Editor’s note: This week’s newsletter is a rerun.
We’ll be back with a fresh newsletter next week.
I often think of fiction as fact’s partner in the pursuit of truth. At its best, the genre is capable of rendering the worlds we’re unable to imagine, and also of revealing the ones hidden around us. Last year, The Atlantic recommitted itself to publishing fiction with greater frequency.
Each installment of “The Friendship Files” features a conversation between The Atlantic’s Julie Beck and two or more friends, exploring the history and significance of their relationship.This week she talks with three men whose international group of friends has been having an annual New Year’s Eve reunion party for the past 10 years (except for 2020, when the pandemic prevented it).
Democracy Now! first aired on nine community radio stations on February 19, 1996, on the eve of the New Hampshire presidential primary. In the 25 years since that initial broadcast, the program has greatly expanded, airing today on more than 1,500 television and radio stations around the globe and reaching millions of people online.
A looming shortage of doses for low- and moderate-income countries puts increased pressure on Novavax to obtain regulatory approvals for global manufacturing.
South of downtown Columbus, Ohio, lost on the way to a tailgate, I saw the road sign bearing his name. The brown aluminum placard flashed between passing cars. I’d been holding my phone, listening to directions, and I dropped it. I could hardly make out the words on the sign, and then it disappeared behind semis, but I knew what they said: Army Specialist Nicholaus E. Zimmer Memorial Highway.
The Brooklyn Nets have officially ended their tug-of-war with Kyrie Irving over the star point guard’s vaccination status. And Irving, who has refused to get a COVID-19 shot, is unquestionably the winner.The rapid spread of the coronavirus’s Omicron variant has left gaps on rosters across the NBA.
Director Rochelle Walensky acknowledged that the decision to shorten the recommended isolation period “really had a lot to do with what we thought people would be able to tolerate.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s tally represents a grim new milestone in the coronavirus pandemic.
The new warning is based on preliminary studies by the National Institutes of Health’s Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics initiative.
The agency said the disparity was due to the rate with which the highly transmissible Omicron spread.
The former Senate Majority Leader died on Tuesday after a years-long battle with pancreatic cancer.
Despite a centrist background, the late Senate Democratic leader’s penchant for partisan combat endeared him to the left.
“He was a man of action, and a man of his word,” the president said of the late senator from Nevada.
Every weekday evening, our editors guide you through the biggest stories of the day, help you discover new ideas, and surprise you with moments of delight. Subscribe to get this delivered to your inbox.This year was … a lot. Delta, Omicron, inflation, threats to democracy. I get why most people are feeling exhausted.I still believe that better times are coming.
Western intelligence agencies have warned that Russia is contemplating an invasion of Ukraine, perhaps involving some 175,000 troops. Vladimir Putin’s government has already moved more than 100,000 troops along Ukraine’s borders, including into Belarus. Russian officials have been making outrageously paranoid and false accusations. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, for example, recently blamed NATO for the return of the “nightmare scenario of military confrontation.
The results, which covered Nov. 1 through Dec. 24, were fueled by purchases of clothing and jewelry.
Nearly the entire increase came from the burst of federal spending as the government mobilized to contain the spread of the virus.
The Fed plans to cease its bond buys entirely by March, rather than its earlier target of June to give itself room to begin raising interest rates as early as the second quarter of next year.
Costs for key goods and services soared 0.8 percent for the month and 6.8 percent for the year, the highest since 1982, the Labor Department reported Friday.
We go to New Delhi, India, to speak with acclaimed Indian author and activist Arundhati Roy about the pandemic, U.S. militarism and the state of journalism. Roy first appeared on Democracy Now! after receiving widespread backlash for speaking out against the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. At the time, her emphatic antiwar stance clashed with the rising tides of patriotism and calls for war after 9/11. “Now the same media is saying what we were saying 20 years ago,” says Roy.
Acclaimed poet Martín Espada recently won the National Book Award for Poetry for his anthology “Floaters.” He became just the third Latinx poet to win the award. “Floaters” is titled after the photo of the Salvadoran father and daughter who drowned in the Rio Grande in June 2019 trying to cross into the United States, one that sparked outrage at the humanitarian crisis at the U.S. southern border. Espada discusses U.S.
In the news today: The House committee probing the Jan. 6 insurrection wants to hear from yet another House Republican who was in contact with Donald Trump that day: Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, whose pleas to Trump for assistance during the violence were rebuffed. The new year is bringing at least some good news, as new government rules take effect curtailing surprise medical bills.
When Fox News demonstrates more journalistic scruples than the BBC, you know we’re in trouble.
Famed constitutional scholar Alan Dershowitz, who thinks the Constitution gives Donald Trump the power to do anything he wants so long as he’s earnestly attempting to steal elections, appeared on BBC News Wednesday after Ghislaine Maxwell was found guilty on five counts of sex trafficking.
Amid the increasing number of COVID-19 cases across the U.S. due to the omicron variant, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced some recent changes to coronavirus guidelines on Dec. 27. While one would assume the recommendations would be stricter given the surge in cases, the announcement came as a shock to many because the CDC instead shortened the recommended isolation and quarantine period for people with COVID-19.
A 14-year-old aspiring engineer who came to America from Chile after fearing for her safety was killed two days before Christmas in a tragic police shooting. Valentina Orellana-Peralta wasn’t a suspect when officers were called to a Burlington department store to investigate an assault with a deadly weapon in progress around 11:45 AM Thursday in the North Hollywood neighborhood of Los Angeles, police said in a news release.
When winter cold sweeps through parts of the United States, the desire for warmer weather has always sent Americans to places like the Caribbean. Even during this pandemic, U.S. tourists long to go somewhere, no matter the possible risks to their health or to the health of the people who call their holiday destinations home.
Though many tourists arrive by air, pleasure cruising to the Caribbean has a long history.
The four-week average, which smooths out week-to-week volatility, fell to just above 199,000, the lowest level since October 1969.
Noam Chomsky decries what he calls the torture of imprisoned WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. He also critiques the Biden administration’s reckless foreign policy. “The trajectory is not optimistic,” Chomsky says. “The worst case is the increasing provocative actions towards China. That’s very dangerous.
Noam Chomsky warns the Republican Party is “marching” the world to destruction by ignoring the climate emergency while embracing proto-fascism at home. Chomsky talks about the January 6 insurrection, how neoliberalism is a form of class warfare and how President Biden’s climate plans fall short of what is needed.
Today, a special broadcast: an hour with Noam Chomsky, the world-renowned political dissident, linguist and author, who just turned 93 years old. Chomsky spoke to Democracy Now! prior to the discovery of the Omicron coronavirus variant, but he predicted new variants would emerge.