The most likely timeline for life to return to normal

The most likely timeline for life to return to normal

Joe Pinsker writes: The end of the coronavirus pandemic is on the horizon at last, but the timeline for actually getting there feels like it shifts daily, with updates about viral variants, vaccine logistics, and other important variables seeming to push back the finish line or scoot it forward. When will we be able to finally live our lives again? Pandemics are hard to predict accurately, but we have enough information to make some confident guesses. A useful way to…

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California’s coronavirus strain looks increasingly dangerous: ‘The devil is already here’

California’s coronavirus strain looks increasingly dangerous: ‘The devil is already here’

The Los Angeles Times reports: A coronavirus variant that emerged in mid-2020 and surged to become the dominant strain in California not only spreads more readily than its predecessors, but also evades antibodies generated by COVID-19 vaccines or prior infection and is associated with severe illness and death, researchers said. In a study that helps explain the state’s dramatic surge in COVID-19 cases and deaths — and portends further trouble ahead — scientists at UC San Francisco said the cluster…

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Lawrence Ferlinghetti changed American culture forever

Lawrence Ferlinghetti changed American culture forever

Fred Kaplan writes: Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who died on Monday at the age of 101, was one of the key figures in 20th-century American culture. He was as responsible as any single other person for the rise of the Beats, the end of obscenity laws, and, not least, the transformation of San Francisco from a backwater province to a vibrant artistic center. He did all this through the creation and flourishing of a bookstore, City Lights—which, seven decades after its founding,…

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How Assad’s worst chemical weapon attack changed history

How Assad’s worst chemical weapon attack changed history

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad writes: In the early hours of Aug. 21, 2013, Scott Cairns was struggling to sleep in his room at the Four Seasons Hotel in Damascus. Cairns was part of a United Nations mission headed by the Swedish scientist Åke Sellström to investigate the regime’s alleged use of chemical weapons. The mission included representatives from the World Health Organization and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). As the head of the OPCW contingent, Cairns had…

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Pankaj Mishra’s reckoning with liberalism’s bloody past

Pankaj Mishra’s reckoning with liberalism’s bloody past

Kanishk Tharoor writes: For nearly three decades, Mishra has skewered the pieties of politicians and intellectuals in the Anglophone world (including India, which boasts more English speakers than the United Kingdom), while also bringing his spirited attention to the histories and imaginations of people outside circles of wealth and power. The scales first fell from his eyes during his travels and reporting in Kashmir in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In the disputed Indian-administered territory, he saw firsthand the…

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Why does the pandemic seem to be hitting some countries harder than others?

Why does the pandemic seem to be hitting some countries harder than others?

Siddhartha Mukherjee writes: On December 2nd, Mukul Ganguly, an eighty-three-year-old retired civil engineer in Kolkata, India, went to the Salt Lake Market to buy fish. The pandemic was surging around much of the world, and he wasn’t oblivious of the risks of spending time at a wet market. His wife, a former forensic analyst, protested vehemently. But Mr. Ganguly wouldn’t be deterred. He picked up his fabric shopping bag, tucked a doubled-up handkerchief in his pocket, and stepped out. Mr….

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Here’s what WHO’s COVID-19 mission to China found about the origins of the coronavirus

Here’s what WHO’s COVID-19 mission to China found about the origins of the coronavirus

By Dominic Dwyer, University of Sydney As I write, I am in hotel quarantine in Sydney, after returning from Wuhan, China. There, I was the Australian representative on the international World Health Organization’s (WHO) investigation into the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Much has been said of the politics surrounding the mission to investigate the viral origins of COVID-19. So it’s easy to forget that behind these investigations are real people. As part of the mission, we met the man…

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The Democrats’ last chance to save democracy

The Democrats’ last chance to save democracy

Michael Klarman writes: Supporters of Donald Trump assaulted the capitol on January 6, 2021, but American democracy has been under siege for far longer—from both former President Trump and the Republican Party. Trump’s transgressions against democracy are well known: They include having attacked the press as the “enemy of the people,” assailed sitting judges, politicized the Justice Department and the intelligence agencies, undermined transparency in government, encouraged political violence, and delegitimized elections. The Republican Party’s undermining of democracy began much…

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Trump is extremely mad that prosecutors will see his tax returns

Trump is extremely mad that prosecutors will see his tax returns

Jonathan Chait writes: Donald Trump’s yearslong quest to prevent the public, Congress, or law-enforcement officials from seeing his tax statements came to a resounding end with a unanimous Supreme Court ruling. He did not take the defeat in stride. Instead, the former president released a statement that, even by Trumpian standards, brims with anger. Trump’s response bears every hallmark of an authentically Trump-authored text, as opposed to the knockoff versions produced by his aides. It is meandering, filled with run-on…

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Biden deprioritizes the Middle East

Biden deprioritizes the Middle East

Politico reports: President Joe Biden is tired of dealing with the Middle East — and, barely a month into his tenure, the region has noticed. The signals are not meant to be subtle, his advisers say. The president has made only one call to a head of state in the Middle East — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday — which itself was delayed by more than three weeks and followed calls to other allies and even adversaries like…

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How John Gray’s philosophy helped me understand my war experience

How John Gray’s philosophy helped me understand my war experience

Andy Owen writes: I first read the English philosopher John Gray while sitting in the silence of the still, mid-afternoon heat of Helmand Province in Afghanistan. In Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (2007), Gray showed how the United States’ president George W Bush and the United Kingdom’s prime minister Tony Blair framed the ‘war on terror’ (which I was part of) as an apocalyptic struggle that would forge the new American century of liberal democracy, where…

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By summer, the pandemic may feel like it’s behind us — even if it’s not

By summer, the pandemic may feel like it’s behind us — even if it’s not

James Hamblin writes: Until very recently, Anthony Fauci had been citing August as the month by which the U.S. could vaccinate 70 to 80 percent of the population and reach herd immunity. Last week, he suddenly threw out May or early June as a window for when most Americans could have access to vaccines. Despite some concerns about new coronavirus variants, Ashish Jha, the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, told me that he doesn’t see viral…

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Why Texas Republicans fear the Green New Deal

Why Texas Republicans fear the Green New Deal

Naomi Klein writes: Since the power went out in Texas, the state’s most prominent Republicans have tried to pin the blame for the crisis on, of all things, a sweeping progressive mobilization to fight poverty, inequality and climate change. “This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal,” Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas said Wednesday on Fox News. Pointing to snow-covered solar panels, Rick Perry, a former governor who was later an energy secretary for the Trump…

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‘Mark changed the rules’: How Facebook went easy on Alex Jones and other right-wing figures

‘Mark changed the rules’: How Facebook went easy on Alex Jones and other right-wing figures

BuzzFeed News reports: In April 2019, Facebook was preparing to ban one of the internet’s most notorious spreaders of misinformation and hate, Infowars founder Alex Jones. Then CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally intervened. Jones had gained infamy for claiming that the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school massacre was a “giant hoax,” and that the teenage survivors of the 2018 Parkland shooting were “crisis actors.” But Facebook had found that he was also relentlessly spreading hate against various groups, including Muslims and…

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