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The most intense attention was on the swing state of Florida and its 29 Electoral College votes. There, Mr. Trump was overperforming his 2016 vote totals in the populous Miami-Dade County, with 526,000-plus votes so far counted in 2020 compared with about 334,000 total four years ago — an enormous improvement.

Florida is a critical part of almost any Electoral College pathway for Mr. Trump to hit the 270 votes needed to secure re-election. Mr. Biden is seen to have multiple paths without the state.

In populous Miami-Dade, Mr. Trump was overperforming his 2016 vote totals, with 512,000-plus votes so far counted in 2020 compared with about 334,000 total four years ago — an enormous improvement.

"I would classify this as a silver lining to what has been quite a hard time for many people,"

Doctors around the country say that they're doing a lot of things differently in the fight against COVID-19 and that treatment is improving. "In March and April, you got put on a breathing machine, and we asked your family if they wanted to enroll you into some different trials we were participating in, and we hoped for the best," says Khalilah Gates, a critical care pulmonologist at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago. "Six plus months into this, we kind of have a rhythm, and so it has become an everyday standard patient for us at this point in time."

Horwitz believes that mask-wearing may be helping by reducing the initial dose of virus a person receives, thereby lessening the overall severity of illness for many patients.

And Mateen says that his data strongly suggest that keeping hospitals below their maximum capacity also helps to increase survival rates.

Gates adds that the takeaway definitely should not be to cast the mask aside. There is still no cure for this disease, and even patients who recover can have long-term side effects. "A lot of my patients are still complaining of shortness of breath," she says. "Some of them have persistent changes on their CT scans and impacts on their lung functions."

"I do think this is good news," Horwitz says of her research findings, "but it does not make the coronavirus a benign illness."

The U.S. government is lending its support to SMR development. In September, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for the first time issued a final safety evaluation report on a SMR—a critical step before a design can be approved—to NuScale

is developing its first commercial SMR for utilities in Utah and promising power by the end of the decade.

the Energy Department awarded $210 million to 10 projects to develop technologies for SMRs and beyond, as part of its Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program. The agency had already awarded $400 million to various projects since 2014 “to accelerate the development and deployment of SMRs,

. Potential buyers range from U.S. utilities trying to phase out coal-fired generators to Eastern European countries seeking energy independence.

GE’s second offering, a system now in development with nuclear startup TerraPower LLC, replaces water with molten salt, similar to what’s used in some advanced solar-power arrays. Dubbed Natrium, the system runs hotter than water-cooled reactors but at lower pressure and with passive cooling, which eliminates piping and electrical systems while improving safety, according to TerraPower CEO Chris Levesque.

“When you have a really elegant design, you can get multiple benefits working together,” Mr. Levesque says. TerraPower, established by investors including Bill Gates, received $80 million of the Energy Department funding for Natrium in October.

Greenpeace, the Union of Concerned Scientists and other advocacy groups argue that nuclear power remains a dangerous technological dead-end that causes as many problems as it solves.

Traditional reactors grew over time to achieve greater efficiencies of scale and lower cost per kilowatt-hour because power output rose faster than construction and operating costs. “There’s no reason that’s changed,” he says, dismissing SMR makers’ promises of lower costs and increased safety

Many proposed SMR expense reductions, such as less shielding, could ultimately increase their danger, while the combined use of several modules could create new safety risks like radioactive contamination that negate gains in individual modules, he says.

Mr. Ramana also says that the technological advances like 3-D printing and digital manufacturing that make SMRs possible are doing even more to improve green renewables. “It’s a kind of treadmill race, where one treadmill is going much faster.”

although SMRs have lower upfront capital cost per unit, their economic competitiveness is still to be proven.”

The calamity we're now all living through offers the professional class an opportunity to reconsider assessments of the national condition issued so confidently pre-pandemic: Economists focus on material living standards partly for ease of quantification, but also because that is what free markets most reliably produce

But “material living standards,” measured in dollars of consumption (or inches of flat-screen TV), are not the same thing as “quality of life.” They say little about relationships, dignity, agency, or life satisfaction.

Ask yourself what matters to you right now. Consider whether new apps on your smartphone compensate for the loss of control, sense of powerlessness, and strain of unpredictability.

Speaking in March at the Heritage Foundation, Senator Pat Toomey, a Republican said, “many nuclear families are struggling, that families don’t have the community support that they once had, extended families live apart,” and “civil society” is in “decline.” Still, he argued, “the standard of living of middle-class and working class Americans has improved,” citing larger houses, better computers, and cars that are not only safer but also equipped with satellite radio and seat warmers.

Weighing these competing factors, he concluded, “For all the problems that we undoubtedly have, the fact is life is better today than it has ever been for the vast majority of the American people.”

What good does G.D.P. do, if people we love are falling seriously ill and dying in unprecedented numbers; if the rhythms of daily life vital to our happiness have gone haywire and our social connections have atrophied?

How much of that technology would you trade to erase the coronavirus? Put another way, how far back in history would you have to travel to find a time when Americans’ true quality of life was lower than today’s?

That this is even a question serves as damning refutation of Senator Toomey’s confidence that an improved standard of living more than compensates for weakened family bonds and waning community support.

While the right-of-center often dismisses working-class frustration with claims of economic prosperity, the left-of-center tends to dismiss their frustration as backward or racist.

America could slow, or partially reverse, elements of globalization that have most disrupted working-class lives, if that were our priority.

We could reorient our education system toward serving the majority of young people who still don’t earn even a community-college degree.

We could reform our system of organized labor to provide workers a genuine seat at the table and an institution in the community.

We could emphasize geography when we talk about diversity, aiming to distribute talent and investment more widely.

These are forms of social redistribution. The task is not to write a larger check but to relinquish power and realign institutions on behalf of those who have been left behind for decades.

She likens the feeling to survivor’s guilt, when there is a sense of injustice. She recommends a positive action to correct that feeling and to express gratitude.

guilt doesn’t have to be destructive, some philosophers argue—in fact, properly understood, it can motivate people to address some of the inequities that the virus is revealing.

Guilt is pervasive now because the coronavirus crisis has opened up a very real class division in the country between those whose jobs allow them to stay home and those whose lives and livelihoods are in the process of being destroyed,

Guilt tends to promote reparative action, such as helping those in need, says Patricia Greenspan, a professor of philosophy at the University of Maryland, College Park, and author of “Practical Guilt.” She says those benefiting from the crisis have an ethical responsibility to contribute to efforts to alleviate others’ suffering.

Catherine Wilson, author of “Moral Animals: Ideals and Constraints in Moral Theory,” thinks that someone who feels guilty should think instead about what kind of world would be an improvement on the one we are living in now. If people don’t feel bad about enjoying themselves but see that they can make life better for others, they can use their energy and talent to activate moral leadership, sparking innovations to make society more just and fair, she says

Chloroquine had produced what he called “spectacular improvements” in the Chinese patients. “It’s excellent news — this is probably the easiest respiratory infection to treat of all,” Raoult said. “The only thing I’ll tell you is, be careful: Soon the pharmacies won’t have any chloroquine left!”

Raoult wrote his first research paper, in 1979, on a tick-borne infection sometimes known as Marseille fever. The disease was also called “benign summer fever,” and more than 50 years of science said it was nonlethal. And yet one of the 41 patients in his data set had died.

Before submitting the paper, Raoult, who was then a young resident, gave it to a supervising professor for review. “And he takes it,” Raoult told me, “he doesn’t show it to me again, and he publishes it — and he’d taken out the death. Because he didn’t know how to make sense of the death.”

Raoult was disgusted, and the incident shaped his philosophy of scientific inquiry. “I learned that the people who wanted to follow the familiar path were prepared to cheat in order to do it,” he said.

In Raoult’s view, French science was a duchy of appearances, connections and self-reverence. “It was people saying” — he mimed the drone of an aristocrat — “ ‘Oh, him, yes, he’s very good.’ And this reputation, you don’t know what it’s based on, but it’s not the truth.”

“He was a ‘follower,’” Raoult said of the professor. “And these ‘followers’ are all cheaters. That’s what I thought. And it’s still what I think.”

He is, fundamentally, a contrarian. In Raoult’s view, little of consequence has been accomplished by researchers who endorse the habitual tools and theories of their age.

“I’ve spent my life being ‘against,’” he told me. “I tell young scientists: ‘You know, you don’t need a brain to agree. All you need is a spinal cord.’” He is thrilled by conflict. It is a matter both of philosophy — the influence, no doubt, of the thinker he refers to admiringly as “master Nietzsche” — and of temperament.

His peers shake their heads at this behavior but grant him a grudging respect. “You can’t knock him down,” said Mark Pallen, a professor of microbial genomics at the University of East Anglia. “In terms of his place in the canon, the sainthood of science, he’s pretty secure there.”

In 1985 and 1986, Raoult worked at the Naval Medical Research Institute in Bethesda, Md., where he discovered the Science Citation Index. The index, a tool that can be used to measure a scientist’s influence on the basis of his or her publication history, was relatively unknown in France. Raoult looked up the researchers reputed to be the best in Marseille. “It was really the emperor wears no clothes,” he said. “These people didn’t publish. There was one who hadn’t written a paper in 10 years.”

In subsequent work, he demonstrated that Marseille fever was indeed fatal in almost precisely one in every 41 cases.

Raoult’s name sits atop several thousand; in each of the past eight years, he has produced more than 100. In 2020, he has already published at least 54.

Like many doctors, Molina viewed Raoult’s study with skepticism, but he was also curious to see if his proposed treatment regimen might in fact work. He tested hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin in 11 of his own patients. “We had severe patients, and we wanted to try something,” Molina told me. Within five days, one had died, and two others had been transferred out of his service to intensive care. In another patient, the treatment was suspended after the onset of cardiac issues, a known side effect of the drugs. Eight of the 10 surviving patients still tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 at the conclusion of the study period

Raoult is reputed to be an indefatigable worker, but he also achieves his extreme rate of publication by attaching his name to nearly every paper that comes out of his institute.

In recent years, Raoult has amused himself, it seems, by staking out tendentious scientific claims, sometimes in territories that are well beyond the scope of his expertise.

He is skeptical, for instance, of the utility of mathematical modeling in the realm of epidemiology.

The same logic has led him to conclude that climate modelers are no more than “soothsayers” for our “scientistic era” and that their dire predictions are mostly just an attempt to expiate our intense but irrational feelings of guilt.

Raoult’s most recent book, “Epidemics: Real Dangers and False Alerts,” was published in late March, by which time the W.H.O. had reported more than 330,000 confirmed cases of Covid-19 worldwide and more than 14,500 deaths. “This anguish over epidemics,” he writes, “is completely untethered from the reality of deaths from infectious diseases.”

Testing had been scheduled to run for two weeks per patient, but after only six days, the results were so favorable that Raoult decided to end the trial and publish

Others might have proceeded with more caution or perhaps waited to confirm these results with a larger, more rigorous trial. Raoult likes to think of himself as a doctor first, however, with a moral obligation to treat his patients that supersedes any desire to produce reliable data.

For decades, Raoult has boasted of his prodigious rates of publication and citation, which, as objective statistics, he considers to be the best measure of his worth as a researcher.

This observation has come to be known as the parachute paradigm: We tend to accept the claim that parachutes reduce injury among people who leap from airplanes, but this effect has never been proved in a randomized study that compares an experimental parachute group to an unlucky parachuteless control.

“If you don’t have something that’s visible in 10 patients, or 30, it’s useless. It’s not of any consequence.” An effective treatment for a potentially lethal infectious disease will be visible to the naked eye.

There is much about Raoult that might make him, and by extension his proposed treatment, appealing to a man like Trump. He is an iconoclast with funny hair; he thinks almost everyone else is stupid, especially those who are typically regarded as smart; he is beloved by the angry and conspiracy-minded; his self-congratulation is more or less unceasing.

Raoult classified Trump’s psychology as that of an “entrepreneur,” by way of contrast with that of a “politician.” “Entrepreneurs are people who know how to decide, who know how to take risks,” he said. “And at a certain point, to decide is to take a risk. Every decision is a risk.”

The French waited far too long, in his estimation, to approve the use of hydroxychloroquine in Covid-19 patients. The authorization came only after Raoult announced in the press that he would continue, “in accordance with the Hippocratic oath” and effectively in defiance of the government, to treat patients with his combination therapy. “I’m convinced that in the end, everyone will be using this treatment,” Raoult told Le Parisien. “It’s just a matter of time before people agree to eat their hats.”

Raoult had already begun assembling data for a larger study, but he dismissed the need for anything particularly vast or lengthy. Like other critics of the R.C.T., he likes to point out that a number of self-evidently useful developments in the realm of human health have never been validated by such rigorous tests.

Raoult’s study had measured only viral load. It offered no data on clinical outcomes, and it was not clear if the patients’ actual symptoms had improved or indeed whether the patients lived or died. At the outset, 26 patients were assigned to receive hydroxychloroquine, six more than the 20 who appeared in the final results.

The six additional patients had been “lost in follow-up,” the authors wrote, “because of early cessation of treatment.” The reasons given were concerning. One patient stopped taking the drug after developing nausea. Three patients had to be transferred out of the institute to intensive care. One patient died. (Another patient elected to leave the hospital before the end of the treatment cycle.)

“So four of the 26 treated patients were actually not recovering at all,” noted Elisabeth Bik, a scientific consultant who wrote a widely circulated blog post on Raoult’s study. She paraphrased the sarcasm circulating on Twitter: “My results always look amazing if I leave out the patients who died.”

The report was also riddled with discrepancies and apparent errors.

This apparent sloppiness was unsurprising to many of those who have tracked Raoult’s work in the past. A prominent French microbiologist told me that, in terms of publication, Raoult’s reputation among scientists has been “long gone” for some time.

Beyond its apparent errors and omissions, the study’s design — its small size, its flawed control, the unrandomized assignment of patients to the treatment and control groups — was widely viewed to render its results meaningless. Fauci repeatedly called its results “anecdotal”;

Large, well-controlled randomized trials are by no means the only way to arrive at useful scientific insights. Their utility is that they enhance statistical signals such that, amid the noise of human variability and random chance, even the faint effect of some new treatment can be detected.

The results of his initial trial have yet to be replicated. “I think what he secretly hopes is that no one will ever be able to show anything,”

The prime statistical hurdle that any proposed treatment for Covid-19 will have to overcome — one that is delicate for even Raoult’s critics to make note of, amid the sorrow and fear of this pandemic — is that the signal is likely to be very faint, because the disease is, in the end, rarely fatal. Nearly everyone survives; an effective treatment will save the life of the one or so patients in every hundred who would not have lived without it.

“Alzheimer’s drugs, obesity drugs, cardiovascular drugs, osteoporosis drugs: Over and over, there have been what looked like positive results that evaporated on closer inspection. After you’ve experienced this a few times, you take the lesson to heart that the only way to be sure about these things is to run sufficiently powered controlled trials. No shortcuts, no gut feelings — just data.”

“I’ve invented 10 or so treatments in my life,” Raoult told me. “Half of them are prescribed all over the world. I’ve never done a double-blind study in my life, never. Never! Never done anything randomized, either.”

“When you tell the story, it’s extremely straightforward, no? It’s subject, verb, complement: You detect a disease; there’s a drug that’s cheap, whose safety we know all about because there’s two billion people who take it; we prescribe it, and it changes what it changes. It might not be a miracle product, but it’s better than doing nothing, no?”

Raoult had by then begun to lose his composure. He accused Lacombe of being a shill for the pharmaceutical industry; his fans sent her death threats. On Twitter, he called Bik, the consultant who wrote critically about the first study, a “witch hunter” and called a study that she tweeted — one of several published in April and May that seemed to suggest that Raoult’s treatment regimen was ineffectual or even harmful — “fake news.” The authors of another such study were accused of “scientific fraud.” “My detractors are children!” Raoult told an interviewer.

It is possible that hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin are an effective treatment for Covid-19. But Raoult’s study showed, at best, that 20 people who would almost certainly have survived without any treatment at all also survived for six days while taking the drugs Raoult prescribed.

In recent weeks, Raoult has in fact tempered his claims about the virtues of his treatment regimen. The published, peer-reviewed version of the final study noted that another two patients had died, bringing the total to 10. Where the earlier version called the drugs “safe and efficient,” they were now described merely as “safe.”

He has shown flickers of what appears to be doubt.

“I don’t trust popularity,” he told the interviewer. “When too many people think you’re wonderful, you should start to wonder.” His initial YouTube video, “Coronavirus: Game Over!” has also been renamed. The new language is more measured, and in place of the exclamation point there now stands a question mark.

Krebs led an effort to improve communication between state and local election jurisdictions about threat activity and election security best practices.

"This was a secure election," Krebs said. "That is a success story. That is something everyone in the administration should be proud of. That's the story I feel we should be telling now."

Going forward, Krebs said he is most worried about how misinformation about elections has "seeped into the mainstream" and what that will mean for people's confidence in results.

CISA launched a website dubbed Rumor Control, aimed at debunking election disinformation spreading on social media.

"We certainly saw throughout that a number of people associated with the campaign, were pushing certain narratives that we fundamentally knew to be false," Krebs said, while listing a number of claims about which Trump himself has tweeted. "We knew that it was important to get this information out there."

Instead, Krebs' former agency has spent much of the past few weeks batting down baseless claims by the president and his legal team about the security of the vote.

One of the easiest ways government can improve people's opinions of voting, he added, is to invest more resources and money into election administration.

The Black/white ratio of high school completion improved dramatically between the 1940s and the early 1970s, after which it slowed, never reaching parity.

Understanding how and why not only reveals why America is so fractured today, but illuminates the path forward, toward a more perfect union.

In measure after measure, positive change for Black Americans was actually faster in the decades before the civil rights revolution than in the decades after

The life expectancy gap between Black and white Americans narrowed most rapidly between about 1905 and 1947, after which the rate of improvement was much more modest

The racial gap in homeownership steadily narrowed between 1900 and 1970, then stagnated, then reversed

Racial integration in K-12 education at the national level began much earlier than is often believed

It accelerated sharply in the wake of the 1954 Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education. But this trend leveled off in the early 1970s, followed by a modest trend toward resegregation.

Income by race converged at the greatest rate between 1940 and 1970.

However, as of 2018, Black/white income disparities were almost exactly the same as they were in 1968

Black Americans on the whole have experienced flat or downward mobility in recent decades.

What’s more, after the passage of civil rights legislation, those trends toward racial parity slowed, stopped and even reversed.

Long-run data on national trends in voting by race is patchy, but the South saw a dramatic increase in Black voter registration between 1940 and 1970, followed by decline and stagnation

nearly all of the gains toward equality with white voter turnout occurred between 1952 and 1964, before the Voting Rights Act passed, then almost entirely halted for the rest of the century.

These data reveal a too-slow but unmistakable climb toward racial parity throughout most of the century that begins to flatline around 1970 — a picture quite unlike the hockey stick of historical shorthand.

It was Black Americans’ undaunted faith in the promise of the American “we,” and their willingness to claim their place in it, against all odds, that won them progress between the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s and the end of the civil rights movement in the 1970s. Collectively, these migrants and their children and grandchildren steadily narrowed the Black-white gap over those years.

Some six decades later all of those upward trends reversed, setting the United States on a downward course that has brought us to the multifaceted national crisis in which we find ourselves today, which bears a remarkable resemblance to the Gilded Age

Why was the last third of the 20th century characterized by a marked deceleration of progress, and in some cases even a reversal?

We have two answers to these questions.

Substantial progress toward white support for Black equality was made in the first half of the 20th century

The first is simple and familiar: White backlash

when push came to shove, many white Americans were reluctant to live up to those principles. Although clear majorities supported the 1964 Civil Rights Act, a national poll conducted shortly after its passage showed that 68 percent of Americans wanted moderation in its enforcement. In fact, many felt that the Johnson administration was moving too fast in implementing integration.

Lyndon B. Johnson’s rejection, in 1968, of the Kerner Commission’s recommendations of sweeping reforms to address racial inequality suggested that his fine-tuned political sensitivity had detected a sea change in white attitudes in the year since he — more than any previous president — had led the project of racial redress

as the century turned and the Gilded Age gave way to the Progressive Era, America experienced a remarkable moment of inflection that set the nation on an entirely new trajectory. A diverse group of reformers grabbed the reins of history and set a course toward greater economic equality, political bipartisanship, social cohesion and cultural communitarianism.

But if Black Americans’ advance toward parity with whites in many dimensions had been underway for decades before the Civil Rights revolution, why then, when the dam of legal exclusion finally broke, didn’t those trends accelerate toward full equality?

These interconnected phenomena can be summarized in a single meta-trend that we have come to call the “I-we-I” curve: An inverted U charting America’s gradual climb from self-centeredness to a sense of shared values, followed by a steep descent back into egoism over the next half century

The moment America took its foot off the gas in rectifying racial inequalities largely coincides with the moment America’s “we” decades gave way to the era of “I.”

hopes went unrealized as the whole nation shifted toward a less egalitarian ideal.

A central feature of America’s “I” decades has been a shift away from shared responsibilities toward individual rights and a culture of narcissism.

Contemporary identity politics characterizes an era that could well be described as a “War of the ‘We’s’.” This is a reality that predated the election of Donald Trump, though his presidency threw it into sharp relief.

It is difficult to say which came first — white backlash against racial realignment or the broader shift from “we” to “I.”

the fact that landmark civil rights legislation passed at the very peak of the I-we-I curve suggests that an expanding sense of “we” was a prerequisite for the dismantling of the color line. Without what the historian Bruce Schulman calls the “expansive, universalist vision” that America had been building toward in the preceding decades, it is hard to imagine that such watershed change — so long and so violently resisted — would have been possible.

By the late 1960s, though the work of widening was not nearly complete, America had come closer to an inclusive “we” than ever before. But just as that inclusion began to bear tangible fruit for Black Americans, much of that fruit began to die on the vine.

The lessons of America’s I-we-I century are thus twofold. First, we Americans have gotten ourselves out of a mess remarkably similar to the one we’re in now by rediscovering the spirit of community that has defined our nation from its inception

we” can be defined in more inclusive or exclusive terms. The “we” we were constructing in the first two-thirds of the last century was highly racialized, and thus contained the seeds of its own undoing. Any attempt we may make today to spark a new upswing must aim for a higher summit by being fully inclusive, fully egalitarian and genuinely accommodating of difference. Anything less will fall victim once again to its own internal inconsistencies.

Wasserman’s data:Florida, since the state’s March primary, added 195,652 Republicans and 98,362 Democrats.Pennsylvania, since June, Republicans plus 135,619, Democrats up 57,985.North Carolina, since March, Republicans up 83,785 to Democrats 38,137.In Arizona, the exception, “Democrats out-registered Republicans 31,139 to 29,667” in recent months.

More worrisome for Biden, the Pew survey shows modestly weakened support among Black women, a key Democratic constituency. Black women supported Clinton over Trump 98 to 1; this year they support Biden over Trump 91-6.

More than twice as many Biden voters as Trump voters — the actual ratio is 2.4 to 1 — plan to cast ballots by mail, according to polling by Pew. So far, however, Democratic requests for absentee ballots have not reached the levels that surveys suggest will be needed for the party to cast votes at full strength on Election Day.

The relatively minor decline in Democratic support among Hispanic Catholics, for example, is more than made up for by Democratic improvement among non-Hispanic white Catholics. In 2016, Trump crushed Clinton among this group, 64-31, or 33 points; now Trump leads Biden by 52-44, or by 8 points.

The fastest growing religious category — atheists, agnostics and “nothing in particular” — has become an even more rock-solid Democratic constituency. In 2016, the nonreligious voted 65-24 for Clinton; according to the most recent Pew data, Biden leads Trump among these voters 71-22.

“The decline in white identity was driven mostly by whites expressing disgust toward Trump,” they write.

From 2000 to 2016, white Republicans maintained consistently high levels of moral traditionalism, according to Webster’s research, dropping less than a point, from 10.9 to 10.1, over the 16-year period. White Democrats, in contrast, dropped by 3.2 points, from 8.8 to 5.6.

Over time, the two parties have staked out consistently opposing views on these questions, many of which are driven by the views of voters toward immigration and the prospect that whites are projected to become a minority in roughly 25 years.

They paint a granular picture of the strain on hospitals across the country that could help local citizens decide when to take extra precautions against COVID-19.

Withholding this information from the public and the research community is a missed opportunity to help prevent outbreaks and even save lives, say public health and data experts who reviewed the documents for NPR.

"At this point, I think it's reckless. It's endangering people," says Ryan Panchadsaram,

The documents show that detailed information hospitals report to HHS every day is reviewed and analyzed — but circulation seems to be limited to a few dozen government staffers from HHS and its agencies,

"The best possible measure of where we are in the pandemic, and the one we would want to anchor modeling to, is daily hospitalizations," he says, which give an early warning of deaths that will likely follow.

For instance, the most recent report obtained by NPR, dated Oct 27, lists cities where hospitals are filling up, including the metro areas of Atlanta, Minneapolis and Baltimore, where in-patient hospital beds are over 80% full. It also lists specific hospitals reaching max capacity, including facilities in Tampa, Birmingham and New York that are at over 95% ICU capacity and at risk of running out of intensive care beds.

Hospitalization data is invaluable in looking ahead to see where and when outbreaks are getting worse, says Dr. Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. "Right now, as we head into the fall and winter surge," Murray says, "we're trying to put more emphasis on predicting where systems will be overwhelmed."

NPR has reviewed several of these reports generated in the past month. They present trends in hospital use, including increases in ventilator usage, along with a growing number of inpatient and ICU beds being occupied by COVID-19 patients. The Oct. 27 report showed that all three measures have increased by 14%-16% in the past month.

About 24% of U.S. hospitals are using more than 80% of their ICU capacity, based on reporting from nearly 5,000 "priority facilities," and more hospitals have joined their ranks in recent weeks.

Researchers say observing these trend lines can help the nation know how to prepare for surge and be ready to intervene before systems become overwhelmed.

Only one member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, Adm. Brett Giroir, appears to receive the documents directly.

HHS tells NPR that more than 800 state-level employees have access to the daily hospitalization data it gathers, but only for their own state, unless another state grants them permission to view its data.

Without a larger view into national or regional data, some states — like Tennessee, which has eight bordering states — are missing out on valuable regional data, says Melissa McPheeters, who directs the Center for Improving the Public's Health through Informatics at Vanderbilt University.

"It's very challenging for states to get the multistate view of things," she says. "It's just a lot easier when there's a knowledgeable third-party who can pull the data together, make them consistent across states and actually tell the story of what the information shows." Typically, she says, this role would be fulfilled by the CDC, but the agency was stripped of its role in collecting COVID-19 hospital data in July.

McPheeters and colleagues at Vanderbilt put out a report this week that found that Tennessee counties without mask mandates had more rapid increases in hospitalizations.

Experts who reviewed the internal documents for NPR say that even for the limited group of federal employees who get them, the daily reports are not as useful as they could be.

Health data experts NPR consulted had ideas on how to improve the analysis. For instance, Panchadsaram suggested that some of the county-level charts, currently presented as raw numbers, would be more useful if analyzed per capita. "You really need to adjust it to the number of people [in an area] to get a sense of where things are being overwhelmed," he says.

And the quality of the underlying data is a concern. Health experts say the data quality was compromised by a controversial shift in data collection from the CDC to HHS in July, and that the issues with data quality have not been fully resolved.

According to HHS data posted on Monday, just 62% of the nation's hospitals reported all the required information last week.

But greater transparency, even of incomplete data, can be invaluable in a crisis, experts say.

If passed, the amendment would give Florida the highest minimum wage among Southern states and impact an estimated 2.5 million workers. 

There are seven other states already on track to hit $15 in the coming years, but those tend to be blue states with liberal labor policies.

Some proponents also say passage of Amendment 2 could help the push for a $15 wage floor at the federal level, especially if Democrats win the White House and control of the Senate.

“If $15 passes in Florida, it will send a clear message to the incoming [Biden] administration that raising the minimum wage is not just good policy but also good politics.”

But despite the general popularity of minimum wage hikes ― most have sailed through on the ballot in recent years ― the Florida proposal is by no means a sure thing.

“I think we feel good, but we need to turn out every single voter in the state,” said Stephanie Porta, the executive director of Organize Florida, a progressive group that supports the referendum.

Florida voters last approved a minimum wage increase in 2004, when they voted to raise it to $6.15 per hour. The current minimum wage is $8.56 thanks to inflation adjustments included in the 2004 referendum, but progressive advocates say that still falls far short of a living wage,

A single adult with no children would need to make more than $12 an hour to earn a living wage in Florida, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The increase to $15 would boost pay for about a quarter of the state’s workforce, according to the Florida Policy Institute, a progressive think tank.

A third of Florida’s female workers would see a raise; 38% of women of color in the workforce would receive a pay increase, the institute says. 

Florida has a $3.02-per-hour “tip credit” for business owners. It’s what allows Johnson to pay a server $5.54 before gratuities, rather than $8.56, under the current minimum wage. That $3.02 credit would stay under the new law, but it would have less impact over time.

“Any restaurant that’s on the bubble right now, especially with COVID ― when they have those additional costs, I don’t know if they make it through,”

Much of the financial backing for the amendment has come from the law firm of John Morgan, a high-profile Florida attorney who represents workers in class-action lawsuits.

a 2005 study that found “no empirical evidence” that Florida’s last, more modest minimum wage increase caused employers to lay off workers.

The COVID-19 pandemic has limited in-person organizing efforts, especially in the lower-income communities that would benefit most from the wage increase, and progressive groups and the Florida Democratic Party fell short of their voter registration targets.

We need to turn out every single voter in the state. Stephanie Porta, executive director of Organize Florida

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has endorsed raising the federal minimum wage to $15, and Democrats and progressives in Florida hope that support for Amendment 2 could boost his chances of defeating President Donald Trump in the crucial swing state.

In 2018, Florida voters said yes on a referendum to restore voting rights to people with felony convictions, a major progressive priority, even as Republicans Ron DeSantis and Rick Scott won narrow victories in the state’s gubernatorial and U.S. Senate races, respectively. 

“I’m sure the legislature will try to screw with it,” Porta said. “They always try to go against the people ― that is their M.O. But we will be ready to fight.”

Traditionally, a scientist submits her paper to a journal, which sends it to a (surprisingly small) group of peers for (several rounds of usually anonymous) comments; if the paper passes this (typically months-long) peer-review gantlet, it is published (often behind an expensive paywall). Languid and opaque, this system is ill-suited to a fast-moving outbreak. But biomedical scientists can now upload preliminary versions of their papers, or “preprints,” to freely accessible websites, allowing others to immediately dissect and build upon their results. This practice had been slowly gaining popularity before 2020, but proved so vital for sharing information about COVID‑19 that it will likely become a mainstay of modern biomedical research. Preprints accelerate science, and the pandemic accelerated the use of preprints. At the start of the year, one repository, medRxiv (pronounced “med archive”), held about 1,000 preprints. By the end of October, it had more than 12,000.

The U.S. is now catching up. In April, the NIH launched a partnership called ACTIV, in which academic and industry scientists prioritized the most promising drugs and coordinated trial plans across the country. Since August, several such trials have started.

Researchers have begun to uncover how SARS‑CoV‑2 compares with other coronaviruses in wild bats, the likely reservoir; how it infiltrates and co-opts our cells; how the immune system overreacts to it, creating the symptoms of COVID‑19. “We’re learning about this virus faster than we’ve ever learned about any virus in history,” Sabeti said.

Similar triumphs occurred last year—in other countries. In March, taking advantage of the United Kingdom’s nationalized health system, British researchers launched a nationwide study called Recovery, which has since enrolled more than 17,600 COVID‑19 patients across 176 institutions. Recovery offered conclusive answers about dexamethasone and hydroxychloroquine and is set to weigh in on several other treatments. No other study has done more to shape the treatment of COVID‑19.

SARS‑CoV‑2’s genome was decoded and shared by Chinese scientists just 10 days after the first cases were reported. By November, more than 197,000 SARS‑CoV‑2 genomes had been sequenced. About 90 years ago, no one had even seen an individual virus; today, scientists have reconstructed the shape of SARS‑CoV‑2 down to the position of individual atoms

Respiratory viruses, though extremely common, are often neglected. Respiratory syncytial virus, parainfluenza viruses, rhinoviruses, adenoviruses, bocaviruses, a quartet of other human coronaviruses—they mostly cause mild coldlike illnesses, but those can be severe. How often? Why? It’s hard to say, because, influenza aside, such viruses attract little funding or interest.

COVID‑19 has developed a terrifying mystique because it seems to behave in unusual ways. It causes mild symptoms in some but critical illness in others. It is a respiratory virus and yet seems to attack the heart, brain, kidneys, and other organs. It has reinfected a small number of people who had recently recovered. But many other viruses share similar abilities; they just don’t infect millions of people in a matter of months or grab the attention of the entire scientific community

Thanks to COVID‑19, more researchers are looking for these rarer sides of viral infections, and spotting them.

These factors pull researchers toward speed, short-termism, and hype at the expense of rigor—and the pandemic intensified that pull. With an anxious world crying out for information, any new paper could immediately draw international press coverage—and hundreds of citations.

“There’s a perception that they’re just colds and there’s nothing much to learn,” says Emily Martin of the University of Michigan, who has long struggled to get funding to study them. Such reasoning is shortsighted folly. Respiratory viruses are the pathogens most likely to cause pandemics, and those outbreaks could potentially be far worse than COVID‑19’s.

Their movements through the air have been poorly studied, too. “There’s this very entrenched idea,” says Linsey Marr at Virginia Tech, that viruses mostly spread through droplets (short-range globs of snot and spit) rather than aerosols (smaller, dustlike flecks that travel farther). That idea dates back to the 1930s, when scientists were upending outdated notions that disease was caused by “bad air,” or miasma. But the evidence that SARS‑CoV‑2 can spread through aerosols “is now overwhelming,”

Another pandemic is inevitable, but it will find a very different community of scientists than COVID‑19 did. They will immediately work to determine whether the pathogen—most likely another respiratory virus—moves through aerosols, and whether it spreads from infected people before causing symptoms. They might call for masks and better ventilation from the earliest moments, not after months of debate

They will anticipate the possibility of an imminent wave of long-haul symptoms, and hopefully discover ways of preventing them. They might set up research groups to prioritize the most promising drugs and coordinate large clinical trials. They might take vaccine platforms that worked best against COVID‑19, slot in the genetic material of the new pathogen, and have a vaccine ready within months

the single-minded focus on COVID‑19 will also leave a slew of negative legacies. Science is mostly a zero-sum game, and when one topic monopolizes attention and money, others lose out.

Long-term studies that monitored bird migrations or the changing climate will forever have holes in their data because field research had to be canceled.

negligence has left COVID‑19 long-haulers with few answers or options, and they initially endured the same dismissal as the larger ME community. But their sheer numbers have forced a degree of recognition. They started researching, cataloging their own symptoms. They gained audiences with the NIH and the World Health Organization. Patients who are themselves experts in infectious disease or public health published their stories in top journals. “Long COVID” is being taken seriously, and Brea hopes it might drag all post-infection illnesses into the spotlight. ME never experienced a pivot. COVID‑19 might inadvertently create one

Other epistemic trespassers spent their time reinventing the wheel. One new study, published in NEJM, used lasers to show that when people speak, they release aerosols. But as the authors themselves note, the same result—sans lasers—was published in 1946, Marr says. I asked her whether any papers from the 2020 batch had taught her something new. After an uncomfortably long pause, she mentioned just one.

The incentives to trespass are substantial. Academia is a pyramid scheme: Each biomedical professor trains an average of six doctoral students across her career, but only 16 percent of the students get tenure-track positions. Competition is ferocious, and success hinges on getting published

Conservationists who worked to protect monkeys and apes kept their distance for fear of passing COVID‑19 to already endangered species.

Among scientists, as in other fields, women do more child care, domestic work, and teaching than men, and are more often asked for emotional support by their students. These burdens increased as the pandemic took hold, leaving women scientists “less able to commit their time to learning about a new area of study, and less able to start a whole new research project,

published COVID‑19 papers had 19 percent fewer women as first authors compared with papers from the same journals in the previous year. Men led more than 80 percent of national COVID‑19 task forces in 87 countries. Male scientists were quoted four times as frequently as female scientists in American news stories about the pandemic.

American scientists of color also found it harder to pivot than their white peers, because of unique challenges that sapped their time and energy.

Science suffers from the so-called Matthew effect, whereby small successes snowball into ever greater advantages, irrespective of merit. Similarly, early hindrances linger. Young researchers who could not pivot because they were too busy caring or grieving for others might suffer lasting consequences from an unproductive year. COVID‑19 “has really put the clock back in terms of closing the gap for women and underrepresented minorities,”

In 1848, the Prussian government sent a young physician named Rudolf Virchow to investigate a typhus epidemic in Upper Silesia. Virchow didn’t know what caused the devastating disease, but he realized its spread was possible because of malnutrition, hazardous working conditions, crowded housing, poor sanitation, and the inattention of civil servants and aristocrats—problems that require social and political reforms. “Medicine is a social science,” Virchow said, “and politics is nothing but medicine in larger scale.”

entists discovered the microbes responsible for tuberculosis, plague, cholera, dysentery, and syphilis, most fixated on these newly identified nemeses. Societal factors were seen as overly political distractions for researchers who sought to “be as ‘objective’ as possible,” says Elaine Hernandez, a medical sociologist at Indiana University. In the U.S., medicine fractured.

New departments of sociology and cultural anthropology kept their eye on the societal side of health, while the nation’s first schools of public health focused instead on fights between germs and individuals. This rift widened as improvements in hygiene, living standards, nutrition, and sanitation lengthened life spans: The more social conditions improved, the more readily they could be ignored.

The ideological pivot away from social medicine began to reverse in the second half of the 20th century.

Politicians initially described COVID‑19 as a “great equalizer,” but when states began releasing demographic data, it was immediately clear that the disease was disproportionately infecting and killing people of color.

These disparities aren’t biological. They stem from decades of discrimination and segregation that left minority communities in poorer neighborhoods with low-paying jobs, more health problems, and less access to health care—the same kind of problems that Virchow identified more than 170 years ago.

In March, when the U.S. started shutting down, one of the biggest questions on the mind of Whitney Robinson of UNC at Chapel Hill was: Are our kids going to be out of school for two years? While biomedical scientists tend to focus on sickness and recovery, social epidemiologists like her “think about critical periods that can affect the trajectory of your life,” she told me. Disrupting a child’s schooling at the wrong time can affect their entire career, so scientists should have prioritized research to figure out whether and how schools could reopen safely. But most studies on the spread of COVID‑19 in schools were neither large in scope nor well-designed enough to be conclusive. No federal agency funded a large, nationwide study, even though the federal government had months to do so. The NIH received billions for COVID‑19 research, but the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development—one of its 27 constituent institutes and centers—got nothing.

The horrors that Rudolf Virchow saw in Upper Silesia radicalized him, pushing the future “father of modern pathology” to advocate for social reforms. The current pandemic has affected scientists in the same way

COVID‑19 could be the catalyst that fully reunifies the social and biological sides of medicine, bridging disciplines that have been separated for too long.

“To study COVID‑19 is not only to study the disease itself as a biological entity,” says Alondra Nelson, the president of the Social Science Research Council. “What looks like a single problem is actually all things, all at once. So what we’re actually studying is literally everything in society, at every scale, from supply chains to individual relationships.”

that’s what I felt back in those days,” he said, “that everything was for sale — it was all about distraction, it didn’t seem serious. It all felt foolish and headed for a crash.”

Younger viewers do not have to fear Chase’s wrath, because they are not so obviously its object. They are also able to watch the show for hours on end, which makes the subtext and themes more apparent. Perhaps all of this has offered clarity that was not possible when the show aired. Perhaps it is easier now to see exactly who — or what — Chase was angry at.

it is easily one of the most written-about TV shows in the medium’s short history. But more than the shows that have emerged in its wake, which are subjected to close readings and recaps in nearly every major publication, “The Sopranos” has a novelistic quality that actually withstands this level of scrutiny. It’s not uncommon to hear from people who have watched the series several times, or who do so on a routine basis — people who say it reveals new charms at different points in life

Perhaps the greatest mystery of all, looking back on “The Sopranos” all these years later, is this: What was Chase seeing in the mid-’90s — a period when the United States’ chief geopolitical foe was Serbia, when the line-item veto and school uniforms were front-page news, when “Macarena” topped the charts — that compelled him to make a show that was so thoroughly pessimistic about this country?

“I don’t think I felt like it was a good time,” he told me. He is 76 now, and speaks deliberately and thoughtfully. “I felt that things were going downhill.” He’d become convinced America was, as Neil Postman’s 1985 polemic put it, “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” not an easy thing for a journeyman TV writer to accept.

“There was nothing but crap out there. Crap in every sense. I was beginning to feel that people’s predictions about the dumbing-down of society had happened and were happening, and I started to see everything getting tawdry and cheap.”

Expanded access to credit had cut into what mobsters call the shylock business; there’s no need to go to a loan shark when the payday lender will offer you similarly competitive rates. Gambling was legalized in many states and flourishes on many reservations; nearly every state in the Union has a lottery, which decimated the numbers racket. Italian American neighborhoods have emptied out — as Jacobs writes, “radically diminishing the pool of tough teenagers with Cosa Nostra potential”; this is dramatized brilliantly in the final episode of the series, when a mobster from a New York family hurries through Little Italy on an important phone call and, when the call ends, looks around to see he’s wandered into an encroaching and vibrant Chinatown. And, Jacobs notes, union membership has been decimated. “In the mid-1950s, about 35 percent of U.S. workers belonged to a union,” he writes. “In recent years, only 6.5 percent of private-sector workers have been union members.”

I was about to change the subject when he hit on something. “Have you noticed — or maybe you haven’t noticed — how nobody does what they say they’re going to do?” he said, suddenly animated. “If your sink gets jammed up, and a guy says he’s going to be out there at 5:30 — no. Very few people do what they say they’re going to do. There is a decline in goods and services that is enormous.”

Chase told me the real joke of the show was not “What if a mobster went to therapy?” The comedic engine, for him, was this: What if things had become so selfish and narcissistic in America that even the mob couldn’t take it? “That was the whole thing,” he said. “America was so off the rails that everything that the Mafia had done was nothing compared to what was going on around them.”

In “The Mafia: A Cultural History,” Roberto M. Dainotto, a professor of literature at Duke, writes that one thing our cinematic Mafiosi have that we admire, against our better judgment, is access to structures of meaning outside of market forces: the church, family, honor. The Mafia movie often pits these traditional values against the corrosive and homogenizing effects of American life.

What “The Sopranos” shows us, Dainotto argues, is what happens when all that ballast is gone, and the Mafia is revealed to be as ignoble as anything else. “Life is what it is,” he writes, “and repeats as such.”

The show puts all this American social and cultural rot in front of characters wholly incapable of articulating it, if they even notice it.

What is, for me, one of the show’s most memorable scenes has no dialogue at all. Tony and his crew have just returned from a business trip to Italy, during which they were delighted with the Old Country but also confronted with the degree of their alienation from their own heritage. They’re off the plane, and in a car traveling through Essex County. As the camera pans by the detritus of their disenchanted world — overpasses, warehouses — Tony, Paulie and Christopher are seeing their home with fresh eyes, and maybe wondering if their ancestors made a bad trade or if, somewhere along the line, something has gone horribly wrong. But we don’t know: For once, these arrogant, stupid and loquacious men are completely silent.

Around the time “The Sopranos” premiered, the N.Y.U. Law professor James B. Jacobs wrote a paper, along with a student, arguing that the Mafia, though weakened by decades of prosecutions, could come roaring back. By 2019, though, he had published a new paper called “The Rise and Fall of Organized Crime in the United States,” declaring the Mafia all but finished. “The world in which the Cosa Nostra became powerful is largely gone,” he wrote. And he cites a litany of factors that aided its collapse, a mix of technological advances, deregulation and financialization — many of the same forces that have created the stratified economy of today.

In his first therapy session with Dr. Melfi, Tony tries to explain why he thinks he has panic attacks, why he suffers from stress. “The morning of the day I got sick, I’d been thinking: It’s good to be in something from the ground floor,” he says. “I came too late for that, I know. But lately, I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.” Melfi tells him that many Americans feel that way. Tony presses on: “I think about my father: He never reached the heights like me, but in a lot of ways he had it better. He had his people, they had their standards, they had their pride. Today, what do we got?”

You can see this world — one in which no one can be squeezed because everyone is being squeezed — starting to take shape from the very beginning of the show. In the pilot, Tony is fending off competition from a new waste-hauling business undercutting his company’s extortionate fees, and trying to figure out how he can get a piece of the similarly extortionate costs his health insurer paid for his M.R.I. — a procedure he had because the stress in his life had given him a panic attack.

The bien-pensant line on Tony remains that he’s a sociopath, and only used therapy to become a better criminal. This is an idea spoon-fed to the viewer in the final episodes by a contrite Dr. Melfi, in a show that spoon-feeds almost nothing to the viewer. Melfi herself might call this a coping mechanism to avoid the messier reality, which is that Tony lives in an immoral world nestled within another immoral world, both of which have only grown more chaotic because of forces outside his control.

Because of this, you can see how he reasons himself into more and more heinous crimes, justifying each and every one of them to himself. Perhaps to you too — at least, up to a point. That sympathy for Tony led contemporaneous critics to ask if people were watching the show in the wrong way, or if our enjoyment pointed to a deficiency of the heart.

t is this quality of Tony’s — this combination of privilege and self-loathing — that I suspect resonates with a younger generation, whether we want to admit it or not. He’s not so different from us, after all. He has an anxiety disorder. He goes to therapy and takes S.S.R.I.s, but never really improves — not for long, anyway. He has a mild case of impostor syndrome, having skipped some key steps to becoming boss, and he knows that people who hold it against him are sort of right. He’s still proud of his accomplishments in high school. He does psychedelics in the desert, and they change his perspective on things. He often repeats stuff he half-remembers someone smarter than him saying. He’s arguably in an open marriage with Carmela, if a rather lopsided one. He liked listening to “Don’t Stop Believin’” in 2007. He’s impulsive and selfish and does not go to church, though he does seem open to vaguer notions of spirituality. He wishes his career provided him with meaning, but once he had the career, he discovered that someone had pulled the rug out at some point, and an institution that had been a lodestar to him for his whole life was revealed to be a means of making money and nothing more. Does this sound at all familiar to you?

Like many young people, Tony is a world-historically spoiled man who is nevertheless cursed, thanks to timing, to live out the end of an enterprise he knows on some level to be immoral.

It gives him panic attacks, but he’s powerless to find a way out. Thus trapped — and depressed — it’s not so hard for him to allow himself a few passes, to refuse to become better because the world is so rotten anyway.

Tony’s predicament was once his to suffer alone, but history has unfolded in such a way as to render his condition nearly universal.

That the people in power truly had insulated themselves in a fantasy environment — not just in the realm of foreign policy, but also, more concretely, in the endless faux-bucolic subdivisions that would crater the economy. We were living in a sort of irreality, one whose totality would humiliate and delegitimize nearly every important institution in American life when it ended, leaving — of all people — the Meadows and A.J.s of the world to make sense of things.

if people still see a monster in Tony, then the monster is themselves: a twisted reflection of a generation whose awakening to the structures that control them came in tandem with a growing aversion to personal accountability in the face of these systems.

Whether that’s true or not, it offers us all permission to become little Tonys, lamenting the sad state of affairs while doing almost exactly nothing to improve ourselves, or anything at all.

This tendency is perhaps most pronounced online, where we are all in therapy all day, and where you can find median generational opinions perfectly priced by the marketplace of ideas — where we bemoan the wrongs of the world and tell ourselves that we can continue being who we are, and enjoy the comforts we’ve grown accustomed to.

In the show’s finale, as the extended Soprano family gathers to mourn the death of Bobby Baccalieri, we find Paulie Walnuts stuck at the kids’ table, where A.J., newly politically awakened, charges into a rant. You people are screwed, he says. “You’re living in a dream.” Bush let Al Qaeda escape, he tells them, and then made us invade some other country? Someone at the table tells him that if he really cares, he should join up. A.J. responds: “It’s more noble than watching these jackoff fantasies on TV of how we’re kicking their ass. It’s like: America.” Again, he’s interrupted: What in the world does he mean? He explains: “This is still where people come to make it. It’s a beautiful idea. And then what do they get? Bling? And come-ons for [expletive] they don’t need and can’t afford?”

However inartfully, A.J. was gesturing at something that would have been hard for someone his age to see at the time, which is that the ’00s were a sort of fever dream, a tragic farce built on cheap money and propaganda.

The notion that individual action might help us avoid any coming or ongoing crises is now seen as hopelessly naïve, the stuff of Obama-era liberalism.

. The “leftist ‘Sopranos’ fan” is now such a well-known type that it is rounding the corner to being an object of scorn and mockery online.

One oddity that can’t be ignored in this “Sopranos” resurgence is that, somewhat atypically for a TV fandom, there is an openly left-wing subcurrent within it

Within weeks of those remarks, cases spiked, I.C.U.s overflowed, and we were reminded yet again of Covid’s power to outwit us.

Dr. Mokdad can literally map how our desire to prematurely claim victory, rather than accept the virus’s continuance, has led us to throw off restrictions, with deadly effect

“We all want it to be over. But contingency planning for long-term response is absolutely essential.”

If we think Covid-19 is going away, then we will drop our guard and not make essential investments now.

we need to organize effectively for the very long haul, dramatically improve our pandemic response and embed safeguards into our everyday lives.

Masks, which so many Americans abandoned when it seemed the end of the pandemic was in sight, could still make a difference: If 95 percent of Americans wore a mask, his model projects roughly 56,000 fewer deaths by Feb. 1.

An escape variant

is not a certainty, said the experts with whom I spoke. But it is not far-fetched, either, in part because of our slow pace at vaccinating the world.

That mind-set is not only a crucial hedge against complacency, in which we settle for the good-enough defenses we have now. It could drive us to capitalize on the extraordinary scientific progress of the past year.

As we come to terms with Covid forever, what might our daily lives look like?

Will we have to pare back our holiday party guest lists for years to come? Will home testing before any social gathering become de rigueur? Will vending machines in every subway station carry cheap KN95 masks?

“We would expect that the transmission will never go to zero,” Dr. Mokdad told me. “The virus is going to be with us for a long time” — meaning that deaths, and efforts to prevent them, could continue for years.

the biggest shift in our new normal could be a growing societal embrace of protective measures, rather than a continued war over school mask wearing or workplace vaccine mandates.

The meanness of the public has forced many public-facing industries to rethink what used to be an article of faith: that the customer is always right. If employees are now having to take on many unexpected roles — therapist, cop, conflict-resolution negotiator — then workplace managers are acting as security guards and bouncers to protect their employees.

It’s not just your imagination; behavior really is worse. In a study of 1,000 American adults during the pandemic, 48 percent of adults and 55 percent of workers said that in November 2020, they had expected that civility in America would improve after the election.

By August, the expectations of improvement had fallen to 30 percent overall and 37 percent among workers. Overall, only 39 percent of the respondents said they believed that America’s tone was civil.

The study also found that people who didn’t have to work with customers were happier than those who did.

“It’s mentally exhausting to have to police adults over this matter,” wrote Adam Mosley, a 51-year-old flight attendant, responding to a request by The New York Times to describe conditions in the service industry at this odd juncture.

In part, the problem is the disconnect between expectation and reality

Before the pandemic, she said, consumers had been seduced into the idea of the “frictionless economy” — the notion that you could get whatever you wanted, the moment you wanted it.

“There’s a lack of outlets for people’s anger,” Ms. Swift said. “That waiter, that flight attendant — they become a stand-in for everything coming between what we experience and what we think we are entitled to.”

Customer Care Measurement and Consulting, has been conducting studies of consumer anger. The next iteration is set to come out this spring. He almost can’t believe what he has seen during the pandemic.

“When we founded the study, I never thought that the environment would be like it was today,” he said. “I would never in my wildest dreams have imagined that we would be seeing people fighting on planes and beating each other up.”

“There’s a growing delta between office workers and those that are interacting with consumers,”

“There is definitely a subset of people that don’t seem to think that any of the rules apply to them,”

most of the bad consumer behavior is low-grade — a persistent hum of incivility rather than an explosion of violence.

“Customers have been superaggressive and impatient lately,”

Such interactions used to make her weep. “But I’ve been calloused by it,” she said. “Now, instead of crying, I’m just really pessimistic and judgmental against the people around me.”

From across the country, workers responded with similar stories: of customers flying off the handle when the products they wanted were unavailable; of customers blaming the store, rather than supply-chain disruptions, for delays; of customers demanding refunds on nonrefundable items; of customers so wound up with worry and anxiety that the smallest thing sends them into a tailspin of hysteria.

The worst, she said, is the political commentary. Once a customer went into a diatribe against Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, saying she had it on good authority that he was about to be jailed for his “crimes.” Others have called Ms. Ashburn a “sheep” and a “fraidy-cat” for wearing a mask.Her go-to response — looking noncommittal and murmuring “hmm” — seems to make matters worse. “I am very discouraged at the polarization and at the unkind way that people treat each other,” she said.

Ms. Miller, from the Wisconsin trade association, said the pressures of the pandemic and the deterioration of elected officials’ behavior — the shouting, the threats, the hatred — had given normal people license to act out, too.

Highly effective people like Napoleon concentrate on one present task and one big goal. How often are we distracted at work? How often do we leave tasks incomplete? Successful people avoid these costly “switches.” You cannot be a world-class athlete in five sports. You cannot build five companies at once. You have limited resources, and they are most effective when concentrated.

A single-minded focus on your goal will make you more successful. Attempting to multitask only hurts your chances of success. As Napoleon said of war, “the art consists in concentrating very heavy fire on a particular point.” His words are as true in a boardroom as on a battlefield.

They were actually thought to encourage good, healthful posture and to keep the internal organs in proper alignment. And the extreme practice of removing ribs to slim the waist, rumored to have flourished in the Victorian era, simply didn’t exist

Today’s approach to gender-specific colors would confuse—and likely amuse—our 19th-century counterparts. White was the preferred color for babies and children of any sex until they reached the age of about 6 or 7, mainly because white clothes and diapers could be bleached. As they grew older, children were dressed in paler versions of the colors adults wore. Red was considered a strong, virile, masculine shade, while blue was dainty, delicate, feminine. So young boys were more frequently seen in pink, while young girls favored pale blue. It wasn’t until the early 20th century—quite possibly as late as the 1940s—that pink began to be universally assigned to girls and blue to boys.

from a low level and mostly in the capital, where those with spare cash could enjoy new coffee shops, foreign restaurants and well-stocked supermarkets.

things visibly improved

the boundaries of that “better life” have been gradually curtailed in the more recent years of Mr Kim’s reign.

accompanied by heightened repression inside the country, more control at the borders and the acceleration of the nuclear programme

Aid organisations have not had access for nearly two years, making it especially hard to discern what is going on in the country.

increased penalties for smuggling and for watching foreign entertainment, such as South Korean dramas.

Mr Kim continues to rebuff offers of aid and even covid vaccines. Attempts by South Korea and America to revive a spirit of detente, for instance by negotiating a formal end to the Korean war, have gone unanswered.

I’ve described it as a romantic narrative, one that’s about unities in the process of becoming, a calling together of Americans to transcend racial division and come together in a unifying way, a more perfect union, as a transcendence of essential American goodness over transitory American evils.

when we tell the story that way, unfortunately, not only is it mythic, but it trains us to treat King as the kind of person who’s not doing any original political thinking. What he’s doing is calling us to be true to who we always already were

And when you treat him like that, the thing that becomes most interesting about him is not his thought. It’s not the way he challenged us to think about violence. It’s not the way he challenges us to think about segregation, both de facto and de jure. It’s not how he challenges us to think about economic justice.

The thing that’s interesting about him starts to be his rhetoric or his tactics, the way in which he pushes people or frames arguments to call us to be true to who we always already were. That’s a real problem because it evades the most incisive, challenging and generative contributions that his public philosophy makes for our era.

it gets conscripted into a story that’s ultimately affirming about the adequacy of our constitutional order, the trajectory of our institutions, the essential goodness of our national character. You often hear politicians use this rhetoric of, this is not who we are.

it’s partly related to how we tell the story of the civil rights movement and particularly, how we tell King’s role in the civil rights movement.

There’s a way in which the philosophy of nonviolence gets painted, even in King’s time, as a kind of extreme, purist pacifism. And part of that is the connection with Gandhi, although I think it’s a radical misunderstanding of Gandhi, as well.

it’s a way of imagining the commitment to nonviolence as related to passivity, as related to the performance of suffering for pity. These are things that King never endures. For him, the idea of passive resistance was a misnomer. He helped coin the phrase “direct action” — he and other members of the civil-rights generation — that nonviolence is aggressive.

It’s an aggressive attack on injustice, an aggressive form of noncooperation with domination. It’s about trying to wedge yourself into the machinery of domination, to prevent its adequate functioning, to try to force or coerce your fellow citizens to stop and take stock of what kind of injustices are being unfurled in their name.

And it does so on the presumption that politics involves coercion, especially for King, who had a pretty tragic sense of human nature, that politics is going to involve confrontation with great evil, that it’s not a Pollyannaish view about what we’re all capable of if we just turn our eye toward God in the right way.

We’re owe it to them to live with evil. And we always are going to be called to confront it. We just need to do it in ways that won’t unleash a further chain of social evil and bitterness and revenge and retaliation. And King thought nonviolence was the only weapon that could cut and heal at the same time.

So when you hear King talk about love, when you hear King talk about nonviolence, these things actually require not just an enormous discipline around the acceptance of suffering, as if it’s some kind of passive practice, but they require really creative, dedicated thinking around how exactly to push and prod your neighbors into addressing the forms of injustice that structure the polity and how to do it in a way that doesn’t leave a perpetual midnight of bitterness when the conflict is done.

He says that the really interesting question, however, is how to organize a sustained, successful challenge to structural injustice. And for King, that requires something that blends militant resistance and a higher-order ethical practice that can point the way toward peaceful reconciliation over the long term.

Gandhi has this line where he says, if you can’t practice nonviolence, it quote, “retaliation or resistance unto death is the second best, though a long way off from the first. Cowardice is impotence, worse than violence.” So this idea that if you can’t be nonviolent, it’s better to be violent than to be a coward, doing nothing — I think gets at something important. Can you help unpack that?

to raise the question of strategy, as if we can evaluate means without some kind of ethical reflection or without some kind of underlying ethical commitments, for King, is already a confusion. He thinks that the ends are prefigured in any means.

Gandhi, in “Hind Swaraj,” has this great passage where he talks about how could come to acquire a piece of property. You could buy it. You could steal it. You could kill somebody in pursuit of it. You could ask for it as a gift.At the end of the day, you still have the same property. But the thing, itself, has changed. In one scenario, it’s a piece of stolen property. It’s a theft. In another, it’s a gift, which is different than something you’ve purchased.

So in the course of acquiring the thing, even though the thing is the same, the means have transformed it in a really, really important way. And King wants to say something similar — that in all political practice, the ends are prefigured in the means

nonviolence has to be — if it’s going to be true nonviolence for King — informed by a philosophy of love that really wants and desires and wills goodwill for the enemy at present and is committed, at the fundamental level, to going on together in peace, going on together, sharing the polity in perpetuity.

I think for King, imperative to nonviolent resistance turns, in large part, on the question of your own dignity and self-respect. So it is a justice question. He’s concerned with structural justice as a matter of the kinds of arrangements that prevail in the larger American society. That’s obviously true.

So there’s the person or group you’re in conversation or conflict with. I’m a liberal, and I’m arguing with a conservative. And I think that’s the most common target to think about: How do I beat or convince this person or group on the other side?

Then there’s the broader community polity — the voters, of the country, people who are bystanders, maybe interested, maybe not, but a broader community that is in some way watching or can be brought in to watch. And then there’s you, the person taking the action, and how it affects you and your group to take a particular action.

something that seems present in King’s thought is much, much, much, much more concern and focus than I think most political thinkers have today on how political action affects you, the person taking it, and affects the broader community that might be watching it

— that ends up with you being turned away from the good and toward things like hatred, resentment, violence, which he thinks, ultimately, will corrode your soul and take you further away from flourishing.

But he’s also concerned with how you relate to your own sense of equality, equal standing, worth, as he would say, somebodiness, we might say dignity — he also says that a lot — and that for King, to acquiesce in the face of oppression and domination, without protest, is to abdicate your own self-respect and dignity.

for him, dignity also required a certain kind of excellence of character, a certain kind of comportment and practice toward others.

So it is about trying to defend your dignity, defend yourself respect against insult and humiliation, oppression. But it’s also about doing so in a way that doesn’t degrade your character in the long term, that doesn’t cause you to end up being turned away from the good, which, again, for him, is going to be a religiously-inflected category

When you think about somebody’s political philosophy or their theory of political action, you can maybe think of there being a couple agents they’re thinking about.

It has fallen out of favor to say that there are certain ways of acting, politically, that are better and worse, from a virtue perspective, because it often is seen not as really a question of you and your relationship to some baseline or ideal but is some kind of concession you’re making to people who don’t deserve

I am a person who believes those questions are still legitimate, that they can’t all be reduced to strategy or will to power or psychic drives. I think that there’s something like an ethical life that requires us to argue about it and requires us to think really hard about how we discipline ourselves to achieve it.

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, wrote a phenomenal book, many years ago, called “Righteous Discontent.” And that’s what introduces the phrase, “the politics of respectability.” It’s a study of turn of the century Black Baptist women and their organizing efforts through the church.

It’s this idea that, in confronting a system of social stigma, the response that you need to have to it is to try to adjust your behavior, comportment, your self fashioning, in line with the dominant norms so that you can, over time, undermine the stigma and become a full participant in society.

there are all sorts of questions, legitimate questions, that are raised against that. Are we losing something valuable about alternative forms of life, about alternative cultural practices, when we take the existing, dominant norms as unassailable or something to aspire to?

what’s really fascinating is that he talks a lot about how he sympathizes with all those criticisms. He agrees with them

here’s the other part of Evelyn Higginbotham’s formulation — there’s a deeper question, one with thousands of years of moral reflection built up into it, which is about virtue ethics — that there are some things that people are appealing to you about that aren’t about their effect in the polity that aren’t about trying to manipulate white, racial attitudes. They’re about your own flourishing and character. They’re deep questions about how to live a good life, how to achieve excellence and the crafting of your soul.

as King would say, our reason sometimes can become subordinate to our passions. It can just be a legitimizing power or rationalizing power to the point where we lose track of what we really want to achieve, the kind of character we really want to have.

And for King, many of the appeals he made in that vocabulary are really about that. They’re really about virtue. They’re really about what hatred does to your life, what anger does to your life, what violence does to your life

there is a question for him, at the core of his life, which is, what makes this worth doing? That’s a virtue question. It’s not just a strategic or tactical one, in the narrow sense.

he describes nonviolence, I think really importantly, as also being about a nonviolence of spirit.

the example that he often gives is about humiliation — that there’s a way in which the desire to humiliate others, to diminish their status in front of other people for your own pleasure, the desire to subject them to standards of evaluation that they probably themselves don’t hold or don’t understand, in order to enable mockery. There’s a way in which, if we’re reflexive about where that desire comes from, we will find that it comes from a place that’s irrational, indefensible and, likely, cruel, and that if we were to imagine a way of life built around those feelings, those desires, those practices, it would be one that would make it really hard for us to have healthy social ties, stable institutions, flourishing social relationships.

So part of what he’s up to is asking us, at all times, to be self-reflexive about the desires and needs and fantasies that drive us in politics

the concession.

So what nonviolence does is, it builds in a check on those kinds of rationalizations, those kinds of emotional drives, by teaching us to avoid forms of humiliation and forms of physical violence that make it hard to come back from. So that’s the first point.