Music: Ivan Lins — ‘Setembro’
Delta variant could create ‘two Americas’ of Covid, experts warn
BuzzFeed News reports: The Delta coronavirus variant, which devastated India and forced the UK to delay lifting its remaining coronavirus restrictions, is now on the rise in the US. What that means for you will depend on whether you are fully vaccinated and where you live. Experts say we may be about to see the emergence of “two Americas” of COVID: One with high rates of vaccination where the Delta coronavirus variant poses little threat, and the other with low…
How Republican states are expanding their power over elections
The New York Times reports: Lonnie Hollis has been a member of the Troup County election board in West Georgia since 2013. A Democrat and one of two Black women on the board, she has advocated Sunday voting, helped voters on Election Days and pushed for a new precinct location at a Black church in a nearby town. But this year, Ms. Hollis will be removed from the board, the result of a local election law signed by Gov. Brian…
A simple remedy for January 6 trutherism
Jack Shafer writes: The human appetite for alternative, and usually hair-brained, explanations for why events blossomed the way they did can never be sated. Oh, you can battle a poison fruitcake ideology like QAnon to the point that it can be contained in a 55-gallon drum and sealed. You can repel one nutter idea after another—Obama birtherism, Benghazi, Sandy Hook, the Katrina levee breach, Bush’s foreknowledge of 9/11—a new one will pop up to replace it like a target in…
That ‘well-regulated militia?’ It was originally created to quell rebellions by the enslaved
Leonard Pitts Jr. writes: Conservatives have a special purgatory for uppity black women who dare question America’s founding myths. New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones — her Pulitzer Prize-winning “1619 Project” centralized slavery in America’s origin story, a heresy that inspired laws banning her work from classrooms — now lives there. And she’s about to have company. In her new book, “The Second,” Emory University history professor Carol Anderson takes on an even more sacred cow: guns. She argues that…
Drought-stricken communities push back against resource hungry data centers
NBC News reports: On May 17, the City Council of Mesa, Arizona, approved the $800 million development of an enormous data center — a warehouse filled with computers storing all of the photos, documents and other information we store “in the cloud” — on an arid plot of land in the eastern part of the city. But keeping the rows of powerful computers inside the data center from overheating will require up to 1.25 million gallons of water each day,…
Trump’s commerce secretary Wilbur Ross raked in $53 million while in public office
HuffPost reports: Donald Trump’s commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, earned at least $53 million from private companies while he was collecting a taxpayer salary and supposed to be looking out for the public instead of his own profits. Ross reported making somewhere between $53 million and $127 million during his four years as head of the Commerce Department. The federal government only requires officials to report broad ranges of outside income. It’s possible that Ross earned “significantly more” since he was…
Africa’s ancient scripts counter European ideas of literacy
D Vance Smith writes: Four different writing systems have been used in Algeria. Three are well known – Phoenician, Latin and Arabic – while one is both indigenous to Africa and survives only as a writing system. The language it represents is called Old Libyan or Numidian, simply because it was spoken in Numidia and Libya. Since it’s possible that it’s an ancestor of modern Berber languages – although even that’s not clear – the script is usually called Libyco-Berber….
Music: Gretchen Parlato & hr-Bigband — ‘Ugly Beauty’
A deeper look at the history of Black self-liberation
Daina Ramey Berry writes: Two centuries ago, a woman named Esther claimed her freedom. The enslaved woman filed a suit against her enslaver, Bernard H. Buckner, on behalf of herself and her two children in federal court. In 1827, Buckner had intended to move the family to his new home in the District of Columbia, but had neglected to heed a local law requiring him to relocate them within a year of establishing residency. It was a technicality, part of…
How a conservative activist sparked the conflict over critical race theory
Benjamin Wallace-Wells writes: Remote work turned out to be advantageous for people looking to leak information to reporters. Instructions that once might have been given in conversation now often had to be written down and beamed from one home office to another. Holding a large meeting on Zoom often required e-mailing supporting notes and materials—more documents to leak. Before the pandemic, if you thought that an anti-racism seminar at your workplace had gone awry, you had to be both brave…
Earth is now trapping an ‘unprecedented’ amount of heat, NASA says
The Washington Post reports: The amount of heat Earth traps has roughly doubled since 2005, contributing to more rapidly warming oceans, air and land, according to new research from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “The magnitude of the increase is unprecedented,” said Norman Loeb, a NASA scientist and lead author of the study, which was published this week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. “The Earth is warming faster than expected.” Using satellite data, researchers measured what…
The Republican collapse in Michigan’s suburban Oakland County is a warning sign for Trumpism
Zack Stanton writes: Oakland County “represents the dominant trend in the country because it combines the most affluent and college graduates in increasingly diverse suburbs becoming increasingly and emphatically Democratic,” says Stanley Greenberg, the Democratic pollster whose study of neighboring Macomb County in the mid-1980s put it on the map and elevated “Reagan Democrats” to the forefront of American politics. But that era no longer really describes the central battlefield of America’s suburban politics. Macomb can have its “Reagan Democrats”;…
Where was the FBI before the attack on the Capitol?
Ryan Goodman and Andrew Weissmann write: What did the FBI know before the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol? What did it do to make sure it had the necessary intelligence? And what did the bureau do with what it did know? After two days of recent hearings with FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, these questions remain frustratingly unanswered. Many law enforcement and intelligence agencies fell short in the run-up to Jan. 6; they failed to adequately prepare for the…
Granting Russia ‘great power’ status, wins Biden praise in Moscow
The New York Times reports: For months, Russia’s state news media have ridiculed President Biden as bumbling, confused and well past his prime. But by Thursday, the mood had shifted: Here was a man in the White House, some said, who understands us, whom we can do business with. Mr. Biden’s meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin in Geneva touched off celebrations on Russia’s often over-the-top political talk shows as well as quieter expressions of cautious optimism in Moscow’s foreign…
Could mitochondria be the key to a healthy brain?
Diana Kwon writes: Long before the earliest animals swam through the water-covered surface of Earth’s ancient past, one of the most important encounters in the history of life took place. A primitive bacterium was engulfed by our oldest ancestor — a solo, free-floating cell. The two fused to form a mutually beneficial relationship that has lasted more than a billion years, with the latter providing a safe, comfortable home and the former becoming a powerhouse, fueling the processes necessary to…