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he tragic effects of our battle with the novel coronavirus are seemingly endless. But arguably the most mind-blowing is this: the very pandemic that threatens to infect and kill millions is simultaneously causing many to also lose their health coverage at their gravest time of need.

Here’s how: the virus has caused a public health crisis so severe that people have been forced to stay home, causing businesses to shutter and lay off workers. And with roughly half of Americans getting their health insurance from their employer, these layoffs mean not only losing their income but also their medical coverage

In other words, just as our need for medical care skyrockets in the face of a global pandemic, fewer will have health insurance or be able to afford it.

Given the scale of the economic carnage — 22 million jobs lost in four weeks — we need another huge relief program, both to limit financial hardship and to avoid economic damage that will persist even when the pandemic fades.

But we may not get the program we need, because anti-government ideologues, who briefly got quiet as the magnitude of the Covid-19 shock became apparent, are back to their usual tricks.

Right now the economy is in the equivalent of a medically induced coma, with whole sectors shut down to limit social contact and hence slow the spread of the coronavirus. We can’t bring the economy out of this coma until, at minimum, we have sharply reduced the rate of new infections and dramatically increased testing so that we can quickly respond to any new outbreaks.

Few men in America are as popular among American men as Joe Rogan. It’s a massive group congregating in plain sight, and it’s made up of people you know from high school, guys who work three cubicles down, who are still paying off student loans, who forward jealous-girlfriend memes, who spot you at the gym. Single guys. Married guys. White guys, black guys, Dominican guys. Two South Asian friends of mine swear by him. My college roommate. My little brother. Normal guys. American guys.

His interview last fall with Elon Musk has been viewed more than 24 million times on YouTube, and his YouTube channel, PowerfulJRE, has 6 million subscribers. An indifferently received episode will tend to get somewhere around 1 million views.

there’s no real way to describe “Joe Rogan fans.” They’re not aligned around any narrow set of curiosities or politics. They’re aligned around Joe.

Following in the footsteps of the great cultural critic Jacques Barzun, we can say that decadence refers to economic stagnation, institutional decay and cultural and intellectual exhaustion at a high level of material prosperity and technological development

Under decadence, Barzun wrote, “The forms of art as of life seem exhausted, the stages of development have been run through. Institutions function painfully. Repetition and frustration are the intolerable result.” He added, “When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent.” And crucially, the stagnation is often a consequence of previous development: The decadent society is, by definition, a victim of its own success.

“What fascinates and terrifies us about the Roman Empire is not that it finally went smash,” wrote W.H. Auden of that endless autumn, but rather that “it managed to last for four centuries without creativity, warmth, or hope.”

State Department diplomats and staff are deeply frustrated by the agency's response to the coronavirus pandemic, saying they're getting no clear or consistent guidance to help them operate, meaning embassies are cobbling together their own response on the fly.

"Every embassy is just making it up as we go along," one foreign service officer based overseas told CNN. "There's no f*cking uniformed guidance to the field. Tell us what the standard should be for US government personnel overseas. Tell us exactly how we should be conducting the business of the US government. There's no uniformity, which leads to interpretation and tensions."

The virus is compounding the workload for State staff. At the headquarters in Washington, some have been working around the clock on the coronavirus response, which has included arranging emergency flights for Americans stranded overseas. "No one has taken day off in two months," one State Department official said of the consular team, which deals with visa issues, passports and Americans traveling overseas.

No wonder governments are opting for the more stringent controls needed to suppress the pandemic. Suppression has the advantage that it has worked in China.

suppression has a sting in its tail. By keeping infection rates relatively low, it leaves many people susceptible to the virus. And since covid-19 is now so widespread, within countries and around the world, the Imperial model suggests that epidemics would return within a few weeks of the restrictions being lifted

To avoid this, countries must suppress the disease each time it resurfaces, spending at least half their time in lockdown. This on-off cycle must be repeated until either the disease has worked through the population or there is a vaccine which could be months away, if one works at all.

Donald Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, which he once dismissed as a hoax, has been fiercely criticised at home as woefully inadequate to the point of irresponsibility.

also thanks largely to Trump, a parallel disaster is unfolding across the world: the ruination of America’s reputation as a safe, trustworthy, competent international leader and partner.

“The Trump administration’s self-centred, haphazard, and tone-deaf response [to Covid-19] will end up costing Americans trillions of dollars and thousands of otherwise preventable deaths,” wrote Stephen Walt, professor of international relations at Harvard.

resh farm produce is healthy and delicious. Most of the time, that’s reason enough to sign up for a community-supported agriculture program (CSA), a system in which one pays to regularly receive goodie bags of whatever happens to be flourishing in nearby farmers’ fields, often along with optional local meat and dairy add-ons. Now, during the Covid-19 pandemic, bolstering local food systems is especially urgent – and there’s more at stake than just really good tomatoes.

This financial crunch will only compound the difficulties that led US farm bankruptcies to an eight-year high in 2019, such as low commodity prices and flooding and fires caused by climate change.

The CSA model is designed to benefit small-scale farmers by allowing them to sell “shares” of their crops during seasons when their expenses are high but their income is not – including winter and early spring. Many CSAs also allow you to donate directly to local farmers, or provide the option of working on a farm, co-op style.

Famine is riding alongside pestilence, on the tail of war. Though coronavirus leaves no part of the world untouched, its impact will be harshest in places that were already suffering.

The head of the World Food Programme warns that we are now on the brink of a hunger pandemic, with the prospect of multiple famines “of biblical proportions” within a few months,

Covid-19 alone has not created this crisis. Rather, it is one more devastating blow, complicating and deepening the troubles of countries already struggling with the impact of war, global heating, other health crises, and specific threats such as the locust infestations plaguing east Africa. It could almost double the number of those facing acute hunger, pushing an additional 130 million people to the brink of starvation by the end of the year. In all, shortages are likely to affect a fifth of the world’s population. Many of them live in overcrowded conditions, with poor sanitation, and a considerable number have pre-existing health problems such as HIV or TB; malnutrition will make them more vulnerable to Covid-19 and other threats

From the start the debate over how to grapple with COVID19 divided along the luridly cartoonish class politics that are at the core of Trumpism. As the country trundled toward shutdown in March, press reports ran interviews with tycoons at their Florida estates and saying the costs to the economy were too great. As this article in Bloomberg News apply headlined one of these pieces:”Billionaires Want People Back to Work. Employees Aren’t So Sure.”

Again and again, the Trump Era forces us to the crudest and most unsubtle portrayals of the role of wealth and privilege in our society. But it’s no surprise since that is the essence of Trumpism.

beneath the “we’ve got to get back to work” mantra has always been a harsher subtext of “you get back to work and I’ll hang back in my south Florida compound and see how it goes.”

we don’t really have to wonder what it’s like to live in a tribal society anymore, do we? Because we already do. Over the past couple of decades in America, the enduring, complicated divides of ideology, geography, party, class, religion, and race have mutated into something deeper, simpler to map, and therefore much more ominous. I don’t just mean the rise of political polarization (although that’s how it often expresses itself), nor the rise of political violence (the domestic terrorism of the late 1960s and ’70s was far worse), nor even this country’s ancient black-white racial conflict (though its potency endures).

I mean a new and compounding combination of all these differences into two coherent tribes, eerily balanced in political power, fighting not just to advance their own side but to provoke, condemn, and defeat the other.

I mean two tribes whose mutual incomprehension and loathing can drown out their love of country, each of whom scans current events almost entirely to see if they advance not so much their country’s interests but their own. I mean two tribes where one contains most racial minorities and the other is disproportionately white; where one tribe lives on the coasts and in the cities and the other is scattered across a rural and exurban expanse; where one tribe holds on to traditional faith and the other is increasingly contemptuous of religion altogether; where one is viscerally nationalist and the other’s outlook is increasingly global; where each dominates a major political party; and, most dangerously, where both are growing in intensity as they move further apart.

WASHINGTON ― When it comes to President Donald Trump and Russian interference in the election, the issue is the cover-up, not the crime. That’s the takeaway from former FBI Director James Comey’s dramatic testimony before Congress on Thursday

By firing Comey, Trump created a powerful enemy no longer entirely constrained by the traditions of the FBI or the desire to keep his job. Compounding their error, the Trump administration and the president himself angered Comey with what Comey called their “shifting explanations” for his firing that left him “confused” and “concerned.”

The American people should have full confidence in Mueller, who preceded Comey as head of the FBI, Comey said Thursday. Mueller, he said, is a straight shooter who will “turn over all the rocks” in the course of the investigation. Comey added that Mueller would never have agreed to become special counsel last month “if he wasn’t going to get full independence.”

Sickness and early death in the white working class could be rooted in poor job prospects for less-educated young people as they first enter the labor market, a situation that compounds over time through family dysfunction, social isolation, addiction, obesity and other pathologies, according to a study published Thursday by two prominent economists.

Offering what they call a tentative but “plausible” explanation, they write that less-educated white Americans who struggle in the job market in early adulthood are likely to experience a “cumulative disadvantage” over time, with health and personal problems that often lead to drug overdoses, alcohol-related liver disease and suicide.

“Ultimately, we see our story as about the collapse of the white, high-school-educated working class after its heyday in the early 1970s, and the pathologies that accompany that decline,” they conclude.

How much can politics achieve? Your answer to that question, it seems to me, is a pretty good indicator of where you are on the right-left spectrum.

I’m pretty skeptical of government as a solution to the core problems of being human. This doesn’t make politics unnecessary: Au contraire. You have to do what you can — say, in protecting civil rights, or guaranteeing universal health care.

But if politics is your path to happiness, it has its limits.

We are living in a society where the long-standing injustices of racial discrimination against African Americans and Latinos are compounded by the injuries of class. These afflict all lower-income groups, but they are currently hitting white Americans particularly hard.

A well-functioning political system and bold leaders would bring us together to build a more just and socially healthy country across the board. But we find ourselves in the Trump Era, where distraction, delusion and division define public life

The 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study released at the beginning of the month suggested that Trump’s victories (particularly in the swing Midwestern states and Pennsylvania) were driven by white voters without a college degree who either didn’t vote in 2012 or had supported Obama.

 or in neighboring areas of Central Asia

Certainly, the famed military strategist Sun Tzu knew about crossbows. He attributed them to an inventor named Q'in from the 7th century BCE. However, the dates of Sun Tzu's life and the first publication of his Art of War are also subject to controversy, so they cannot be used to establish the early existence of the crossbow beyond a doubt.

Repeating crossbows, called zhuge nu in Chinese, could shoot multiple bolts before needing to be reloaded. Traditional sources attributed this invention to a Three Kingdoms period tactician named Zhuge Liang

I learned something new about chain migration, as the Trump administration calls it, this week. The ability of a new immigrant to sponsor extended members of her family for permanent residence and eventually citizenship was originally a product of white supremacy! It was designed to keep America from becoming too brown.

Of course, it didn’t quite work out that way, with family unification compounding the unprecedented racial and demographic shifts of the last half-century. At the time, though, many on the left were in favor of merit-based immigration laws, precisely because they would replace the racist quotas embedded in the hugely restrictionist 1924 law, and allow for people to be admitted based on their abilities rather than on their country of origin.

What I love about this nugget is how it exposes our right-left divide as constantly in flux over the decades, and how it reveals the eternal fact of all legislation: that unintended consequences are often as salient as intended ones.

According to a report from the Governors Highway Safety Administration, which tracks pedestrian fatalities, America's roads are getting deadlier.In 2019, 6,301 pedestrians were killed by vehicles on American streets — up 46% from 2010. Over the same timespan, the total for all traffic deaths rose by 5%.

And in the first half of 2020, while driving was down because of the pandemic, the pedestrian death rate — the number of people struck and killed compared with the number of miles driven — soared by 20%, putting 2020 on track for the largest one-year increase in the death rate ever.

Speed undoubtedly plays a factor in that spike. With fewer cars on the road during the pandemic, some drivers chose to speed, with sometimes deadly consequences. But other factors predate the coronavirus and have contributed to pedestrian deaths for years now.

paving the way for a potential $4.2 billion industry that could create tens of thousands of jobs and become one of the largest markets in the country.

end years of racially disproportionate policing that saw Black and Hispanic people arrested on low-level marijuana charges far more frequently than white people.

The deal was crafted with an intense focus on making amends in communities impacted by the decades-long war on drugs.

Hours later, the police in Albany, N.Y., confirmed that they had been notified of one such accusation by the New York State Police, an incident at the Executive Mansion that was characterized as something that might have risen “to the level of a crime.”

The convening of a special judicial committee could signal a shift in Mr. Heastie’s thinking, but it could also give him more time to decide whether to proceed with impeachment. It also may give the governor some breathing room in a scandal that has overwhelmed his administration in recent weeks.

The tumult from the governor’s compounding scandals has significantly complicated negotiations over the state budget, due April 1, when the year’s most important policy issues are decided.