To understand how the coronavirus keeps evolving into surprising new variants with new mutations, it helps to have some context: The virus’s genome is 30,000 letters long, which means that the number of possible mutation combinations is mind-bogglingly huge. As Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, told me, that number far, far exceeds the number of atoms in the known universe.
Wordle! It’s a word game people are playing online. Each day, the game offers one new puzzle: Guess a five-letter English word correctly in six or fewer tries. After each guess, the game tells you which letters are correct, which are wrong, and which are the right letters in the wrong place. It’s fun! But why?Games seem like trifles, and many are, which can make them difficult to take seriously as art or culture.
Twenty years ago today, President George W. Bush delivered a State of the Union address that would instantly become one of the most bitterly controversial in U.S. history. At its core were short indictments of the aggressions and human-rights abuses of North Korea, Iran, and Iraq.Then the kicker:“States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.
Joe Biden, who ran for president promising to restore trust in American democracy, recently undermined it. It’s not what he was elected to do, and he needs to repair the damage.During his marathon press conference last week, Biden was asked whether the failure of voting-rights legislation in Congress would render this year’s elections illegitimate.
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.
The deficiencies include failures to outline roles and responsibilities for other entities involved in a response.
At a time when inflation is a growing concern, the survey found more than four in 10 people believe that both the BBB and the infrastructure bill will increase inflation.
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.
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.
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.
Hello Friday! As if on cue, our infrastructure continues to literally crumble, and the pittance put forward to fix the myriad issues BBB would have helped to ameliorate remain critical to our country’s future. The Biden administration is being pressured to make the moves that the majority of Americans support, come hell or high water—and the latter is coming, thanks to climate change.
The San Jose, California, City Council is requiring gun owners to carry liability insurance and pay a fee in what the city says is the first ordinance of its kind in the U.S. The city council passed the law on Tuesday, and it will likely take effect in August.
By all accounts, Artemis Rayford was a happy, vibrant 12-year-old. He loved playing football and wearing his Tennessee Titans jersey. As a sixth-grader at Memphis, Tennessee’s Sherwood Middle School, Rayford had participated, just before the last year’s winter break, in a program his school coordinated with the Memphis Police Department—intended to discourage violence and gang activity. He and his fellow students learned about a new law passed in Jul.
Detained immigrants and their advocates scored a major court victory this week, reaching a “groundbreaking” settlement in a lawsuit filed nearly two years ago over unsafe pandemic conditions.
Under an agreement reached Thursday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is barred from re-detaining immigrants previously released from two California facilities due to COVID-19. This could affect up to 250 people.
The social media platform TikTok continues to prove itself to be more than just a platform for viral dance videos and pranks. It now has one of its oldest users sharing the reality of the Holocaust through her story of surviving it.
The character’s temporary makeover threatens to destroy “fabrics of our society,” the right-wing media mouth said.
Earlier this week I asked readers, “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?
A congressional candidate also recently accused the National Butterfly Center’s staff of being “OK with children being trafficked and raped.
Their majority is fragile and could falter at any moment.
Every Joe Wright movie, for better or worse, is brimming with theatricality. The British director has tackled literary adaptations (Pride & Prejudice, Atonement, Anna Karenina), true-story dramas (The Soloist, Darkest Hour), and action-adventure (Pan, Hanna) in his surprising and varied career. Regardless of genre, he’s not a filmmaker who strives for grounded realism.
My iPhone note “Guster tour, Pros & Cons” was becoming more and more lopsided.Our impending club tour, booked nine months ago after a COVID-halted March 2020 run, was in peril. We assumed then—it seems like a lifetime ago—that winter of 2022 would allow us plenty of time to present a tour that was safe for both us and our fans. Other bands made similar plans as our industry attempted, once again, to regain a foothold after the crushing Delta wave.
The Oath Keeper “QRFs” show how things could have been a lot worse, and how much more there is to learn.
The 70-year-old Republican governor ended his televised State of the State address Thursday night by flashing his English bulldog’s rear end to the cameras and crowd.
We’re nearly two years into the pandemic and parents are not okay. Variants have upended schooling. Tests are in short supply. And a work-life balance that disappeared in 2020 feels no closer to returning. It’s enough to make some mothers get together to just scream.Few works of entertainment express the strains and contradictions of parenthood today like Netflix’s The Lost Daughter.
Religious texts such as the Bible, the Torah, and the Quran don’t say anything about vaccines—of course, all three texts predate them by hundreds of years. So when faith leaders face questions about immunizations, they generally offer their own interpretations of the scriptures. Such questions, particularly about the applicability of religious exemptions, have become more urgent during the pandemic, forcing clergy to take hard stances for or against excusals.
Families of passengers who died in fatal crashes while aboard Boeing 737 MAX jets in Ethiopia and Indonesia are urging the Department of Justice to reopen a Trump-era settlement that allowed the company to evade criminal prosecution. We speak with the father of one of the victims, as well as the director of the new documentary, “Downfall: The Case Against Boeing,” which details Boeing’s push for profit over safety and is set to air on Netflix February 18.