In 2019, Gennady Borisov, an amateur astronomer in Crimea, discovered his seventh comet. This icy object wasn’t like the others Borisov had found, or like any of the other comets in the solar system. This one wasn’t orbiting the sun.Instead, it had been drifting alone in interstellar space, following its own path, until one day, it entered our solar system and grazed past the sun.
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.While meme stocks and NFTs draw headlines, a group of economists and Wall Street experts worries that a much more traditional style of investing is stifling the economy, our staff writer Annie Lowrey reports.
By the time you read this, at least a quarter of Americans will have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. It’s a stunning turnaround for a country where a bungled early response, inadequate financial support to keep people home, and a mishmash of mask requirements have led to more than 30 million infections and more than 554,000 deaths.Just north of the border, Canadians—usually so smug about our universal health care—are looking on with jealousy.
We speak with economist Darrick Hamilton, founding director of the Institute on Race and Political Economy at The New School, about how U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is calling for a minimum global corporate income tax to help pay for President Joe Biden’s proposed $2.25 trillion infrastructure and jobs plan, aimed in part at combating the climate crisis and addressing racial inequities in housing and transportation.
We look at pandemic profiteering in the medical system as a new report by Kaiser Health News reveals some of the nation’s richest hospitals recorded hundreds of millions of dollars in surplus over the past year after accepting federal healthcare bailout grants.
More than a year into the pandemic and the economic crisis it generated, many workers continue to be excluded from receiving any government relief. These excluded workers include undocumented people — many of them in essential services — and people recently released from prison. Hundreds of essential workers across New York are leading marches and hunger strikes to demand lawmakers support a $3.
Editor’s Note: Every Tuesday, Abby Freireich and Brian Platzer take questions from readers about their kids’ education. Have one? Email them at homeroom@theatlantic.com.Dear Abby and Brian,I’m writing about my daughter, a seventh grader whom I’ll call Z. Her school has been fully remote since last spring. Z used to love school, but after a year of remote classes, she is totally unmotivated.I’m terrified that, with high school approaching, she is falling behind.
It’s obvious that these were deliberately withheld and not simply misplaced.
Parenting advice on religion, racism, and gun violence.
The opportunity for a competent administration to do something historic was helped by timing, weather, and, yes, Trump.
“We’ve already been f—ing smoking weed the whole time.
Activists fear the police-enforced closure will inspire similar actions across the city.
After its diesel fraud, the carmaker tries lying to reporters about its electrical vehicle marketing.
It’s time to see if you can cancel your gym membership
“We need to educate folks,” Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves said.
Please tell me what to put where.
Advice about marriage, polyamory, and more.
The numbers signal the U.S. is well on its way toward a revival, one that’s widely expected to reach record levels of growth later this year.
The president’s team is preparing a $3 trillion spending proposal to power through Congress. They’re betting markets and the economy will cooperate long enough to pass it.
Structural inequities in the U.S. labor market that have affected Black and Hispanic workers’ ability to advance out of low-paying jobs, as well as discrimination in hiring practices, are also likely having an effect.
Central bank officials now expect the unemployment rate to drop to 4.5 percent by the end of 2021.
Janet Yellen said the greater risk was not strengthening the economy as it recovers from the impact of the pandemic.
As the number of COVID-19 cases surges in Brazil, the country is also facing a major crisis on the political front. The heads of Brazil’s Army, Navy and Air Force all quit in an unprecedented move, a day after far-right President Jair Bolsonaro ousted his defense minister as part of a broader Cabinet shake-up.
In today’s policy and politics news, a Democratic president has proposed a thing and Republicans are vowing to oppose that thing. Georgia Republicans are still reeling over the corporate backlash to their newest voter suppression law. A new poll shows that over half of Republican voters believe Republican false claims that the election was “stolen” from Trump, and almost that many falsely believe the attempted insurrection at the U.S.
The acclaimed science fiction writer and author of the Dune series of novels, Frank Herbert, memorably wrote that “Fear is the mind-killer.” Since the 1950s the Republican Party in this country has operated under a similar assumption, with the politics of fear as its modus operandi to achieving and consolidating political power.
Democrats will likely have an extra chance to pass a spending bill with a simple majority of votes this year.
Another victim of the stealthy “Psaki bomb,” noted a Twitter fan.
Voters in the Badger State will select their next chief education official on Tuesday in an open-seat contest that pits Pecatonica School District Superintendent Jill Underly against former Brown Deer School District Superintendent Deborah Kerr.
The post is open because the current incumbent, Carolyn Stanford Taylor, decided not to run for election; Stanford Taylor was appointed to the position in 2019 by Democratic Gov.
While the Republican Party continues to devolve into the party of white supremacists, authoritarian fascists, and conspiracy theorists, they are losing their grip on many of the voting blocs they have always counted on to keep them in power. Several demographic groups are moving away from the Republicans, such as with older voters and suburbanites. Other blocs, like Asian Americans, have been slowly moving away for two decades.
It’s been a month and change since massive Texas blackouts caused by cold weather caused chaos, widespread property damage, and deaths, which has been enough time for Texas Republicans to move on from incoherent claims about it all being caused by windmills to incoherent legislative proposals aimed at deflecting attention from the state’s own screw-ups while once again sticking it to any energy company not chained to the state’s all-powerful fossil fuel industry.