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Until recently, cancellation flowed exclusively downward, from the powerful to the powerless

in this era of fallen gatekeepers, where anyone with a Twitter handle or Facebook account can be a publisher, banishment has been ostensibly democratized

the N.F.L. has a different power at its fingertips: the power of monopoly

if we are to construct such a world, we would do well to leave the slight acts of cancellation effected in the quad and cafe, and proceed to more illustrious offices.

The N.F.L. is revered in this country as a paragon of patriotism and chivalry, a sacred trust controlled by some of the wealthiest men and women in America. For the past three years, this sacred trust has executed, with brutal efficiency, the cancellation of Colin Kaepernick.

It would be nice to live in a more forgiving world, one where dissenting from groupthink does not invite exile and people’s occasional lapses are not held up as evidence of who they are

Mr. Kaepernick’s cancellation bars him from making a living at a skill he has been honing since childhood.

the wrongdoing of elite institutions was once hidden from public view, in the era of Donald Trump it is all there to be seen.

A sobering process that began with the broadcast beatings of civil rights marchers at Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma in 1965, then accelerated with the recorded police brutality against Rodney King, has achieved its zenith with the social media sharing of the executions of Walter Scott, Laquan McDonald and Daniel Shaver.

The new cancel culture is the product of a generation born into a world without obscuring myth, where the great abuses, once only hinted at, suspected or uttered on street corners, are now tweeted out in full color

Nothing is sacred anymore, and, more important, nothing is legitimate — least of all those institutions charged with dispensing justice. And so, justice is seized by the crowd.

Mr. Kaepernick is not fighting for a job. He is fighting against cancellation. And his struggle is not merely his own — it is the struggle of Major Taylor, Jack Johnson, Craig Hodges and Muhammad Ali

This isn’t a fight for employment at any cost. It is a fight for a world where we are not shot, or shunned, because the masters of capital, or their agents, do not like our comportment, our attire or what we have to say.

In past instances where Iran has faced acts of military aggression, Tehran has sometimes declined to respond; at other times, it has retaliated with incredible violence, weeks later and thousands of miles from its borders.

Washington has not launched an overt military operation in Iran since the 1980s but U.S. military force directed at both Iran’s allies and adversaries has at times prompted Tehran to reassess its activities in the region.

But looking at Iran’s relations with another adversary, Israel, can provide an insight into Tehran’s playbook. Israel, which traditionally maintains a policy of silence over its overseas military operations, is widely believed to have conducted a series of assassinations inside the Islamic Republic.

Iran’s global network of proxies and partners—many cultivated by Soleimani—gives it a variety of options to retaliate around the world. Nevertheless, experts note that the kind of terrorist attacks seen in the 1990s and 2000s have become less frequent since the establishment of effective deterrents between Hezbollah and Israel in 2006.

At least since President Trump took office in 2016, Iran’s leadership has believed its regional adversaries are seeking to push Tehran into direct confrontation with the U.S. as a means of curbing its influence in the region, says ICG’s Vaez. “The Iranian leadership has tried not to play into the hands of its enemies.

As the Times acknowledged back in September, as media focus started to turn in earnest toward Iowa (five months before any actual voting), the state’s caucuses “disenfranchise huge blocs of voters”, and yet, “to a greater degree than in recent campaigns, this unrepresentative and idiosyncratic state is proving that it is the only electoral battleground that matters for Democrats”. We should be counterbalancing that logic, not eagerly indulging it. And yet, as in so many cycles past, the Iowa feeding frenzy is kicking in again, to the exclusion of other issues, and voices, that matter.

“Today, the American soldier is in danger, tomorrow the European soldier could be in danger,” Rouhani said. ”We want you to leave this region but not with war. We want you to go wisely. It is to your own benefit.” Rouhani did not elaborate.

Rouhani separately criticized Europe’s “baseless” words regarding the nuclear deal. Iran had been holding out for Europe to offer a means by which Tehran could sell its oil abroad despite U.S. sanctions. However, a hoped-for trading mechanism for other goods hasn’t taken hold and a French-pitched line of credit also hasn’t materialized.

The European nations reluctantly triggered the accord’s dispute mechanism on Tuesday to force Iran into discussions, starting the clock on a process that could result in the “snapback” of U.N. and EU sanctions on Iran.

Zarif, speaking in New Delhi at the Raisina Dialogue, blamed U.S. “ignorance” and “arrogance” for “fueling mayhem” in the Middle East. However, he also acknowledged the anger Iranians felt over the plane shoot down. “In the last few nights, we’ve had people in the streets of Tehran demonstrating against the fact that they were lied to for a couple of days,” Zarif said.

Hossein Salami, the head of the Guard, said in a speech that Iran’s “war project was closed since the people stood” against American pressure. “Now, we are moving toward peace,” Salami said. That contradicted Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the head of the Guard’s aerospace program, who blamed the U.S. in part for the shootdown and vowed further revenge.

Iranian state media said the British ambassador to Iran, Robert Macaire, had left the country. Macaire left after being given what the state-run IRNA news agency described as “prior notice,” without elaborating.

Administration officials are especially bullish about that strategy in recent days, as Iran’s government contends with renewed protests and absorbs the killing of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani. And in an ominous turn for Tehran this week, Britain, France and Germany formally accused Iran of violating the 2015 nuclear deal, after months of effectively looking the other way at increased Iranian nuclear activity.

The administration’s current approach “contrasts in an almost perfectly polarized fashion” with Mr. Obama’s, Ms. Maloney said. That strategy, which began with Mr. Trump’s May 2018 abandonment of the nuclear deal and was followed by punishing sanctions on Iran’s financial system and oil exports, “rests on the idea that Iran only responds to really tough pressure.”Ms. Maloney and other analysts say that, like Mr. Obama’s effort at outreach, Mr. Trump’s strangulation approach may also be stymied by an Iranian government that has resisted 40 years of alternating American efforts to reshape or replace it.

Mr. Trump and his top officials insist that is not their goal — especially not through the use of force. “We do not seek war, we do not seek nation-building, we do not seek regime change,” the president said in remarks this month. It is clear, however, that administration officials hope to undermine the Iranian government. Early in Mr. Trump’s presidency, a memo that circulated in his White House written by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a hawkish Washington think tank, suggested “a strategy of coerced democratization” for Iran.

Ayatollah Khamenei, 80, addressed the nation from the Mosalla mosque in the capital. The last time he did so was in 2012 on the 33rd anniversary of the country's Islamic Revolution.

He delivered part of his address in Arabic, calling on the Arab and Islamic world to drive the US out of the region. "The biggest punishment for the United States is its expulsion," he said.

Speaking on behalf of the group, he said on Thursday: "We are here to pursue closure, accountability, transparency and justice for the victims - Ukrainian, Swedish, Afghan, British, Canadian as well as Iranian, through a full, complete and transparent international investigation."

Huge crowds were present to witness the rare sermon, with President Hassan Rouhani in the front row alongside parliament speaker Ali Larijani. The last time Khamenei presided over Friday prayers was in 2012 to mark the 33rd anniversary of the Islamic Revolution.

They come at a pivotal time for Iran, after vigils to mourn those who died in the Ukraine International Airlines crash quickly turned into mass anti-government demonstrations, with calls for Khamenei to step down and for those responsible for downing the plane to be prosecuted.

Iran's military initially denied shooting down the plane before admitting to it several days later, saying the plane was "accidentally hit by human error." Khamenei expressed his condolences to the families of the victims, but said foreign press had tried to deceive Iranians over the crash.

An apparently leaked copy of the publication's February issue cover, shot in front of a pink and green background, began circulating online Sunday. The photo instantly attracted ire on social media for appearing poorly lit and styled, while others suggested it was "disrespectful" to the Vice President-elect.

Vogue "loved the images Tyler Mitchell shot and felt the more informal image captured Vice President-elect Harris's authentic, approachable nature -- which we feel is one of the hallmarks of the Biden/Harris administration.

Explaining the influences behind the cover shoot, Vogue said that the apple green and salmon pink background had been inspired by the colors of Howard University's Alpha Kappa Alpha, the "first historically African American sorority."

The article also said that the Vice President-elect's styling choices "were her own," and that the image "reflects Harris at her casual best."

Playwright and lawyer Wajahat Ali described it as a "mess up," adding that Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour "must really not have Black friends and colleagues."

"Folks are arguing over the photo chosen for VP Harris's Vogue cover, but here's what's important: she looks great, she's being honored, and the cover is driving Trump and Melania nuts,"

The debate comes just over a week before Harris is inaugurated as the first female and first Black and South Asian Vice President. In an accompanying in-depth profile, published online by Vogue on Sunday, Harris recalls the moment the election was called and her subsequent victory speech. She also speaks about climate change and protesting for racial justice.

Elsewhere in the interview, she reiterated that Covid-19 will be the Biden-Harris administration's main priority during its first 100 days.

The most important part of an effective response is to finally, at long last, forge a genuinely bipartisan effort to save our democracy, rejecting the vicious partisanship that has disabled and destabilized government for too long. If we cannot find common ground now, on this core issue at the very heart of our endangered system, we never will.

I propose that Congress creates a new mechanism to help accomplish this purpose. It should create a supremely high-level bipartisan and nonpartisan commission to oversee the election. This commission would not circumvent existing electoral reporting systems or those that tabulate, evaluate or certify the results. But it would monitor those mechanisms and confirm for the public that the laws and regulations governing them have been scrupulously and expeditiously followed — or that violations have been exposed and dealt with — without political prejudice and without regard to political interests of either party.

If we fail to take every conceivable effort to ensure the integrity of our election, the winners will not be Donald Trump or Joe Biden, Republicans or Democrats. The only winners will be Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Ali Khamenei. No one who supports a healthy democracy could want that.

Before Trump, I’d never had the feeling of wanting to fast-forward through the era I was living in, of longing to be in the future, looking back at how it all turned out.

Of course, it can be thrilling when art and entertainment are politically relevant. But when politics are so alarming that the rest of the world seems to recede, it creates cultural claustrophobia. Since Election Day 2016, writers, artists and critics have wondered what many forms of cultural production — novels, fine art, theater, fashion — mean “in the age of Trump.” It’s a cliché — one I know I’ve used — about the reorientation of almost everything around the monstrous fact of the Trump presidency.

Living in Trump’s panic-inducing eternal present is bad for art, but it’s also bad for imagination more broadly, including the imagination needed to conceive a future in which Trumpism is unthinkable.

With that, Australia’s leaders decided they had seen enough. On Friday, the country’s immigration minister canceled Mr. Djokovic’s visa for a second time, putting his bid to win a record 21st Grand Slam title in grave doubt.

In the final tally, a country far from the epicenters of Covid suffering, where sport is a revered forum for right and wrong, has become an enforcer of the collectivist values that the entire world has been struggling to maintain during the pandemic.

Mr. Djokovic sought to play by his own rules. First, he admitted submitting an entry form at the airport that falsely said he had not traveled internationally in the 14 days before he arrived in Melbourne. He had in fact been flying during that time between his native Serbia and Spain. (The misstatement was a “human error,” he said, made by his agent.)

And then there was everything he did during the time he believed he might have been exposed to Covid and eventually, in his telling, tested positive — the Covid diagnosis that enabled his vaccine exemption in the first place.

Five days in December, more or less, sank his chances of winning an unmatched 10th Australian Open, as the world saw what his many critics have described as his selfish and reckless disregard for the health of others.

The next day, before he had received the result, he said, he took a rapid antigen test that came back negative. He then attended a junior tennis ceremony in Belgrade, where photographs show him posing without a mask near children.

Later that day, Dec. 17, Mr. Djokovic said he learned about his positive P.C.R. test result. But he did not then go into 14 days of isolation, as the Serbian government requires.

The following day, Dec. 18, he did a media interview and a photo shoot at his tennis center in Belgrade. He later said he knew he was Covid-positive

his behavior after receiving a positive test seems to be what set the world on edge over his moral compass.

Refusing to get vaccinated was one thing. But withholding the fact that he was infectious?

Many Australians saw in Mr. Djokovic’s actions both dishonesty and a disregard for others. Some questioned whether he had really tested positive in the first place, given the convenient timing for his vaccination exemption.

The community spirit that has defined the country’s virus response — with people grinding through lockdowns and longing for family as borders slammed shut, only to then rush out for vaccines — is in an uncertain place at the moment.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison sought to exploit that urge when he pounced on Mr. Djokovic’s first visa cancellation, tweeting barely an hour after it happened on Jan. 6 that “rules are rules.”

He made the point again on Friday evening after the second visa cancellation was announced, four days after a judge had restored it on procedural grounds.

Australians have made many sacrifices during this pandemic, and they rightly expect the result of those sacrifices to be protected,”

With tens of thousands of new Covid cases every day in Australia, and sky-high vaccination rates among the vulnerable, one athlete does not pose much of a threat.

But the “Djokovic affair” is no longer — and maybe never was — just about science.

Dr. Collignon said that three years into the pandemic, it raised the question of moral judgment. “When do we stop punishing people for making bad decisions?” he asked.

In Australia, the answer is “not yet.”

the decent man is the one who doesn’t infect anyone, as Albert Camus wrote in his 1947 novel “The Plague,” and if the prime minister hadn’t jumped on the cause, someone else probably would have.

Sport is life to many Australians. Participation rates are high, and even watching others compete has been described, for generations, as an activity that builds character.

A “character test” sits at the center of a provision that gives the immigration minister the right to deny or cancel a visa for a wide range of reasons, though in this case, he relied on another section that lets the minister reject a visa if it’s “in the public interest.”

More than two dozen refugees are still in the same hotel where Mr. Djokovic stayed while waiting for the hearing on his first visa cancellation. Some, like Mehdi Ali, a musician who fled Iran when he was 15, have been held by Australia for many years.

But for Mr. Djokovic, Australia’s tough stance on border security seems to have delivered a result that many people can support, even if it means a less interesting Australian Open.

At Melbourne Park on Friday, where Mr. Djokovic had been scheduled to practice after being named the No. 1 seed, fans seemed resigned to the loss of a player who was fun to watch and hard to admire.

No disrespect for him or his tennis ability and that, but there’s something about him that just doesn’t quite sit with the Australian public.”

Symbolic acts of sanctioning individuals and issuing sharply worded statements are nothing new in the long and troubled relationship between Tehran and Washington.

The Biden administration needs a foreign policy success, particularly after the chaotic exit from Afghanistan, and has said it prefers a diplomatic resolution to the nuclear standoff over military confrontation.

The Biden administration initially wanted to return to the original deal while following the Trump blueprint on missiles and foreign policies, but has now indicated it would accept a return to the 2015 accord without those strings attached.

initially demanded the lifting of all sanctions imposed by Mr. Trump and guarantees that a future American president would not withdraw from the deal. But Tehran has softened those demands as the negotiations have progressed in Vienna.

Former President Donald Trump withdrew from the nuclear deal in 2018 and imposed tough economic sanctions cutting off most of Iran’s oil revenues and international financial transactions. Mr. Trump’s goal was to pressure Iran into a deal that reached beyond its nuclear program, restricting its ballistic missiles and regional political and military activities.

“We will facilitate revenge on Americans in any place, even their own homes and by people close to them, even if we are not present,” he said in a video of the speech.

Yet neither side wants to seem too eager to compromise, which would risk appearing weak.

The recent jousting between Tehran and Washington is linked to Iran’s commemoration on Jan. 3 of the two-year anniversary of the U.S. assassination of General Suleimani. In speech after speech during the ceremonies, Iranian officials threatened revenge against American officials — even though Iran had retaliated five days after the assassination with a ballistic missile strike on an American military facility in Iraq.

Ebrahim Raisi, the newly elected hard-line Iranian president, said that former President Trump and his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, should stand trial in an impartial court and face “ghesas,” a term that in Islamic jurisprudence means an “eye for an eye.” Otherwise, he warned, people would take their own revenge.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, signaled an indirect endorsement of talks with the U.S. in a speech on Monday when he said the Islamic Republic “holding talks and negotiating with the enemy at certain junctures does not mean surrendering.”

Over a four-day period, they unleashed a series of rocket and drone attacks on a U.S. military base in western Iraq and on the living quarters of State Department employees at the Baghdad airport, according to the Iraqi military and an official with the U.S.-led anti-ISIS coalition based in Baghdad, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak publicly.

In northeastern Syria, artillery rounds were fired at a Syrian-Kurdish-led base with U.S. advisers, according to the U.S.-led coalition, which issued a statement blaming the attacks on “Iran-supported malign actors.”

Tehran’s proxies were launching the attacks, Iranian officials were expressing a surprisingly optimistic view of the talks in Vienna, now in their eighth round, while the State Department was offering a more measured assessment.

An adviser to Iran’s Foreign Ministry said he believed a deal could be reached before mid-February, which would coincide with the anniversary of the 1979 Islamic revolution.

made an important concession to get things rolling by agreeing to work from a draft agreement worked out with Mr. Rouhani’s team,

Under that agreement, the U.S. would lift all sanctions related to the nuclear deal (while keeping those for human rights and other issues) and Iran would return to its technical commitments regarding its nuclear program under the old treaty.

Washington’s outlook has been more cautious than Tehran’s.

“I’m not going to put a time limit on it or give you the number of meters remaining on the runway, except to say, ‘Yes, it is getting very, very, very short,’”

Iran may have softened its initial demand for the removal of all sanctions imposed after Mr. Trump exited the deal, including those related to human rights.

Iran was pursuing “the removal of sanctions” related only to the original nuclear deal and looking to complete sanctions removal sometime in the future.

Iran has long maintained that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes. But if the talks fail, he said, its efforts at enriching uranium since the U.S. exited the nuclear deal have put it in a position to move toward weaponization very quickly.

that would be on par with what we experience with flu viruses, which scientists estimate hit us about every two to five years, less often in adulthood. It also matches up well with the documented cadence of the four other coronaviruses that seasonally trouble humans, and cause common colds.

For now, every infection, and every subsequent reinfection, remains a toss of the dice. “Really, it’s a gamble,” says Ziyad Al-Aly, a clinical epidemiologist and long-COVID researcher at Washington University in St. Louis. Vaccination and infection-induced immunity may load the dice against landing on severe disease, but that danger will never go away completely, and scientists don’t yet know what happens to people who contract “mild” COVID over and over again

Or maybe not. This virus seems capable of tangling into just about every tissue in the body, affecting organs such as the heart, brain, liver, kidneys, and gut; it has already claimed the lives of millions, while saddling countless others with symptoms that can linger for months or years.

considering our current baseline, “less dangerous” could still be terrible—and it’s not clear exactly where we’re headed. When it comes to reinfection, we “just don’t know enough,”

Perhaps, as several experts have posited since the pandemic’s early days, SARS-CoV-2 will just become the fifth cold-causing coronavirus.

A third or fourth bout might be more muted still; the burden of individual diseases may be headed toward an asymptote of mildness that holds for many years

Future versions of SARS-CoV-2 could continue to shape-shift out of existing antibodies’ reach, as coronaviruses often do. But the body is flush with other fighters that are much tougher to bamboozle—among them, B cells and T cells that can quash a growing infection before it spirals out of control

Those protections tend to build iteratively, as people see pathogens or vaccines more often. People vaccinated three times over, for instance, seem especially well equipped to duke it out with all sorts of SARS-CoV-2 variants, including Omicron and its offshoots.

promising patterns: Second infections and post-vaccination infections “are significantly less severe,” she told me, sometimes to the point where people don’t notice them at all

Bodies, wised up to the virus’s quirks, can now react more quickly, clobbering it with sharper and speedier strikes.

“There are still very good reasons” to keep exposures few and far between, Landon, of the University of Chicago, told me. Putting off reinfection creates fewer opportunities for harm: The dice are less likely to land on severe disease (or chronic illness) when they’re rolled less often overall. It also buys us time to enhance our understanding of the virus, and improve our tools to fight it.

Immunity, though, is neither binary nor permanent. Even if SARS-CoV-2’s assaults are blunted over time, there are no guarantees about the degree to which that happens, or how long it lasts.

A slew of factors could end up weighting the dice toward severe disease—among them, a person’s genetics, age, underlying medical conditions, health-care access, and frequency or magnitude of exposure to the virus.

for everyone else, no amount of viral dampening can totally eliminate the chance, however small it may be, of getting very sick.

Long COVID, too, might remain a possibility with every discrete bout of illness. Or maybe the effects of a slow-but-steady trickle of minor, fast-resolving infections would sum together, and bring about the condition.

Every time the body’s defenses are engaged, it “takes a lot of energy, and causes tissue damage,” Thomas told me. Should that become a near-constant barrage, “that’s probably not great for you.”

Bodies are resilient, especially when they’re offered time to rest, and she doubts that reinfection with a typically ephemeral virus such as SARS-CoV-2 would cause mounting damage. “The cumulative effect is more likely to be protective than detrimental,” she said, because of the immunity that’s laid down each time.

people who have caught the virus twice or thrice may be more likely to become long-haulers than those who have had it just once.

Some other microbes, when they reinvade us, can fire up the immune system in unhelpful ways, driving bad bouts of inflammation that burn through the body, or duping certain defensive molecules into aiding, rather than blocking, the virus’s siege. Researchers don’t think SARS-CoV-2 will do the same. But this pathogen is “much more formidable than even someone working on coronaviruses would have expected,

Seasonal encounters with pathogens other than SARS-CoV-2 don’t often worry us—but perhaps that’s because we’re still working to understand their toll. “Have we been underestimating long-term consequences from other repeat infections?” Thomas said. “The answer is probably, almost certainly, yes.”

the rhythm of reinfection isn’t just about the durability of immunity or the pace of viral evolution. It’s also about our actions and policies, and whether they allow the pathogen to transmit and evolve. Strategies to avoid infection—to make it as infrequent as possible, for as many people as possible—remain options, in the form of vaccination, masking, ventilation, paid sick leave, and more.

Gordon and Swartz are both hopeful that the slow accumulation of immunity will also slash people’s chances of developing long COVID.

The outlooks of the experts I spoke with spanned the range from optimism to pessimism, though all agreed that uncertainty loomed. Until we know more, none were keen to gamble with the virus—or with their own health. Any reinfection will likely still pose a threat, “even if it’s not the worst-case scenario,” Abdool Karim told me. “I wouldn’t want to put myself in that position.”