered another risky, uncertain phase of America’s pandemic summer. COVID-19 cases are surging across most states, and once again, intensive-care units are filling up. Eighteen states have either paused or rolled back their plans to reopen, and even Republican governors who previously resisted public-health guidelines about masks are now asking people to mask up. So why on Earth do so many articles about this crisis feature pictures of people frolicking on wide-open beaches? Why is an…
A me-too moment for journalists of color
Soledad O’Brien writes: I left CNN more than seven years ago. But I watch its coverage, and that of other news networks — the panel-driven journalism that sometimes gives voice to liars and white supremacists; the excuse of “balance” to embolden and normalize bigots and bigotry by posing them as the “other side.” When I criticize CNN (as I do frequently on social media), the company attacks me as “more of a liberal activist than a journalist,” a common dig…
White supremacist ideas have historical roots in white American Christianity
NPR reports: When a young Southern Baptist pastor named Alan Cross arrived in Montgomery, Ala., in January 2000, he knew it was where the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. had his first church and where Rosa Parks helped launched the famous bus boycott, but he didn’t know some other details of the city’s role in civil rights history. The more he learned, the more troubled he became by one event in particular: the savage attack in May 1961 on a…
DNA linked to severe Covid-19 was inherited from Neanderthals, study finds
The New York Times reports: A stretch of DNA linked to Covid-19 was passed down from Neanderthals 60,000 years ago, according to a new study. Scientists don’t yet know why this particular segment increases the risk of severe illness from the coronavirus. But the new findings, which were posted online on Friday and have not yet been published in a scientific journal, show how some clues to modern health stem from ancient history. “This interbreeding effect that happened 60,000 years…
Music: The KutiMangoes — ‘Keep You Safe’
Trump’s push to amplify racism unnerves Republicans who have long enabled him
The Washington Post reports: President Trump’s unyielding push to preserve Confederate symbols and the legacy of white domination, crystallized by his harsh denunciation of the racial justice movement Friday night at Mount Rushmore, has unnerved Republicans who have long enabled him but now fear losing power and forever associating their party with his racial animus. Although amplifying racism and stoking culture wars have been mainstays of Trump’s public identity for decades, they have been particularly pronounced this summer as the…
Trump’s mishandling of the pandemic has turned America into a pariah
Anne Applebaum writes: [E]veryone can look at everyone else’s country, read its media and social media, see how its institutions are coping with the crisis. We can’t leave our houses, but we can meet in cyberspace, where we can keep talking. While we are there, we can see how other countries are dealing with the pandemic. Some are doing well, especially those that have decent bureaucrats, respect for science, and high levels of trust: South Korea and Taiwan, Germany and…
‘White power’ video was a glimpse into Trump-era political discourse in ‘America’s friendliest’ retirement community
The Washington Post reports: Sharon Sandler was already irritated as she walked toward the growing line of golf carts preparing to parade around one of her retirement community’s town squares for President Trump’s birthday. Sandler, who is in her 60s, had spent the early afternoon of June 14 at an anti-racism vigil that sought to honor the memory of people killed by police, but whoever controlled the Villages’ sound system wouldn’t lower the volume, she said, so a solemn moment…
No one wants to go back to lockdown. Is there a middle ground for containing Covid-19?
STAT reports: First came the freezes. Governors last month started to “press pause” on the next phases of their reopenings as Covid-19 cases picked back up. Now, in certain hot spots, they are starting to roll back some of the allowances they’d granted: no more elective medical procedures in some Texas counties. Bars, only reopened for a short time, are shuttered again in parts of California. And on Monday, Arizona’s governor ordered a new wave of gym, bar, and movie…
Rapid Arctic meltdown in Siberia alarms scientists
The Washington Post reports: Alexander Deyev can still taste the smoke from last year’s wildfires that blanketed the towns near his home in southeastern Siberia, and he is dreading their return. “It just felt like you couldn’t breathe at all,” said Deyev, 32, who lives in Irkutsk, a Siberian region along Lake Baikal, just north of the Mongolian border. But already this year, fires in the spring arrived earlier and with more ferocity, government officials have said. In the territory…
How real revolutions happen
Rebecca L. Spang writes: Three months ago, a global pandemic and a sudden economic crisis looked grave enough to suggest that something—if not a revolution, then at least the stirrings of a revolutionary era—was under way. Since then, the revolt against the pre-coronavirus status quo has only gained force. Crowds chanting “Black lives matter” and “Enough is enough” have marched all across the country. Statues have been toppled, buildings have been renamed, and pollsters report that public opinion has shifted…
The Boogaloo tipping point
Dale Beran writes: On May 29, two federal security officers guarding a courthouse in Oakland, California, were ambushed by machine-gun fire as elsewhere in the city demonstrators marched peacefully to protest the killing of George Floyd. One of the guards, David Patrick Underwood, died as a result of the attack, and the other was wounded. For days, conservative news broadcasters pinned the blame on “antifa,” the loosely affiliated group of anti-fascist anarchists known to attack property and far-right demonstrators at…