Sign up for Derek’s newsletter here.The American economy isn’t looking great right now. U.S. GDP shrank last quarter, despite a hearty showing from American consumers. Inflation is high; markets are down; both wages and personal-savings rates show some troubling statistical signals. Is the U.S. destined to have a recession in 2022? I don’t know for sure. But here are nine signs that worry me.1. Everybody’s stock portfolio is disgusting right now.
Why are so many writers drawn to campus novels? In a 2006 article, Megan Marshall writes that the genre is “escape reading.” Citing older works such as The Harrad Experiment and 3 in the Attic, Marshall sees many college novels as “fumbling and sophomoric confessionals.” That’s certainly changed. Campus novels today have expanded beyond the confines of the Ivy League and deal with some of our society’s most pressing questions.
Finland’s president and prime minister say they plan to end decades of neutrality and join NATO. Sweden is also expected to seek NATO membership. The Kremlin says Russia sees the expansion of NATO on its borders as a threat. “People on both sides will suffer,” says Reiner Braun, executive director of the International Peace Bureau, who warns Russia will escalate in response and move more nuclear weapons near the 830-mile-long Finland-Russia border.
Three journalists were killed within a three-day span this week in Mexico, bringing the toll to 11 so far this year and making Mexico the deadliest country in the world for journalists, behind Ukraine. Most of the murders have gone unsolved. This week journalists across Mexico took to the streets protesting the murder of their colleagues and called for accountability.
Calls are growing for President Biden to grant clemency to Leonard Peltier, the 77-year-old imprisoned Native American activist who has spent 46 years behind bars for a crime he says he did not commit. Amnesty International considers Peltier a political prisoner, and numerous legal observers say his 1977 conviction for alleged involvement in killing two FBI agents in a shootout on the Pine Ridge Reservation was riddled with irregularities and prosecutorial misconduct.
The Interior Department has documented the deaths of more than 500 Indigenous children at Indian boarding schools run or supported by the federal government in the United States which operated from 1819 to 1969. The actual death toll is believed to be far higher, and the report located 53 burial sites at former schools. The report was ordered by the first Indigenous cabinet member, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, whose grandparents were forced to attend boarding school at the age of 8.
More than 1 million Americans have died from drug overdoses since 2001.
Groups that operate clinics and run abortion access funds warn that they’ll need more money, more providers and more space to help care for the influx of people who will cross state lines to seek abortions.
Lawmakers detail how 400 million Covid-19 doses were destroyed at the company’s Baltimore facility after it failed to heed internal warnings about quality standards.
On a month-to-month basis, prices rose 0.3% from March to April, a still-elevated rate but the smallest increase in eight months.
Rates this year could reach their highest levels since before the 2008 Wall Street crash if surging prices continue.
The government said gross domestic product shrank at a 1.4 percent annualized rate in the first quarter.
The steady spending suggested the economy could keep expanding this year even though the Federal Reserve plans to raise rates aggressively to fight the inflation surge.
The war in Ukraine will “severely” set back the global recovery from Covid-19, according to the IMF.
Amazon has fired two workers who helped organize the first successful U.S. union at Amazon’s Staten Island JFK8 warehouse. This comes as the National Labor Relations Board on Monday upheld a complaint that Amazon violated labor law in the Staten Island union vote by holding mandatory worker meetings to dissuade employees from voting to unionize.
To avoid drawing unwanted attention, Tommy and the four others dressed as if they were heading out for a leisurely day. It was July 2020, and the weather was perfect for some time on the water. The young men acted as though they knew one another well, and were excited to reconnect. But inside, Tommy felt panicked and desperate. He was about to attempt an escape from Hong Kong, where he faced a near-certain jail sentence for his role in the prodemocracy protests there.
The Infowars host, who has lined his pockets by spreading fear and lies, said, “If you don’t support us, you’re helping the enemy.
According to statements that Vladimir Putin and other Russian officials have made on state-run media, there are three goals for the “special military action” in Ukraine.
One is to secure all of Donetsk and Luhansk oblast and bring them into Russia. The idea that either will be an independent “people’s republic,” or that there might be some kind of referendum to determine their fate is now old hat. They’ll just be part of Russia. And like it.
Welcome to Thursday. The GOP continues moving forward with its only policy platform: taking away Americans’ rights. In the case of LGBTQ+ Americans, they are doing this by way of attacking children. Because the only “life” they are “pro” is contained to just the gestation period of fetuses, they are also proceeding with their policy of taking away more than 50% of our population’s rights to bodily autonomy.
Remember last year when House GOP Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy suddenly turned against the bipartisan Jan. 6 commission he had deputized one of his own members to negotiate?
Right. Now McCarthy is among five sitting Republican House members who have been subpoenaed by the select committee investigating Jan.
Republicans at all levels of government have made book bans a recent rallying cry. Under the guise of fighting critical race theory (CRT), conservatives have lit hysteria under their voting base by convincing them that “inappropriate” books are going to invade their child’s brain. In reality, these books are more often than not by or about LGBTQ+ and/or people of color, with a handful of white, cisgender, heterosexual writers thrown in too.
With the U.S. Supreme Court poised to overrule Roe v. Wade, things are about to get very brutal for abortion rights at the state level.
Twenty-two states already have laws on their books to ban abortion after a ruling becomes final, and this week Louisiana legislators are considering a bill to make abortion a crime, charging those who have one with murder.
Conservative commentator Kathy Barnette is nipping at the heels of Trump’s pick in the Pennsylvania race for a Senate seat.
“The use of AI is compounding the longstanding discrimination that jobseekers with disabilities face,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke told reporters Thursday.
The president held a meeting with retailers as lawmakers clamor for Biden to do something about the formula crisis.
GOP lawmakers blasted the Biden administration for providing baby formula to detained undocumented immigrants during a shortage.
Early in Knocked Up, Ben Stone (played by Seth Rogen) tells his friends that a one-night stand has ended in pregnancy. Ben’s friend Jonah (Jonah Hill) offers him advice on the matter. “It rhymes with shma-shmortion,” Jonah says. “I’m just saying … you should get a shma-shmortion at the shma-shmortion clinic.”Knocked Up is now 15 years old. It premiered in 2007, a product of raunch culture and one of its bards, the director Judd Apatow.
CHEVY CHASE, Md.—A few of Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s neighbors were visibly annoyed last night as a dozen abortion-rights protesters marched down their tree-lined street, blaring music and chanting, “We are not your incubators!” A middle-aged couple in jogging suits scoffed and yanked their goldendoodle to the other side of the road. One woman driving an SUV pulled up dangerously close to a demonstrator and laid on the horn.
We live in the inner rim of one of the Milky Way’s spiral arms, a shimmery curve against inky darkness. Travel for thousands of light-years in one direction, past countless stars, countless planets, and countless moons, and you’d reach the outer edge of the Milky Way, where the last bits of our galaxy give way to the sprawling stillness of the intergalactic medium.
We speak with Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah, winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature, which recognized his “uncompromising and compassionate” writing about colonialism and the refugee experience. He is the first Black writer to win the award since Toni Morrison almost 30 years ago and the first Black African writer to win the prize since 1986. Gurnah discusses his work, which explores displacement, migration and “historical moments that create us.