Cheney and Kinzinger call out GOP leaders at first Capitol riot hearing

Cheney and Kinzinger call out GOP leaders at first Capitol riot hearing

Politico reports: The two House Republicans participating in the Democratic-led investigation into the Jan. 6 Capitol attack issued pointed rejoinders to their party’s leadership, defending their own conservative credibility, during the select panel’s first hearing on Tuesday. An emotional Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois spent much of his questioning time criticizing fellow Republicans who “have treated this as just another partisan fight.” While he didn’t mention House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy by name, the GOP leader has chastised Kinzinger and…

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As virus cases rise, anger increases among the vaccinated

As virus cases rise, anger increases among the vaccinated

The New York Times reports: As coronavirus cases resurge across the country, many inoculated Americans are losing patience with vaccine holdouts who, they say, are neglecting a civic duty or clinging to conspiracy theories and misinformation even as new patients arrive in emergency rooms and the nation renews mask advisories. The country seemed to be exiting the pandemic; barely a month ago, a sense of celebration was palpable. Now many of the vaccinated fear for their unvaccinated children and worry…

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‘What’s Covid?’ Why people at America’s hardest-partying lake are not about to get vaccinated

‘What’s Covid?’ Why people at America’s hardest-partying lake are not about to get vaccinated

Politico reports: The petite blonde bartender in ripped jean shorts bounced to each side of a square-shaped bar as women in bikinis and shirtless men lined up on a sweltering afternoon to order Bud Light, vodka and soda, and piles of nachos at this dockside retreat in the Lake of the Ozarks region. In a county designated a Covid hot spot, in a state with one of the lowest vaccination rates in the nation, and in a region where hospitals…

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Tunisia’s democracy verges on collapse as president moves to take control

Tunisia’s democracy verges on collapse as president moves to take control

The New York Times reports: Tunisia’s fledgling democracy, the only one remaining from the popular revolutions that swept the Arab world a decade ago, trembled on the brink of collapse Monday after its president sought to seize power from the rest of the government in what his political opponents denounced as a coup. The president, Kais Saied, who announced the power grab late Sunday, did not appear to have completely succeeded in taking control as of Monday evening, as chaos…

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The woman who brought us the world

The woman who brought us the world

Alice Dragoon writes: Had Virginia Tower Norwood listened to her high school guidance counselor, she would have become a librarian. Her aptitude test showed a remarkable facility with numbers, and in 1943, he could think of no better way for a young woman to put such skills to use. Luckily, Norwood didn’t suffer from the same lack of imagination. The salutatorian of her Philadelphia high school class, she had long been devouring logic puzzles and putting the slide rule her…

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The seven climate tipping points that could change the world forever

The seven climate tipping points that could change the world forever

Alexandria Herr, Shannon Osaka, and Maddie Stone report: In 2019 an international team of scientists published a commentary in the celebrated science journal Nature, sounding the alarm of a planet in crisis — and calling for transformative change. “We are in a state of planetary emergency,” they wrote, departing from the usual sterility of scientific writing. “The stability and resilience of our planet is in peril.” Yes, they were writing about climate change, but of a particular kind: climate tipping…

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Facebook pledged to bring the world together but wound up pulling us apart

Facebook pledged to bring the world together but wound up pulling us apart

Jill Lepore writes: Facebook has a save-the-world mission statement—“to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together”—that sounds like a better fit for a church, and not some little wood-steepled, white-clapboarded, side-of-the-road number but a castle-in-a-parking-lot megachurch, a big-as-a-city-block cathedral, or, honestly, the Vatican. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s C.E.O., announced this mission the summer after the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, replacing the company’s earlier and no less lofty purpose: “to give people the power to share…

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Your vaccinated immune system is ready for breakthroughs

Your vaccinated immune system is ready for breakthroughs

Katherine J. Wu writes: A new dichotomy has begun dogging the pandemic discourse. With the rise of the über-transmissible Delta variant, experts are saying you’re either going to get vaccinated, or going to get the coronavirus. For some people—a decent number of us, actually—it’s going to be both. Coronavirus infections are happening among vaccinated people. They’re going to keep happening as long as the virus is with us, and we’re nowhere close to beating it. When a virus has so…

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‘We’re f—ed’: Democrats fear turnout catastrophe from GOP voting laws

‘We’re f—ed’: Democrats fear turnout catastrophe from GOP voting laws

Politico reports: After Georgia Republicans passed a restrictive voting law in March, Democrats here began doing the math. The state’s new voter I.D. requirement for mail-in ballots could affect the more than 270,000 Georgians lacking identification. The provision cutting the number of ballot drop boxes could affect hundreds of thousands of voters who cast absentee ballots that way in 2020 — and that’s just in the populous Atlanta suburbs alone. It didn’t take long before the implications became clear to…

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The spyware threat to journalists

The spyware threat to journalists

Steve Coll writes: Khadija Ismayilova, an investigative reporter from Azerbaijan, is an icon among the subtribe of journalists who work to expose cross-border financial corruption. She has broken big stories about money laundering and dodgy banking, despite being targeted by President Ilham Aliyev’s authoritarian regime. Operatives planted cameras in her home in Baku and, in 2012, released a video of her having sex with her boyfriend. In 2014, she was arrested on trumped-up charges that included tax evasion; a court…

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New research finds time spent among trees might help kids’ brains grow and develop

New research finds time spent among trees might help kids’ brains grow and develop

Science Alert reports: As a child grows and develops, the neurons in their brain are said to branch like trees. Being around this very type of foliage could actually help the process along. A long-term study among 3,568 students in London, between the ages of 9 and 15, has found those kids who spent more time near woodlands showed improved cognitive performance and mental health in adolescence. On the other hand, other natural environments, like grasslands or lakes and rivers,…

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Stuck in the smoke as billionaires blast off

Stuck in the smoke as billionaires blast off

Naomi Klein writes: Many people here think they are safe from climate change, the journalist from a German newspaper explained to me. They don’t see it as an immediate threat, like Covid-19. They see the Greens as scolds who want to take away their cheap holidays. “What do you have to say to them?” The question came via video call in late June, and I was, at that very moment, pickled in my non-air-conditioned home, gripped by a heatwave that…

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What climate scientists are saying about this catastrophic summer

What climate scientists are saying about this catastrophic summer

Slate reports: By all accounts, the climate crisis is already here. Deadly heat domes across the Pacific Northwest, a petroleum pipeline leak in the middle of the ocean that set the Gulf of Mexico on fire, and the deadly floods in Germany and Belgium in the past few weeks alone have proved that the world is changing in response to how we have changed it.* No one should be surprised by this. For decades, scientists have been ringing the alarm…

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We may finally know why the delta variant of coronavirus is so infectious

We may finally know why the delta variant of coronavirus is so infectious

Live Science reports: People infected with the delta variant of the novel coronavirus may be carrying more than a thousand times more virus particles and may test positive two days earlier than those infected with the original SARS-CoV-2, according to an early new study. The study has not been peer reviewed and looked at only a small number of cases in China, but if the results can be confirmed, they may explain, at least in part, why the delta variant…

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