America’s Eldercare System Is a Tinderbox
One of the earliest signs that the coronavirus was about to overtake the United States was the February outbreak at a nursing home facility outside of Seattle. At the Life Care Center in Kirkland,...
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The Other Latif and the Radiolab Problem
The Other Latif—a new serialized podcast and radio show by Latif Nasser, a producer at the WNYC subsidiary Radiolab—is about a case of overlapping identities. After discovering that a detainee at...
View ArticleThe Deranged Push to Get Americans Back to Work
Reports began emerging earlier this week that President Donald Trump has been getting restless about the severity of the nation’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, worrying both that the crisis...
View ArticleWhy Politicians Can’t Stop Talking About “Folks”
Any recent history of “folks” in political discourse must begin with Barack Obama, who used the word more than twice as often as any other president, according to a BuzzFeed analysis. When discussing...
View ArticleThe Climate Crisis Will Be Just as Shockingly Abrupt
As governments around the globe debate how to respond both to the coronavirus itself and the economic chaos it has unleashed, a theme that’s come up over and over is how to prioritize what makes it...
View ArticleTwo Weeks in an Oligarchy
Two Sundays ago, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, devoted YMCA member and erstwhile presidential hopeful, reluctantly closed the city’s public schools after pleas from multiple city officials and...
View ArticleProtecting Native Elders in a Pandemic
The coronavirus has reached every state in the country, and the impact on Indian Country is no different as the virus has spread quickly through tribal nations. Healthcare systems in Native...
View ArticleDarling, Let’s Do Coronavirus in the Hamptons This Year
Goldman Sachs co-head of investment banking Gregg Lemkau wants to disabuse you of any notion that working from his summer home in Hawaii is all it’s cracked up to be. Lamkau complained on Twitter this...
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The Bonkers Appeal of The Tiger King
In retrospect, Carole Baskin probably should have taken it more seriously the day her mailbox exploded with snakes. A self-appointed champion for the rights of big cats, Carole received those snakes...
View ArticleRent Strike Nation
Last week, the head of the St. Louis Federal Reserve, James Bullard, predicted that in the second quarter of 2020, the U.S. economy could see a 30 percent unemployment rate and a 50 percent drop in...
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The Caged Ballot
A week before last Thanksgiving, a group of Republican attorneys gathered at the tony Madison Club a few blocks from the Wisconsin State Capitol to learn what they could do to help reelect President...
View ArticleDon’t Worry About Supermarket Shelves. Worry About Farmers.
For longtime central Michigan farmer Bob Thompson, the coronavirus comes at a particularly bad moment. “It has been a tumultuous period these four or five years in agriculture. It has pushed many...
View ArticleA Tale of Two Stimulus Packages
As Congress rushed to pass a $2.2 trillion stimulus package last week, many in the press could only marvel. Not only was the size of the bill itself unprecedented—dwarfing 2009’s $831 billion stimulus...
View ArticleThe Backstreet Boys Can’t Help You
In the United Kingdom, the government has pledged to cover 80 percent of the wages of workers left unemployed as the result of the coronavirus. Ireland has enacted an emergency nationalization of its...
View ArticleThis Is Crisis Colonization
On Saturday morning, as hundreds of tribes were mobilizing their emergency responses to the coronavirus, a shock wave reverberated through Indian Country: Mashpee Wampanoag Chairman Cedric Cromwell...
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Welcome to the Zoom Party
In 2011, a New York Times piece announced the rise of videoconferencing. Skype had been around since 2003, but Microsoft had just bought the company, and a “critical mass” of businesses was starting to...
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Policing and the English Language
Just before dawn on a cold April Saturday, Officers Thomas Shea and Walter Scott were patrolling the neighborhood of South Jamaica, Queens, where a rash of parked cars had recently been broken into and...
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How America’s Newspapers Covered Up a Pandemic
When Donald Trump first declared that the coronavirus shutdown would be over by Easter, he was embracing a hallowed American tradition of happy-talk denial. As the polymath president (part wartime...
View ArticleThe Health Insurance Crisis at Our Doorstep
The coronavirus pandemic has placed America squarely in the middle of two major crises: A public health crisis, with millions poised to become severely sickened; and an economic crisis, as necessary...
View ArticleThe Paranoid Style of America in a Pandemic
Last week, as I waited in the social-distance line outside a medical pot store on Martin Luther King Boulevard in Fayetteville, Arkansas, I overheard two men in front of me talking. Both, like me, were...
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