Listen and subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google In the social-media age, we curate images of our lives on a screen—making it especially easy to translate images of perfection as the image of oneself. But the pressure to pretend we are perfect is exactly the thing holding us back from experiencing the happiness we seek—and limiting our ability to be our whole, authentic selves.
Arguably, no mode of writing has influenced the past decade of novels more than autofiction, a catchall term for books that call themselves fiction while claiming to be rooted, in some way, in their authors’ real lives. Amid this boom, critics and readers alike have shown a certain anxiety over how based in fact a novel can be—and how anyone might know, given that no autofiction writer purports to be telling the complete, unadulterated truth.
Governor Greg Abbott is afraid. Not of COVID-19, which is killing thousands of Texans, but of losing his primary.Last week, Abbott announced that he was banning COVID-vaccine mandates by “any entity” in Texas, a policy so absurd that you’d be forgiven for thinking, as the running joke on social media goes, that the coronavirus wrote the executive order itself.
POLITICO breaks down the U.S. booster rollout and the big remaining questions.
The top infectious disease doctor said data gathered in the United States and elsewhere points toward the need for the booster shots.
The new decision by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals extends a previous order that for now keeps in place the Texas law known as Senate Bill 8.
The panel recommended giving the shots at least six months after initial immunization. Its vote is not binding, but the FDA normally follows the recommendations of its advisory committees.
E-cig manufacturers and anti-vaping groups alike are puzzled by the agency’s course so far.
The current inflation spike now appears to be on track to persist deep into 2022.
Politicians like to argue in favor of more infrastructure — and more spending on it. But we can use the capacity we already have in much smarter ways.
The central bank plans to begin yanking back assistance to the economy as early as next month, and many Fed officials are open to increasing interest rates next year.
Key aspects of the economy are doing better than before the pandemic, which supporters say shows how government spending can help.
We get an update from New Jersey, where the People’s Organization for Progress is leading a 67-mile march to demand the state Legislature pass legislation to hold police accountable. The nine-day march wraps up Saturday, and activists are demanding passage of a state policy that would give police review boards subpoena power, ban and criminalize chokeholds, establish requirements for use of deadly force and end qualified immunity in New Jersey.
In the news today: Senate Democrat Joe Manchin continues to thwart the nation’s last chance to rework its energy infrastructure and, perhaps, dodge the worst of our impending, almost-unimaginable climate catastrophes. Advocacy groups staged a virtual walk-out during a meeting with the Biden administration in protest of the administration’s continued backing of Trump-era anti-asylum policies.
Quarterly fundraising reports for federal candidates covering the period from July 1 to Sept. 30 were due at the Federal Elections Commission on Oct. 15 at 12:00 AM ET. Below is our chart of fundraising numbers for every House incumbent (excluding those who’ve said they’re retiring) and any notable announced or potential candidates.
As always, all numbers are in thousands. The chart, and an explanation of each column, can be found below.
Quarterly fundraising reports for federal candidates covering the period from July 1 to Sept. 30 were due at the Federal Elections Commission on Oct. 15 at 12:00 AM ET. Below is our chart of fundraising numbers for every Senate incumbent up for reelection this cycle (excluding those who’ve said they’re retiring) and any notable announced or potential candidates.
As always, all numbers are in thousands.
Content warning: Discussion of domestic violence.
For much of the second half of the Obama administration, Iranian-born pastor Saeed Abedini was the face of persecuted Christians around the world. He spent almost four years in an Iranian prison on trumped-up charges of endangering national security. In truth, he had been ensnared in the heavy-handed persecution that Christians in Iran have long faced under the mullahs.
Some Republicans just don’t ever learn and continue to take their ill-informed logic to public platforms like Twitter. In the latest of Republican embarrassments, Sen. Ted Cruz was graciously slammed on Twitter after mocking Australia’s new COVID-19 vaccine requirements for workers.
“I love the Aussies.
John Roberts clarified that he is pro-vaccine and said he plans to get a COVID-19 booster shot as soon as possible.
“Why would you do this unless you wanted to hide something? Like, ya know, not disclosing your tax returns?” one Twitter user mused.
The former president tried citing executive privilege in his attempt to keep information out of the hands of those investigating the insurrection.
Trump’s bodyguards violently attacked a group of protesters in the early days of the former president’s campaign, the suit claims.
Nothing about The Body Keeps the Score screams “best seller.” Written by the psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, the book is a graphic account of his decades-long career treating survivors of traumatic experiences such as rape, incest, and war. Page after page, readers are asked to wrestle with van der Kolk’s theory that trauma can sever the connection between the mind, which wants to forget what happened, and the body, which can’t.
My favorite recollection of Colin Powell was the look he got when he was amused. He’d tilt his head up and look at you under the base of his glasses, smiling, and take joy in the moment. He had such a great capacity for merriment.Powell died today, at age 84, of complications of COVID-19, his family said.
Various veteran lawmakers deciding to call it quits may not bode well for Democrats as they seek to retain control of the House in 2022.
On March 16, 2017, Mount Etna almost killed Boris Behncke. He was on the volcano’s snow-covered flanks, accompanying a film crew from the BBC. Serpents of lava were slithering out of a southeastern crater, but Behncke, a volcanologist at Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology, felt no need to take his hard hat out of his bag. They were more than a mile away from the crater, seemingly far from harm’s reach.
We speak with Ethan Paul, a former reporter with the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong who is now with the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. China’s military revealed last week that it had conducted beach landing and assault drills in the province across from Taiwan. This comes as the CIA has set up a new mission center focused solely on China. CIA Director William Burns has described China as “the most important geopolitical threat facing the United States.
The Biden administration is launching a national vaccination campaign for about 28 million children between the ages of 5 and 11. The vaccine will be two doses and one-third as potent as the one being given to people over the age of 12. An independent panel is set to offer a recommendation to the FDA that evaluates the safety and efficacy of the vaccines in late October. We’re joined by Dr.
Residents of Benton Harbor, Michigan, are calling for immediate action on replacing the city’s lead pipes, which have endangered their drinking water. Since 2018, tap water in the predominantly Black city has contained lead levels up to 60 times the federal limit. Yet government officials have only addressed the toxic contamination as an urgent crisis in recent days. Dr.
Illustration by Rodrigo Corral. Sources: Hugh Sitton / Getty; Been There YB / Shutterstock
Many years ago, when I was a junior professor at Yale, I cold-called a colleague in the anthropology department for assistance with a project I was working on. I didn’t know anything about the guy; I just selected him because he was young, and therefore, I figured, more likely to agree to talk.Five minutes into our lunch, I realized that I was in the presence of a genius.