Rewatching the music video for “Blurred Lines,” the totemic Robin Thicke song, is an interesting project. In 2013, when it was released, the song spawned a new microeconomy of commentary denouncing it as a distillation of rape culture, or fretting over whether enjoying its jaunty hook was defensible. (“I know you want it,” Thicke croons presumptively over and over, even though honestly, no, I do not want it at all.
Photographs by Maureen DrennanA sign in the entrance of the Michael A. Rawley Jr. American Legion Post advertises the space as “members only,” but the Brooklyn-based photographer Maureen Drennan has warned me in advance to ignore it. Drennan has often entered these establishments unannounced: Since 2018, she’s photographed American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars posts across the northeastern United States, drawn in by what she calls their “lonely poetry.
The United States and China made a surprise announcement on Wednesday at the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow on a joint pledge to reduce methane emissions and slow deforestation. The United States is the largest historical emitter of carbon emissions, while China has been the largest emitter in recent years.
Kyle Rittenhouse took to the stand on Wednesday before his defense team asked for a mistrial with prejudice in the case. If a mistrial is granted, Rittenhouse cannot be tried again, though the judge did not immediately rule on the request and said jury deliberations could begin on Monday. Now 18 years old, Rittenhouse was 17 when he fatally shot two men and injured one with a semiautomatic rifle during racial justice protests last year in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
It’s tripped up the last two Democratic presidents and could trip up Biden too: How to sell a recovery when most voters aren’t feeling it.
The prospect of hitting businesses with new testing costs as many struggle to staff back up could harden opposition to Biden’s plan, and hamper the president’s latest push to end the pandemic.
The administration warned a federal court of the dangers of a stay of its vaccinate-or-test requirement for private employers.
“It’s a necessary step to accelerate our pathway out of the pandemic,” Vivek Murthy said.
Operation Warp Speed poured billions into Moderna and agreed not to share its vaccines abroad. Now the company is holding up the race to vaccinate low-income countries.
CDC Director Rochelle Walensky quickly endorsed the use of shots, which could become available as early as Wednesday.
Plummeting stock prices and lack of federal action has soured investors
“This recovery is faster, stronger, fairer and wider than almost anyone could have predicted,” Biden said.
The long-awaited move signals both optimism about the pace of job growth and wariness about price surges that have pushed inflation up to its highest level in decades.
Weaker-than-projected economic growth in the last quarter, a jobs slowdown and supply chain snags that are likely to continue into next year are sending warning signs for the economy.
It’s not just Republicans who are assigning responsibility to the administration for the rocky economic recovery, polls show.
Stella Moris, partner of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, says British authorities have so far blocked attempts for her and Assange to marry while he is being held in Belmarsh prison. Supporters have also raised concerns Assange has become suicidal. “They are killing him. If he dies, it is because they are killing him,” Moris says. “They are torturing him to death.
Ten Democrats said they will introduce a resolution to censure the Arizona Republican.
In the news today: Conservative book-burning fever spreads. Republicans are looking to elect yet another unapologetic white nationalist extremist who promises to arrest the party’s enemies, and yet again Arizona is the state they think will vote to do it. And new reports and documents yet again confirm that Trump’s Republican administration had few qualms about breaking whatever rules they wanted to break.
Meanwhile, the Kyle Rittenhouse trial continues with … ick.
“No student should be forced to make the choice of forfeiting their education or risking their health,” an attorney said.
For someone who continually touts his winning bona fides, Donald Trump sure loses a lot. He lost his casinos, $1 billion in cash over a decade, the popular vote (twice), the 2020 election, the House, the Senate (thanks to his nonstop whining), two wives, most of his hair, and, on or about Jan. 6, his effing mind.
High school can be a treacherous experience for many people, especially if you were in any way different from your peers. Teenagers (like, frankly, adults) can be cruel, exclusive, and often live with many complex emotions, traumas, and obstacles they don’t know how to express or seek help about.
Those wondering why no jurisdiction has actually brought criminal charges against Donald Trump and his minions need to remember that when done properly, a criminal investigation is supposed to take time. A good prosecutor is supposed to build a Mount Everest-sized trove of evidence against a defendant—and do so in a way that the defendant’s claim of innocence is slowly and painstakingly strangled.
Newsmax host Eric Bolling has found a home on the bleeding edge of right-wing reality television. Bolling left Fox News in disgrace after an investigation revealed he was sending unsolicited graphic photos of male genitalia and text messages to female employees.
In tapes dating to July 2019, Gregory and Travis McMichael made accusations about theft and trespassing in their Georgia neighborhood.
About $600 million is coming from the state of Michigan, which was accused of repeatedly overlooking the devastating risks of switching Flint’s water source in 2014.
Update your calendars, everyone: NASA isn’t going to put people on the moon in 2024. The space agency announced yesterday that it is now aiming to send a crew to orbit the moon, Apollo 8 style, in May 2024, and then land astronauts on the surface, à la Apollo 11, sometime in 2025. If your reaction to this news is something like, Wait a second, what? NASA is trying to land people on the moon again?—that’s fine.
Scott Fairlamb, whose brother is in the U.S. Secret Service, was the first Jan. 6 defendant sentenced in connection with an assault on cops.
As talks at the Glasgow U.N. climate summit accelerate, we look at how the roots of the climate crisis date back to Western colonialism with award-winning Indian author Amitav Ghosh, who examines the violent exploitation of human life and the natural environment in his new book, “The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis.
The world’s richest countries have responded by militarizing their borders and treating the humanitarian crisis as a security issue. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg attended this year’s U.N. climate summit, marking the first time a top alliance leader came to the climate talks since they began. On Tuesday, U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi at COP26 raised the issue of security during a press conference.
Today a draft agreement at COP26 was released, calling on nations to accelerate the phasing out of coal and fossil fuel subsidies and make pledges to cut emissions by the end of 2022. The draft also urges wealthy nations to “urgently scale-up” financial support for developing countries to help them adapt to the climate crisis. This comes as a new report by the group Climate Action Tracker estimates world temperatures are on track to rise by 2.