J. D. Vance and the Collapse of Dignity - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Americans once expected politicians to carry themselves with a seriousness that indicated their ability and willingness to tackle problems, whether poverty or war, that were too difficult for the rest of us. We elected such people not because we wanted them to be like us but because we hoped that they were better than us: smarter, tougher, and capable of being leaders and role models.
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ven some of the most flawed people we elevated to high office at least pretended to be better people, and thus were capable of inspiring us to be a better nation.
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Today, we no longer expect or even want our politicians to be better than we are.
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The inadequacy of the stories we told about the pandemic - 0 views
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Increasingly, it feels possible to take stock not just of what happened but also of the inadequacy of some of the stories we told ourselves to make sense of the mess.
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This week, I want to consider two prominent frameworks about the pandemic that are nevertheless rarely considered alongside each other: disparities in Covid mortality by race and by partisanship.
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Partisanship was a huge driver of that more significant second-year failure, since Republican resistance to vaccination explains a large share of cumulative American Covid mortality
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The War in Ukraine Is the End of a World - The Atlantic - 0 views
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On this grim anniversary, I will leave the political and strategic retrospectives to others; instead, I want to share a more personal grief about the passing of the hopes so many of us had for a better world at the end of the 20th century.
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I grieve for the young men who have been used as “cannon meat,” for children whose fathers have been dragooned into the service of a dictator, for the people who once again are afraid to speak and who once again are being incarcerated as political prisoners.
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And then, within a few years, it was over. If you did not live through this time, it is difficult to explain the amazement and sense of optimism that came with the raspad, as Russians call the Soviet collapse,
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A Blow Against the Malice Theory of American Politics - The Dispatch - 1 views
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Why were partisans so oblivious to the escalating tensions that were tearing America apart? Why were they so confident that the solution to American polarization was domination and not accommodation?
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The answer was clear. For decades, winners and losers alike spun virtually every American election as the sign of things to come, the harbinger of a permanent victory (or permanent defeat). You don’t even have to be that old to see the recent pattern. The thrill of Democratic victory in 1992 turned into the agony of defeat in 1994, then the thrill of victory again in 1996
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Then Obama won in 2008. But for Republicans, that was an aberration—a fluke caused by the housing crash and an unpopular war. The real majority came to the polls in Tea Party 2010. But wait: Obama won again in 2012, and suddenly all the momentum was on the side of the “coalition of the ascendant.” Remember that phrase? It signaled permanent Republican doom—the alleged party of white people couldn’t possibly keep winning in a nation that was growing more diverse by the year, could it?
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Welcome to the blah blah blah economy - 0 views
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Covering politics in a "post-truth" America | Brookings Institution - 0 views
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The media scandal of 2016 isn’t so much about what reporters failed to tell the American public; it’s about what they did report on, and the fact that it didn’t seem to matter.
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Facebook and Snapchat and the other social media sites should rightfully be doing a lot of soul-searching about their role as the most efficient distribution network for conspiracy theories, hatred, and outright falsehoods ever invented.
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I’ve been obsessively looking back over our coverage, too, trying to figure out what we missed along the way to the upset of the century
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For Email Newsletters, a Death Greatly Exaggerated - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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email, long dismissed as a festering petri dish of marketing come-ons, has cleaned up its act. Gmail, in particular, has stamped out a lot of spam and segmented the inbox into personal, social and promotional streams that make email much less a mess than it used to be.
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It makes sense. My personal digital hierarchy, which I assume is fairly common, goes like this: email first, because it is for and about me; social media next, because it is for and about me, my friends and professional peers; and finally, there is the anarchy of the web, which is about, well, everything.
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With an email, there is a presumption of connection, of something personal, that makes it a good platform for publishers.
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Climate Strike N.Y.C.: Young Crowds Demand Action, Welcome Greta Thunberg - The New Yor... - 0 views
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“I feel hopeful seeing the power of all these people here today,” one teenager said of the protest, which drew tens of thousands of demonstrators.
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The crowd totaled at least 60,000, according to an afternoon estimate from Mayor Bill de Blasio’s office. In a sign of how difficult crowd sizes can be to pin down, organizers put the figure at 250,000. A permit had been issued for 5,000, prompting some organizers to joke that their efforts to publicize the event had been too successful.Sign up for the New York Today NewsletterEach morning, get the latest on New York businesses, arts, sports, dining, style and more.
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She’s able to do so much,” Mina said. “It shows no matter how small you are and how little you feel, you can stand up to someone and make a difference.
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What Matters: Unemployment spikes and Congress moves ahead on $2 trillion in aid - CNNP... - 0 views
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Washington (CNN)The Senate's historic $2 trillion stimulus package is set for debate on the House floor Friday. The chamber will convene at 9 a.m. to consider the largest emergency aid package in US history in response to the coronavirus outbreak and its economic fallout, following a remarkable 96-0 Senate vote late Wednesday.
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$250 billion set aside for direct payments to individuals and families, $350 billion in small business loans and $250 billion in unemployment insurance benefits.
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A $500 billion fund for Treasury to provide loans and support for distressed industries. That includes $25 billion for passenger air carriers, $4 billion for cargo air carriers and $17 billion for businesses that work in national security. The rest of the funds, $454 billion, can be spent as loans to businesses, states and municipalities.
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Trump Has Broken the Republican Party-and Conservatism-for Good - The Bulwark - 0 views
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FDR replaced his sitting vice president, Henry Wallace, on the ticket with the senator from Missouri in 1944. Why Truman? Because he had come to national attention as head of the Truman Committee, formally known as the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program.
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This was a bipartisan special committee that investigated—with considerable vigor and publicity—problems of waste, inefficiency, and profiteering in our war-production effort.
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Once upon a time, Congress was not afraid of doing its job of oversight and legislation.
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Quantifying the Coming Recession - The Atlantic - 0 views
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we’re in a recession and everyone knows it. And what we’re experiencing is so much more than that: a black swan, a financial war, a plague
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To quantify the present reality, we have to rely on anecdotes from businesses, surveys of workers, shreds of private data, and a few state numbers. They show an economy not in a downturn or a contraction or a soft patch, not experiencing losses or selling off or correcting. They show evaporation, disappearance on what feels like a religious scale.
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What is happening is a shock to the American economy more sudden and severe than anyone alive has ever experienced
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US Coronavirus: Michigan's Covid-19 crisis could be a sign of what's to come for the US... - 0 views
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As the US races to vaccinate more Americans, Covid-19 cases and hospitalizations are rising, predominantly among younger people who haven't yet gotten a shot.
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Some experts worry this might only be the start of what's to come in the next weeks. Michigan is already in the middle of a violent surge
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"Michigan is really the bellwether for what it looks like when the B.1.1.7 variant ... spreads in the United States," Dr. Celine Gounder told CNN on Sunday. "It's causing a surge in cases and it's causing more severe disease, which means that even younger people, people in their 30s, 40s and 50s are getting very sick and being hospitalized from this."
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Opinion: Naomi Osaka's courageous choice - CNN - 0 views
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Twenty-three-year-old tennis player and four-time Grand Slam singles champion Naomi Osaka stunned the tennis community this week by dropping out of the in-progress French Open, one of the year's major tournaments, announcing on social media that she will "take some time away from the court."
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That is why forcing her to choose between her mental health and a few media sound bites was entirely unnecessary. We don't need to hear from her to appreciate her skill on the court. We do not need to drive her out of her career in order to punish her for failing to perform.
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Her decision was surprising, but not entirely out of the blue. Earlier, Osaka had announced that she would be opting out of the tournament's "mandatory" media interviews, citing mental health concerns, including a history of depression.
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Something unusual is happening in Derek Chauvin's trial - CNN - 0 views
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Some of the most damaging testimony against the police officer on trial over the death of George Floyd is coming from fellow cops.
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The defense will argue that a combination of Floyd's health conditions that Chauvin could not have known about means there is reasonable doubt about whether he ultimately caused Floyd's death. But a succession of police officers have said Chauvin's actions were unnecessary, as prosecutors try to convince the jury that he acted with malice.
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The second week of evidence against Derek Chauvin, who is charged with murdering Floyd, has moved on from wrenching eyewitness accounts of the Minnesota man's death, which sparked a worldwide racial reckoning. Prosecutors are now narrowing in on Chauvin's conduct in subduing Floyd, making a case that he acted outside reasonable police procedure.
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Denmark, Finland, and the 'Secrets' of the Happiest Countries - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Wanting to copy the happiest people in the world is an understandable impulse, but it distracts from a key message of the happiness rankings—that equitable, balanced societies make for happier residents.
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In the process, a research-heavy, policy-oriented document gets mistaken, through a terrible global game of telephone, for a trove of self-help advice.
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the list implies “a social understanding of happiness—something that happens between people,” which is a welcome alternative to the default assumption that individual people are responsible for their own misery. He also thinks it can show people which policies to vote for if they want to nudge their society in a happier direction.
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The Not-So-Soft Bigotry of COVID Indifference - The Bulwark - 0 views
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As the coronavirus pandemic continues to cut a wide swath through American communities, many have started to ignore it or, worse, rationalize the country’s mounting losses as a “sad but unavoidable” fact of life. The “sadness” appears to be of a very limited type. A recent poll found nearly 60 percent of Republicans view the deaths we’ve experienced as “acceptable.
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There may be a relatively simple explanation for this complacency: the pandemic has disproportionately affected populations that are mostly out of sight and mind for the majority of Americans
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COVID-19, for much of America, is something that happens to other people and many of the others are very old, very poor, people of color, or some combination of all these characteristics.
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Where Progressives and the Alt-Right Meet - The Bulwark - 0 views
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You would think that the National Museum of African American History and Culture would be dedicated to fighting the scourge of racism, particularly vicious caricatures and stereotypes of African Americans.
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Yet toward the end of May the institution posted one of the most racist documents I’ve ever seen, as part of a web page about “whiteness.” This graphic didn’t gain widespread notice until last week, at which point the museum promptly yanked it down.
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But the Internet is forever, so here it is:
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