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The upshot is that “fake news”—the political logic, not the synthetic variety—has become more than a talking point for the American president and his imitators. It has had and will continue to have real-world consequences, both for American democracy and beyond America’s shores. As the British minister Matt Hancock recently testified to the House of Lords, “the basis of a free democracy is to have an agreed, objective basis of fact off which to have political disagreements.” Hancock felt compelled to make one more point: “Objective reality … exists.”

Arendt put it differently. “Conceptually, we may call truth what we cannot change,” she wrote in the essay “Truth and Politics.” But “metaphorically, it is the ground on which we stand and the sky that stretches above us.”

The European Union has failed Italy because promised solidarity in taking in immigrants reaching Europe through Mediterranean routes hardly materialized. In 2017, Italy received over 60 percent of such migrants

It has failed Italy because the rigid fiscal constraints of membership of the euro — set up to ensure that Italy’s budgetary laxness and administrative inefficiency would not be a problem for Germans — have proved unsustainable, engendering growing resentment toward Chancellor Angela Merkel.

let Salvini and Di Maio and Giuseppe Conte, the new prime minister whose inflation of his academic credentials is not reassuring, go to work on the mess. It’s much better to have them fail on the inside than have them rail from the outside. It’s better to have them lose support through failure than gain support through bluster.

a core beauty of the European Union is that its interlocking institutions are designed precisely to ensure that no country can go off on what the Germans call a Sonderweg — the sort of wayward path of nationalism and mysticism and racism that led Germany, and all of Europe, to ruin.

Another reason why New York has so many confirmed coronavirus cases is because it is looking for them.The US has lagged behind other countries in testing suspected cases, and people across the country have told CNN that they have been unable to get tested.New York, though, has made a dedicated push to ramp up testing at hospitals, labs and drive-through centers specifically set up in the most dense areas. With FDA approval, New York state authorized 28 public and private labs to begin testing for coronavirus on March 13, the first state to do so.

With over 8 million people, New York City is also the largest city in the country. So New York's high number of coronavirus cases is also just a reflection of its size. The state will likely lead the country in coronavirus cases even if its infection rate per person is not the highest, Sepkowitz said.

Cuomo said over 100,000 people have been tested for coronavirus in New York. He said Thursday that about 25% of all testing nationwide has been performed by New York.

Cuomo has earned rave reviews for his daily press conferences during the crisis. But both he and de Blasio were slow to aggressively shut schools, events and social gatherings in the early days of the outbreak.

New York City is a world-renowned tourist destination and the most visited destination in the US. As such, Cuomo said that contagious people from countries that had earlier coronavirus outbreaks traveled to the city and spread the virus.

Given all those reasons, New York City was always bound to be a hub of rapidly spreading cases. But it is far from the last.

The world may be paying for those missteps right now. Testing is central to the effort to fight the spread of the virus. Countries that test widely can isolate infected people and prevent or slow new infections. Without early and widespread testing, health officials and policymakers will be flying blind, epidemiologists say.

“Y​ou cannot fight a fire blindfolded,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, W.H.O.’s director general. “And we cannot stop this pandemic​ i​f we don’t know who is infected.”

As the virus reached into the United States in late January, President Trump and his administration spent weeks downplaying the potential for an outbreak. The Centers for Disease Control opted to develop its own test rather than rely on private laboratories or the World Health Organization.

The outbreak quickly outpaced Mr. Trump’s predictions, and the C.D.C.’s test kits turned out to be flawed, leaving the United States far behind other parts of the world — both technically and politically.

In Britain, as in many other countries, the virus is circulating so quickly that it is no longer possible to test people and investigate whom they may have infected, said David McCoy, a public health professor at Queen Mary University in London

“The window of opportunity to contain the epidemic has now shut,” Mr. McCoy said.

France says that it is able to test 2,500 cases daily, though officials won’t say how many people they have tested. The United States has run about 25,000 tests. Neither country has contained the virus or tested aggressively for it. Korea and Singapore have so far been able to do both.

“We were not just looking at having a very good diagnostics test. That’s kind of a given. You can’t do anything without that,” said Dr. Sidney Yee, the chief executive of Singapore’s Diagnostics Development Hub. “We were also looking at getting people prepared and getting accurate messages out.”

national leaders set the tone. “What you’re seeing today is the impact of those earlier comments, and that earlier attitude,”

With no treatment for the disease, many countries are telling sick people to stay home unless they become seriously ill. Hospitals cannot afford to be overwhelmed by nervous people asking for tests.

But patients who self-quarantine likely won’t ever be tested, making it difficult to know the true scope of the disease. And as the disease spreads, the practicality of testing declines, as does its value.

“Testing of contacts, I believe, will be totally out of control very soon,”

For months, Trump himself referred to the illness as “the coronavirus.” In early March, though, several conservative media figures began using Wuhan virus or Chinese virus instead. On March 16, Trump himself began to refer to it as the “Chinese Virus,” prompting commentators to charge that he was racializing the epidemic

Even before Trump’s adoption of Chinese virus, Asian Americans had been facing a wave of discrimination, harassment, and violence in response to the epidemic. The president’s rhetoric did not start this backlash, but the decision to embrace the term Chinese virus reinforced the association between a worldwide pandemic and people of a particular national origin.

Legitimizing that link with all the authority of the office of the president of the United States is not just morally abhorrent, but dangerous.

The president’s now-constant use of Chinese virus is the latest example of a conservative phenomenon

Trump and his acolytes are never more comfortable than when they are defending expressions of bigotry as plain common sense, and accusing their liberal critics of being oversensitive snowflakes who care more about protecting “those people” than they do about you. They seek to reduce any political dispute to this simple equation whenever possible.

“I want them to talk about racism every day,” the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon told The American Prospect in 2017. “If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”

n this instance, though, the gambit served two additional purposes: distracting the public from Trump’s catastrophic mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic, and disguising the fact that Trump’s failures stemmed from his selfishness and fondness for authoritarian leaders, which in turn made him an easy mark for the Chinese government’s disinformation

Trump understands that overt expressions of prejudice draw condemnation from liberals, which in turn rallies his own base around him. Calling the coronavirus the “Chinese virus” not only informs Trump’s base that foreigners are the culprits, it also offers his supporters the emotional satisfaction of venting fury at liberals for unfairly accusing conservatives of racism.

The point is to turn a pandemic that threatens both mass death and the collapse of the American economy into a culture-war argument in which the electorate can be polarized along partisan lines.

Since that report, Chinese officials have engaged in a propaganda offensive, expelling American journalists, minimizing their early missteps, and putting forth a conspiracy theory that the virus was engineered by the U.S. military. Compared with all this, the president’s defenders argue, Trump referring to the coronavirus as the “Chinese virus” seems trivial.

Lost in that comparison, however, is the fact that the most effective target of CCP disinformation has been Trump himself.

According to The Washington Post, at the same time that Trump was stating that Beijing had the disease under control, U.S. intelligence agencies were already warning him that “Chinese officials appeared to be minimizing the severity of the outbreak.”

Administration officials directly warned Trump of the danger posed by the virus, but “Trump’s insistence on the contrary seemed to rest in his relationship with China’s President Xi Jingping, whom Trump believed was providing him with reliable information about how the virus was spreading in China,” The Washington Post reported, “despite reports from intelligence agencies that Chinese officials were not being candid about the true scale of the crisis.”

The right’s rhetorical shift then, is not just another racism rope-a-dop

It is also an attempt to cover up the fact that the Chinese government’s propaganda campaign was effective in that it helped persuade the president of the United States not to take adequate precautionary measures to stem a tide of pestilence that U.S. government officials saw coming.

Now faced with the profound consequences of that decision, the right has settled on a strategy that does little to hold Beijing accountable for its mishandling of the coronavirus, but instead plays into Beijing’s attempt to cast any criticism of the Chinese government’s response as racism

The term makes no distinction between China’s authoritarian government and people who happen to be of Chinese origin, and undermines the unified front the Trump administration would want if it were actually concerned with countering Chinese-government propaganda.

Instead, the Trump administration has chosen a political tactic that strengthens the president’s political prospects by polarizing the electorate, and covers up his own role as Xi’s patsy, while making its own pushback against CCP propaganda less effective

This approach reflects the most glaring flaws of Trumpist governance, which have become only more acute during the coronavirus crisis: It exacerbates rather than solves the underlying problem, placing the president’s political objectives above all other concerns, even the ones both the president and his supporters claim to value.

Raqqa, which has been held by IS since 2014, is an important hub for the jihadist group's operations and is reportedly defended by up to 4,000 fighters.

As well as holding part of Al-Sabahiya in the west, the alliance also controls Al-Meshleb in the east. But it has struggled to advance from the city's north, which is heavily defended.

"IS has reinforced the northern approach to Raqqa much more, thinking that's how the SDF would try to advance on the city," Mr Abdel Rahman said.

This order is similar to one issued by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo that has been the basis for him being blamed for thousands of nursing home deaths.

Whitmer's order did say, however, that hospitals could only send residents to nursing homes if the homes had a dedicated unit for those COVID-19, and if they did not, the patients should be sent to a regional hub or alternate facility. Cuomo's order, which was rescinded in May, only said "standard precautions must be maintained, and environmental cleaning made a priority."

Consider a slice of Florida’s seniors, ages 65 to 74, who have been eligible for vaccination for four months. Almost all seniors in the state’s wealthiest county, St. Johns, have been vaccinated. (The numbers may be inflated because of seasonal residents, or snowbirds, who aren’t necessarily counted as part of the county’s population but are still counted among people getting vaccinated there.) But the first county west of St. Johns is one of the state’s poorest: Putnam, where the median annual income is about $35,000. Only half of the county’s residents ages 65 to 74 have been vaccinated.

The reasons are myriad: The state’s rollout has been deeply reliant on tech savviness and reliable transportation to secure and then get to vaccination appointments, said Dr. Frederick Anderson, who runs a community health clinic at Florida International University’s medical school. Additionally, some of the current vaccines are difficult to store and transport, which makes vaccine rollout easier in population hubs, which tend to be wealthier.

When eligibility is expanded in other states, vaccinations are expected to surge among the wealthiest Americans and lag among the poorest.

“The rural counties are lagging slightly behind what we would expect,” said Dave Jeppesen, the director of Idaho’s health department, in a news conference Wednesday.

Nationally, many conservatives — men in particular — have said in multiple polls that they do not wish to be vaccinated. In some of Idaho’s more conservative counties, senior vaccination rates are below 40 percent.

If that's the case, it will take more than just opening up eligibility to get the country to levels of vaccination that can reach herd immunity — when roughly 70 percent of people are vaccinated, making it too difficult for the virus to spread.

“What we saw was the single largest demand event in history,” said Peter Keavey, managing director for energy products at CME Group, owner of the New York Mercantile Exchange, where U.S. crude futures trade.

Prices have since somewhat recovered. But those jarring moves of the spring added urgency to arguments about whether benchmarks used since the 1980s adequately reflect the modern oil market

The crash rippled through the physical market, where, for example, Saudi Arabia sets prices for exports to the U.S. using an assessment tied to futures prices.

The pricing system based on three benchmark crudes—West Texas Intermediate in the U.S., Brent in Europe and Dubai in the Middle East—has broadly stayed the same.

Crude oil comes in dozens of varieties that differ by density and sulfur content. WTI, Brent and Dubai act as reference points against which other grades are priced. They also are the basis for financial contracts that allow players in the oil market to hedge against and speculate on price swings.

That means the price of the contracts typically converges with oil prices at Cushing in the run-up to their last day of trading.

“We need to open up the benchmarks to be more reflective of global oil prices,” said Greg Newman, chief executive of U.K.-based Onyx Capital Group, which specializes in oil swaps. “How can it be accurate if you’re focusing on one tiny localized area?”

Even before coronavirus, there was growing interest in assessing the price of crude at the Gulf Coast, home to other U.S. trading hubs.

there has been a boom in U.S. oil exports since a four-decade embargo on its shipments ended in late 2015.

WTI futures show no sign of being displaced as the primary gauge of U.S. crude prices, said CME’s Mr. Keavey. “Crude-oil infrastructure in the U.S. still revolves around Cushing,” he said. “The Gulf Coast is certainly an emerging price point, but it is still a secondary benchmark.”

“Benchmarks always reflect flows,”

This narrative – that "others," often from far-flung places, are to blame for epidemics – is a dramatic example of a long tradition of hatred. In 14th-century Europe, Jewish communities were wrongfully accused of poisoning wells to spread the Black Death. In 1900, Chinese people were unfairly vilified for an outbreak of the plague in San Francisco's Chinatown. And in the '80s, Haitians were blamed for bringing HIV/AIDS to the U.S., a theory that's considered unsubstantiated by many global health experts.

Some public health practitioners say the global health system is partially responsible for perpetuating these ideas.According to Abraar Karan, a doctor at the Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, the notion persists in global health that "the West is the best." This led to an assumption early on in the pandemic that COVID-19 spread to the rest of the world because China wasn't able to control it.

China's response was not without fault. The government's decision to silence doctors and not warn the public about a likely pandemic for six days in mid-January caused more than 3,000 people to become infected within a week, according to a report by the Associated Press, and created ripe conditions for global spread. Some of the aggressive measures China took to control the epidemic – confining people to their homes, for example — have been described as "draconian" and a violation of civil rights, even if they ultimately proved effective.

But it soon became clear that assumptions about the superiority of Western health systems were false when China and other Asian countries, along with many African countries, controlled outbreaks far more effectively and faster than Western countries did, says Karan.

Some politicians, including former President Donald Trump publicly blamed China for the pandemic, calling this novel coronavirus the "Chinese Virus" or the "Wuhan Virus." They consistently pushed that narrative even after the World Health Organization (WHO) warned as early as March 2020, when the pandemic was declared, that such language would encourage racial profiling and stigmatization against Asians. Trump has continued to use stigmatizing language in the wake of the Atlanta shooting, using the phrase "China virus" during a March 16 call to Fox News.

A report by researchers at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF), released this month, directly linked Trump's first tweet about a "Chinese virus" to a significant increase in anti-Asian hashtags. According to a separate report by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, anti-Asian hate crimes in 16 U.S. cities increased 149 percent in 2020, from 49 to 122.

Suspicion tends to manifest more during times of vulnerability, like in wartime or during a pandemic, says ElsaMarie D'Silva, an Aspen Institute New Voices fellow from India who studies violence and harassment issues. It just so happened that COVID-19 was originally identified in China, but, as NPR's Jason Beaubien has reported, some of the early clusters of cases elsewhere came from jet setters who traveled to Europe and ski destinations.

Karan says we also need to shift our approach to epidemics. In the case of COVID-19 and other outbreaks, Western countries often think of them as a national security issue, closing borders and blaming the countries where the disease was first reported. This approach encourages stigmatization, he says.

In the early days of COVID-19, skepticism by Western public health officials about the efficacy of Asian mask protocols hindered the U.S.'s ability to control the pandemic. Additionally, stereotypes about who was and wasn't at risk had significant consequences, says Nancy Kass, deputy director for public health at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics.

According to Kass, doctors initially only considered a possible COVID-19 diagnosis among people who had recently flown back from China. That narrow focus caused the U.S. to misdiagnose patients who presented with what we now call classic COVID symptoms simply because they hadn't traveled from China.

It's reminiscent of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, Kass says. Because itwas so widely billed as a "gay disease," there are many documented cases of heterosexual women who presented with symptoms but weren't diagnosed until they were on their deathbeds.

That's not to say that we should ignore facts and patterns about new diseases. For example, Kass says it's appropriate to warn pregnant women about the risks of traveling to countries where the Zika virus, which is linked to birth and developmental defects, is present.

But there's a difference, she says, between making sure people have enough information to understand a disease and attaching a label, like "Chinese virus," that is inaccurate and that leads to stereotyping.

the West is usually regarded as the hub of expertise and knowledge, says Sriram Shamasunder, an associate professor of medicine at UCSF, and there's a sense among Western health workers that epidemics occur in impoverished contexts because the people there engage in primitive behaviors and just don't care as much about health.

Instead, Karan suggests reframing the discussion to focus on global solidarity, which promotes the idea that we are all in this together. One way for wealthy countries to demonstrate solidarity now, Karan says, is by supporting the equitable and speedy distribution of vaccines among countries globally as well as among communities within their own borders.Without such commitments in place, "it prompts the question, whose lives matter most?" says Shamasunder.

Ultimately, the global health community – and Western society as a whole – has to discard its deep-rooted mindset of coloniality and tendency to scapegoat others, says Hswen. The public health community can start by talking more about the historic racism and atrocities that have been tied to diseases.

Additionally, Karan says, leaders should reframe the pandemic for people: Instead of blaming Asians for the virus, blame the systems that weren't adequately prepared to respond to a pandemic.

Although WHO has had specific guidance since 2015 about not naming diseases after places, Hswen says the public health community at large should have spoken out earlier and stronger last year against racialized language and the ensuing violence. She says they should have anticipated the backlash against Asians and preempted it with public messaging and education about why neutral terms like "COVID-19" should be used instead of "Chinese virus."

Ship owners and operators have some options, but none of them are particularly good ones. The adage that time is money couldn't be more true in the shipping business. For the vessels already backed up in the canal, if the waterway isn't clear for transit soon, a decision will need to be made about whether to continue waiting or go to Plan B.

To get an idea just what a shortcut could be lost, commodity analysts Kpler said that for a vessel averaging 12 knots (14 mph), Suez to Amsterdam, takes 13 days via the canal. Around the Cape of Good Hope, it takes 41 days.

The situation could become clearer in the next week, Karatzas said, but if the Ever Given looks likely to require a massive operation to break free, shippers will have to make some tough and potentially costly decisions. The same goes for vessels that haven't yet left port, although the cost in time and money for them wouldn't be as great.

Another possible option is to go through the Panama Canal by way of the Pacific. But many of the largest commercial vessels today, such as the 1,300-foot Ever Given, are too big to fit through the Panama Canal.

Jonathan Roach, a container market analyst for Braemar ACM Shipbroking, said in a recent letter to clients that the route via the Cape of Good Hope was the most likely detour, even for vessels that can fit through the Panama Canal.Last year, due to a combination of excess capacity and falling fuel prices, some shippers did just that — opting to go the Africa route to avoid the Suez Canal transit fees.

There is one more possibility, but it too has severe limitations. A shorter route through the Arctic known alternately as the Northeast Passage, or the Northern Sea Route, or NSR, is being touted by Russia.

The number of vessels using the NSR has increased to several hundred each year, thanks in part to global warming that has reduced polar ice. However, traffic there still amounts to a mere fraction of what passes through the Suez.

The Northern Sea Route is still not considered practical by most shipping companies. For example, in 2018, Maersk, the world's largest container line, sent one of its ships via the NSR, but the company emphasized it doesn't see the route "as an alternative to our usual routes" and that the voyage was merely "a trial to explore an unknown route for container shipping and to collect scientific data."

Lastly, it's worth noting that a prolonged shutdown of the Suez Canal is not unprecedented. The waterway was closed for eight years, beginning in 1967, after war broke out between Egypt and Israel. As a result, ships were forced to divert around the tip of Africa.

Global supply chains, already significantly disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic, could be further stressed by a prolonged shutdown of the Suez Canal, said Jonathan Gold, vice president for supply chain and customs policy with the National Retail Federation.

The greatest impact would be felt in the European market, which relies most on transfers through the canal, but given the interconnected nature of global manufacturing and commerce, there's likely also to be a knock-on effect for the United States.

Bisceglie said it's time for companies to consider "having more disparate [supply hubs] instead of having all our eggs on one cargo ship." Maersk told NPR on Friday that it was too early to commit to rerouting any of its massive global container fleet. The Copenhagen, Denmark-based company said in a statement, that while "out of our control, we apologize for the inconvenience this incident may cause to your business and for critical shipments."

Like much else about the situation, it depends on how long it goes on. A weeklong delay for a few hundred ships at the Suez might have only a negligible impact for consumers, but a prolonged delay could increase the cost of shipping, complicate manufacturing and ultimately drive up prices.

That's $80,000 a day in fuel and an extra 10 days travel time — both to and from Asia. "So, you're looking at the best part of a million dollars with your operating costs. So it's a million dollars out and a million dollars back," he said.

In his letter to clients, Roach also noted problems at the Suez Canal could disrupt the flow of containers. A trade imbalance between Europe and Asia means that filled containers going west return mostly empty to ports in the east to be refilled. "If empty stocks dwindle in Asia, there is the short-term possibility of an increase" in prices, Roach wrote.

Overall, though, Joanna Konings, a senior economist at ING, told Bloomberg that she's "relatively sanguine" about the impact on trade. But she doesn't rule out "an inflationary shock that could come right to the consumer."

Shipping rates for petroleum products have nearly doubled since the Ever Given's grounding on Tuesday, according to Reuters. Although oil prices may also be feeling some upward pressure in the wake of the Ever Given incident, their increase so far has been blunted by news of further COVID-19 lockdowns in Europe that are likely to continue to depress demand.

If those vaccines make their way into arms quickly, the nation could be on its way to a relatively pleasant summer and something approaching normal by autumn. Imagine schools running at full capacity in September and families gathering for Thanksgiving.

This is especially true for racial minorities, who are being disproportionately missed by the vaccination effort.

There’s plenty of disagreement among experts as to why America is still having problems with vaccine uptake. Some officials have suggested that the main cause is that too many people are hesitant to get the vaccine. Others point the finger at overcautious public health officials who they say have undersold the promise of the vaccines. Still others point to long lines at clinics as proof that far more people want the vaccine than can actually get it.

It will mean setting up employee vaccination sites at schools, grocery stores, transit hubs and meatpacking plants, and community clinics at houses of worship, with local leaders promoting and running them.

“The easier you can make it for people to get vaccinated, the more likely your program will be to succeed,”

“Blue America is increasingly buoyed by the knowledge economy,” the analysis concludes, while “red America is struggling to find a viable growth model for the twenty-first century.”

A big part of the problem, the authors argue, is conservative governance.

The analysis looks at the political economy of 26 states that voted Republican in presidential elections three times since 2000. Of those, 21 are what the authors call “low road states.

Mostly Southern, they largely maintain that model centered on weak unions and low wages, and tend to have smaller governments and far fewer urban centers.

those states have aggregate wage averages that rank below those in the states that voted blue three times since 2000

Another group — “left behind states” — are the ones in the industrial Midwest. They, too, are struggling in the knowledge economy. But they have legacies of progressive policies strengthening unions and public spending

To address resulting regional disparities, the analysis argues, these states should want expanded federal cash transfers and bigger federal spending on health care, social insurance and infrastructure

Instead, red state politicians have increasingly embraced a national agenda that is focused on tax cuts and aggressive deregulation and hostile to federal transfers.

Why? Because GOP policy at the federal and state levels is largely set by “national business groups and organized wealthy backers.

Meanwhile, the rescue package’s child allowance is the sort of policy that “conservative populist” Republicans who want to wean the GOP off its addiction to plutocratic policies should support.

GOP political elites are able to continue insulating themselves from accountability for this disconnect, not just “through identity appeals rooted in racial and cultural backlash,” but also because of the bias “of the American electoral system toward nonurban areas.”

“The tragic irony is that this huge rural bias also helps Republicans get away with ignoring the economic needs of their own constituents.”

The Sputnik V vaccine has a cheaper list price and can be stored at higher temperatures than the Pfizer vaccine, which has made it appealing to Latin American countries with less-developed economies and infrastructures. It requires two doses taken 21 days apart to be effective.

Russia has acknowledged the production squeeze and has considered launching regional production hubs in several countries, including Brazil, according to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.

Experts have repeatedly voiced concern over transparency around Sputnik's testing and its accelerated authorization in Russia. However, the vaccine was found 91.6% effective against symptomatic Covid-19 and 100% effective against severe and moderate disease, in an interim analysis of the vaccine's Phase 3 trial results published in The Lancet.

“This is meant to be a temporary way of getting my thoughts and ideas out to the public without the Fake News spin, but the website is not a ‘platform,’” he said in a statement. “It is merely a way of communicating until I decide on what the future will be for the choice or establishment of a platform.”

’s comforting to be vaccinated and to go where everyone else is vaccinated, too

In early May, I took my first commercial flight since travel restrictions have eased and my vaccination reached full potency, to visit my daughter in Texas. I didn’t feel wildly unsafe; it was psychologically uncomfortable, but I have always disliked airports and planes. I ate and drank nothing onboard, and my mask was tightly fixed on my face.Still, there was also a feeling of festive nostalgia attached to reclaiming the skies, a feeling I usually associate with returning to a university where I once studied, or revisiting the scene of childhood summers.

Equally, much as I yearn to go elsewhere, I am eager to welcome people to these shores. It’s eerie to walk through the great New York City museums and not hear the din of 100 languages. Travel is a two-way street, and let us hope that it will soon be bumper-to-bumper in both directions.

Mr. Biden’s immigration plan would provide a pathway to citizenship for an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants, and increase diversity visas and border-security funding. But, conceding the long odds of achieving such extensive changes, lawmakers are focusing on cobbling together a package of smaller bills that would legalize about eight million or fewer undocumented immigrants.

A team of immigration activists and researchers as well as congressional aides is exploring the question, digging into the best way to present their case to Ms. MacDonough, who declined to comment for this article. They have found past precedents, including one from 2005, in which changes to immigration policy were allowed as part of a budget-reconciliation package, and they are tallying up the budgetary effects of the immigration proposals — which total in the tens of billions.

“Before we can do anything meaningful on immigration, we’re going to have to deal with the current crisis at the border,” said Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, who has been involved in the bipartisan talks. “I don’t think the public is going to tolerate us ignoring this crisis, and it’s just going to get worse unless we deal with it.”

To pull it off, Democrats would have to grapple with strict budget rules that limit what can be done under reconciliation.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi last month endorsed the idea of using reconciliation to push through an immigration measure, citing the “budget impacts of immigration in our country.” Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the No. 3 Democrat, came out in favor of the approach last week.

The pro-immigration group FWD.us hired Kevin Kayes, a former assistant Senate parliamentarian, to help hone the procedural argument in favor of allowing the maneuver this year.“Those provisions are the precedent for us,” said Kerri Talbot, the deputy director of the Immigration Hub. “A lot of things we’re trying to do now relate to what was approved in 2005.”

Twenty-two Democrats, including four senators, recently wrote a letter to Mr. Biden urging him to include an immigration overhaul in his infrastructure package. Many are worried that they will lose control of Congress in the 2022 midterm elections, and fearful that the Supreme Court will strike down former President Barack Obama’s protections for Dreamers.

Yet not all Democrats are likely to support a unilateral approach

For now, Senator Richard J. Durbin, the No. 2 Democrat who has for years pushed for a path to citizenship for the Dreamers, said that he was focused on passing a bipartisan immigration bill, and that Mr. Schumer had encouraged him to work to reach a deal with Republicans.

“The crisis at the border is undisputable — even the president admits that now — so if we can work on that, and then work on some of the path options that I’ve supported in the past, I’m guardedly optimistic,” he said.

The disease would ravage Wuhan before it was brought under control in March. The city was locked down on Jan. 23 with little or no warning. The hardships endured and lives lost became a source of both sorrow and pride for residents once the 76-day lockdown was lifted on April 8.

Scientists initially suspected the virus came from wild animals sold in the market.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology maintains an extensive archive of genetic sequences of bat coronaviruses built in the wake of the 2003 SARS pandemic, which spread from China to many countries.

China has firmly rejected calls for an independent outside investigation. The head of the WHO recently expressed impatience with how long China took to make necessary arrangements for the expert team's visit.

China stifled independent reports about the outbreak and has published little information on its search for the origins of the virus. An AP investigation found that the government has strictly controlled all scientific research related to the outbreak and forbids researchers from speaking to the press.

“Traditionally we kept our shopping separate from our living from our recreation,” said Amanda Nicholson, a professor of retail practice at Syracuse University. “That’s not what the world wants anymore. Malls need to be more creative about getting people outside their homes — it can’t just be stores, stores and more stores."

These days, the most successful malls tend to be dominated by brands that appeal to higher earners, like Nordstrom, Apple and Lululemon, as well as up-and-comers like Untuckit and Peloton. They also tend to have invested heavily in restaurants, spas and specialty gyms that keep customers coming back, week after week, even if they’re doing more of their shopping online, Saunders said.

“Everybody talks about the future of retail and the future of entertainment, and how you merge the two,” Don Ghermezian, president of Triple Five Group, said last month. “There really isn’t a center on the planet that has done it to the degree that we’ve done in here.”

The nation’s first shopping center opened in Edina, Minn., in 1956. Renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright was unimpressed, as it had “all the evils of the village street and none of its charm.

“There was an explosion of one-level malls with four anchor stores, a dreary food court and a carousel in the middle,” said Nicholson of Syracuse. “Developers realized they could put a large, flat building in the middle of a field and quickly make money — so for decades, in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, that’s what they did.

since 2010, the cost of a gigabyte of hard-drive space has fallen from 10 cents to 1 cent. Why spend your one wild and precious life organizing app icons on a home screen? Why throw out books when you can always buy a new bookshelf?

Each of us became a wanderer in a sea of content. Each of us adopted the tacit—but still shameful—assumption that we are just treading water, that the clock is always running, and that the work will never end

What the idealized iPhone user and the idealized Gmail user shared was a perfect executive-functioning system: Every time they picked up their phone or opened their web browser, they knew exactly what they wanted to do, got it done with a calm single-mindedness, and then closed their device

the implicit promise of Gmail-style computing. The explosion of cloud storage and the invention of smartphones both arrived at roughly the same time, and they both subverted the idea that we should organize our computer. What they offered in its place was a vision of ease and readiness.

When iTunes launched in January 2001, Apple’s software was a place to organize the MP3s and other music files on your desktop computer. (It was not yet even a tool to sync an iPod, because the first iPod didn’t come out until October 2001.) But within a few years, it became a “digital hub,” a place to organize your music and movies and, eventually, iPhone, which debuted in 2007