For the second year in a row, the Sundance Film Festival had to go completely virtual, but that didn’t stop the annual celebration from giving a robust preview of the most exciting emerging artists in Hollywood. Much of this year’s slate defied the pandemic’s limitations: Twisty horror films didn’t need Park City’s frigid climate to deliver chills.
As the U.S. prepared for authorization of the first Covid-19 vaccines, the administration prepared a secret list of which nations would get the doses first.
Pour one out for Delta, the SARS-CoV-2 variant that Season 3 of the pandemic seems intent on killing off. After holding star billing through the summer and fall of 2021, Delta’s spent the past several weeks getting absolutely walloped by its feistier cousin Omicron—a virus that’s adept at both blitzing in and out of airways and dodging the antibodies that vaccines and other variants raise.
The Gilded Age made its debut on HBO on January 24, which is also the writer Edith Wharton’s birthday—a detail that’s hard to ascribe to coincidence. Not only does the drama borrow Wharton’s milieu of 1880s New York City, but the show’s creator is also a self-proclaimed Whartonite.
The deficiencies include failures to outline roles and responsibilities for other entities involved in a response.
As the Federal Reserve signals it will raise interest rates in March, we talk to Christopher Leonard, author of the new book “The Lords of Easy Money,” about how the Federal Reserve broke the American economy. He details the issues with quantitative easing, a radical intervention instituted by the federal government in 2010 to encourage banks and investors to lend more risky debt to combat the recession.
A 60-year U.S. embargo that prevents U.S.-made products from being exported to Cuba has forced the small island nation to develop its own COVID-19 vaccines and rely on open source designs for life-saving medical equipment such as ventilators. We speak to leading Cuban scientist Dr. Mitchell Valdés-Sosa about how massive mobilization helped produce three original vaccines that have proven highly effective against the coronavirus.
Liberal Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer is retiring after nearly three decades on the bench, giving President Biden a chance to fulfill a campaign promise to nominate the first Black woman in history to serve on the high court. Those worried that identity politics will hinder the most qualified candidate should consider that 108 of 115 justices since the nation’s founding have been white men, says Elie Mystal, justice correspondent for The Nation.
While Democratic strategists say these attacks are baseless, arguing that no one is being denied pills based on their race, they warn they may prove effective.
Jacinda Ardern was to have been married next weekend.
The ruling Communist Party is stepping up enforcement of its “zero tolerance” strategy.
A flurry of regulatory, testing and logistical issues is complicating the rollout.
Congress needs to create a new safety net for such lenders — not let regulators squeeze them out of business.
Inside the White House, there is still optimism: “President Biden was elected to a four-year term, not a one-year term.
The government reported Wednesday that the consumer price index, the most widely watched gauge of inflation, hit a four-decade high in December compared to the previous year.
The jump is the latest evidence that rising costs for food, rent and other necessities are heightening the financial pressures on America’s households.
The potential clash over the Fed’s plans to tighten monetary policy could be a harbinger of conflicts to come with Democrats and even some Republicans.
In memory of Thich Nhat Hanh, the world-renowned Buddhist monk, antiwar activist, poet and teacher who died Saturday, we reair a speech Hanh gave at Riverside Church in New York in 2001. Shortly after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, Hanh urged the audience to embrace peace in the face of anger, citing his experience of witnessing suffering on both sides during the war in his native Vietnam. “The real enemy of man is not man,” says Hanh.
Vladimir Putin likes to say that playing chess with the United States is like playing against a pigeon: It struts around the board, knocks over the pieces, shits everywhere, and then declares victory. Playing chess with Europe, in contrast, must be like playing with a child who has forgotten the rules of the game, claims to have invented new ones, and then sulks when no one wants to play.For so long, many people in Europe, including the U.K.
In the news today: Supreme Court Stephen Breyer has reportedly made the decision to retire at the end of the court’s current term; the decision would allow President Joe Biden to name a replacement while Democrats are in control of the Senate, foiling potential Republican plans to deny yet another court seat to a Democratic president. Another key insurrection figure loses the fight to hide his records from investigators.
NBC News has confirmed that Associate Justice Stephen Breyer will retire at the end of this term, paving the way for President Joe Biden to name his successor.
Breyer, 83, is the court’s oldest member. He has served for 27 years on the court, and had given few indications that he was seriously considering stepping down.
Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer will be stepping down at the end of the current Supreme Court term in June or July. Which has to be a blow to Mitch McConnell, who has been harboring nefarious plots for making sure President Joe Biden never had the opportunity to seat a Supreme Court justice.
Those plans weren’t even secret.
NBC News has confirmed that Justice Stephen Breyer will retire at the end of this term, paving the way for President Joe Biden to name his successor. Breyer, 83, is one of the three remaining liberal justices, and for several months progressives and activists have encouraged him to step down while Democrats still hold both the House and the Senate—something that could likely change after the 2022 midterms.
On Wednesday, Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo—Gov. Ron DeSantis’ choice to continue being Florida’s surgeon general—advanced on to the next state Senate committee. The Tampa Bay Times reports that Democratic state Sen. Lauren Book informed the panel that the four Democrats on the panel would not vote on Ladapo’s confirmation, and walked out in protest. “We don’t feel that we’re getting any answers.
“We will not be deterred by frivolous lawsuits,” Letitia James said.
Sorry, Hillary. Sorry, Liz Cheney. Sorry, imitation Sorkin pundits.
People should become parents only if they’re sure they’ll never need help, the Wisconsin Republican suggested.
The conservative commentator was previously suspended for violating the platform’s COVID-19 misinformation policy.
Sign up for Conor’s newsletter here.What do you think about artificial wombs? Are they ethical? Desirable? Should they be a priority for scientists? If they become advanced enough to be viable, would you ever use one? How would a world in which they were available differ from ours? Any thoughts on this subject are welcome.Email your answers to conor@theatlantic.com. I’ll publish a selection of answers in Friday’s newsletter.
Last spring, during an online civics class I teach at the National Constitution Center for high-school students, I asked Justice Stephen Breyer about the values of compromise, consensus, and intellectual humility that he has championed throughout his career, as a Senate staffer for Ted Kennedy, an appellate judge, and a Supreme Court justice.“I saw Senator Kennedy do this all the time,” replied Breyer, who announced his retirement from the Supreme Court today.