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Millions of white evangelical adults in the U.S. do not intend to get vaccinated against Covid-19. Tenets of faith and mistrust of science play a role; so does politics.

Stephanie Nana, an evangelical Christian in Edmond, Okla., refused to get a Covid-19 vaccine because she believed it contained “aborted cell tissue.”

Nathan French, who leads a nondenominational ministry in Tacoma, Wash., said he received a divine message that God was the ultimate healer and deliverer: “The vaccine is not the savior.”

A network of far-right agitators across the country spent weeks organizing and raising money for a mass action to overturn President Trump’s election loss.

Keith Lee, an Air Force veteran and former police detective, spent the morning of Jan. 6 casing the entrances to the Capitol.

Much is still unknown about the planning and financing of the storming of the Capitol, aiming to challenge Mr. Trump’s electoral defeat. What is clear is that it was driven, in part, by a largely ad hoc network of low-budget agitators, including far-right militants, Christian conservatives and ardent adherents of the QAnon conspiracy theory. Mr. Lee is all three. And the sheer breadth of the movement he joined suggests it may be far more difficult to confront than a single organization.

In an effort to mark a clean break from the Trump era, the president-elect plans to roll out dozens of executive orders in his first 10 days on top of a big stimulus plan and an expansive immigration bill.

WASHINGTON — President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., inheriting a collection of crises unlike any in generations, plans to open his administration with dozens of executive directives on top of expansive legislative proposals in a 10-day blitz meant to signal a turning point for a nation reeling from disease, economic turmoil, racial strife and now the aftermath of the assault on the Capitol.

He also plans to send sweeping immigration legislation on his first day in office providing a pathway to citizenship for 11 million people in the country illegally. Along with his promise to vaccinate 100 million Americans for the coronavirus in his first 100 days, it is an expansive set of priorities for a new president that could be a defining test of his deal-making abilities and command of the federal government.

The warning was a notable departure for a Department of Homeland Security accused of being reluctant during the Trump administration to publish intelligence reports or public warnings about the dangers posed by extremists and white supremacist groups.

“the presidential transition, as well as other perceived grievances fueled by false narratives,”

Mr. Biden’s peaceful inauguration last week could create a false sense of security because “the intent to engage in violence has not gone away” among extremists angered by the outcome of the presidential election.

These bets involve contracts that give them the option to buy a stock at a certain price in the future. If the price rises, the trader can buy the stock at a bargain and sell it for a profit. (In practice, lots of traders just sell the options contract itself for a profit or loss instead of actually buying the shares, but this description suffices for our purposes.)

The brokers who sell the options contracts have to provide the shares if the trader wants to exercise the option. To mitigate their risk, they buy some of the shares they’d need. Normally, this small amount of demand doesn’t do much to the price.

But if enough traders bet big, the demand can push the stock up. If it goes high enough, the brokers who would be on the hook have to buy more shares, lest they get stuck having to buy a lot of expensive shares all at once.

Seven Republicans broke ranks in voting to convict former President Donald J. Trump, and despite moving to acquit the former president, Senator Mitch McConnell condemned him on the Senate floor.

In a 57-to-43 vote, the Senate handed down an acquittal for Mr. Trump for the second time in 13 months. But it was the most bipartisan support for conviction of any of the four impeachments in American history.

Michael T. van der Veen, one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, expressed frustration at the possibility of dragging out the proceedings with witness testimony. A trial lawyer in Philadelphia, Mr. van der Veen erupted at times over the lack of judicial norms in the Senate chamber that are typical of courtrooms across the country.

The share of adults who say spending on policing in their area should be increased now stands at 47%, up from 31% in June 2020. That includes 21% who say funding for their local police should be increased a lot, up from 11% who said this last summer.

Support for reducing spending on police has fallen significantly: 15% of adults now say spending should be decreased, down from 25% in 2020. And only 6% now advocate decreasing spending a lot, down from 12% who said this last year.

White (49%) and Hispanic (46%) adults are more likely than Black (38%) or Asian (37%) adults to say spending on police in their area should be increased.

Maps Class-Divided Cities: San Francisco Edition Richard Florida and Sara Johnson 11:05 AM ET 9 Comments inShare4 Share Print Share on emailEmail Author's Note: This is the 11th of a series of posts that explore the class divides across America's largest cities and metros. Using data from the American Community Survey, each post explores the geography of class within a large city and metro area. For a detailed description of methodology, see the first post in the series. The map above charts the geography of class for the city of San Francisco. The creative class lives in the areas that are shaded in purple, the red areas are primarily service class, and the blue are working class. Each colored space on the map is a Census tract, a small area within a city or county that can be even smaller than a neighborhood.

Most of the city proper is purple, reflecting a large creative class concentration in some of the most sought-after neighborhoods such as Pacific Heights and Russian Hill. SoMa or South of Market, which stretches below Market Street along the eastern part of the city south of the Bay Bridge, is an area of mixed-use and warehouse buildings that are now home to the city's tech scene, including lots of start-up companies as well as big names like Twitter, Zynga, and Airbnb.

There’s been great thirst this election cycle for insight into the psychology of Trump voters

J.D. Vance’s memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” offers a narrative about broken families and social decay. “There is a lack of agency here — a feeling that you have little control over your life and a willingness to blame everyone but yourself,”

white voters feel the American Dream is drifting out of reach for them, and they are angry because they believe minorities and immigrants have butted in line.

Her show might be gone but the “Oprah Effect” clearly endures.

After Oprah Winfrey said on Monday she would buy a 10 percent stake in Weight Watchers and take a seat on the board, the company’s slumping stock doubled to $13.92 per share, adding about $400 million to its market value

Ms. Winfrey also plans to give Weight Watchers unfettered access to her name and face for marketing purposes.

According to the company, its site is used by more than 200 million people in the United States each month, out of a total population of 320 million. A 2016 Pew study found that 44 percent of Americans read or watch news on Facebook.

we can know, based on these facts alone, that Facebook is hosting a huge portion of the political conversation in America.

Using a tool called CrowdTangle, which tracks engagement for Facebook pages across the network, you can see which pages are most shared, liked and commented on, and which pages dominate the conversation around election topics.

Smartphones changed the advertising game completely. It took only a few years for billions of people to have an all-purpose content delivery system easily accessible sixteen hours or more a day. This turned media into a battle to hold users’ attention as long as possible.

And it left Facebook and Google with a prohibitive advantage over traditional media: with their vast reservoirs of real-time data on two billion individuals, they could personalize the content seen by every user. That made it much easier to monopolize user attention on smartphones and made the platforms uniquely attractive to advertisers. Why pay a newspaper in the hopes of catching the attention of a certain portion of its audience, when you can pay Facebook to reach exactly those people and no one else?

Wikipedia defines an algorithm as “a set of rules that precisely defines a sequence of operations.” Algorithms appear value neutral, but the platforms’ algorithms are actually designed with a specific value in mind: maximum share of attention, which optimizes profits.

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The recent rise in American anti-Semitism is well documented. I could fill pages with FBI hate-crime statistics, or with a list of violent attacks from the past six years or even the past six months, or with the growing gallery of American public figures saying vile things about Jews. Or I could share stories you probably haven’t heard, such as one about a threatened attack on a Jewish school in Ohio in March 2022—where the would-be perpetrator was the school’s own security guard. But none of that would capture the vague sense of dread one encounters these days in the Jewish community, a dread unprecedented in my lifetime.

What I didn’t expect was the torrent of private stories I received from American Jew

If 37 percent of American adults aren't in the labor force, what are they doing?

More 19inShare Email Print The share of American adults who are either working or actively looking for work -- i.e.: the labor force participation rate -- fell to its lowest point since 1979

The reason the labor force's share of the country is shrinking has to do with both economics and demographics. We're becoming an older country

Since 1979, the one-percenters have doubled their share of the nation’s collective income from about 10 percent to about 20 percent.

And between 2009, when the Great Recession ended, and 2011, the one-percenters saw their average income rise by 11 percent even as the 99-percenters saw theirs fall slightly

This dismal litany invites the conclusion that if we would just put a tight enough choke chain on the 1 percent, then we’d solve the problem of income inequality. But alas, that isn’t true, because it wouldn’t address the other half of the story: the rise of the educated class.

nvestors were expecting volatility in 2014, but this is ridiculous.While the overall stock market remains somewhat tranquil, beneath the quiet surface, some individual stocks are already giving their owners a sickening ride. Thursday was the latest day in a week full of some head-turning big drops in stocks, including consumer electronics seller Best Buy and skin treatment maker Nu Skin.

Thursday closed down a bruising $10.74, or 29%, to $26.83, while Nu Skin, a seller of skin care products, was down $30.43, or 26%, to $84.80.

Evidence of investors' low tolerance for disappointment. Best Buy's stock woes were triggered by reports of holiday sales that fell short of what analysts had predicted. The consumer electronics seller reported that sales at stores open at least a year fell 0.8% during the nine-week period ending Jan. 4. Investors were already turning negative on retailers following disappointing news from other retailers and consumer products sellers. Shares of at-home soda maker equipment maker, SodaStream and video game seller GameStop have seen their shares fall 22% and 19% this week on disappointing results.

today’s young people simply don’t drive like their predecessors did. In 2010, adults between the ages of 21 and 34 bought just 27 percent of all new vehicles sold in America, down from the peak of 38 percent in 1985. Miles driven are down, too. Even the proportion of teenagers with a license fell, by 28 percent, between 1998 and 2008.

What if Millennials’ aversion to car-buying isn’t a temporary side effect of the recession, but part of a permanent generational shift in tastes and spending habits? It’s a question that applies not only to cars, but to several other traditional categories of big spending—most notably, housing. And its answer has large implications for the future shape of the economy—and for the speed of recovery.

Half of a typical family’s spending today goes to transportation and housing

According to the most recent Pew Research Center data, among those who approve of the job that Donald Trump is doing as president, 51 percent say that people who feel differently about the president probably do not share many of their other values and goals.

And among those who disapprove of Trump’s job performance, 56 percent say that people who approve of the president probably do not share their other values and goals.

This is a vastly different response from the last time this question was asked in 2017. In July, nearly 59 percent of Democrats and nearly 56 percent of Republicans said that while members of the other party felt differently about politics, they probably shared many of their same values and goals.

A city is a place where many people live close together. The problem of urban transportation is a problem of sharing space.

When you drive alone (or take Uber alone) in a gridlocked street or freeway, you are taking more than your fair share of the limited space. When stuck in traffic, you are blocking others from moving freely.

If cities want to move people faster than walking while allowing them to take up only their fair share of space, two options arise. One is to use a vehicle that’s not much bigger than the human body, such as bicycles and scooters. Those tools work well for certain people in particular circumstances, but not for everyone. The other option is to share the ride in a vehicle. If space is really scarce, that vehicle will have to carry lots of people. In most cases, riders will have to share a vehicle with strangers, people who are not traveling for the same purposes or even to the same places. That’s what public transit is.

Ahmaud Arbery killing reignites debate over sharing graphic viral videos

The outrage surrounding the viral video of 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery being shot just outside Brunswick, Georgia, is what prompted prosecutors to request a grand jury to consider charges, according to many social justice activists.

The footage released this week shows Arbery jogging down a narrow two-lane road. A white law enforcement officer and his son, whose truck is stopped nearby, shoot Arbery within seconds of confronting him.